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Innocent Until Predicted Guilty
theodp writes "Gizmodo has an angry piece on IBM helping Florida to predict how delinquent your child's going to be. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has decided to start using IBM predictive analytics software to help them determine which of the 85,000 kids who enter their system each year poses the biggest future threat. From IBM's sales pitch: 'Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.'"
It seems to me that if the government thinks it can predict these things and takes certain actions in prevention, it might actually cause the problem that is predicted, and thus validate the method.
With IBM software we can lock threads before flame wars start....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Florida is insane, in the same way that senile demented octogenarians are insane. They never think past tomorrow, because they don't know if they're going to live until tomorrow. All that matters is today, the pudding, and Matlock.
You guys are being pretty hard on IBM. They're just providing computing and analytical power. You're acting like they collaborated with the Nazis or something.
The best part is, if the software doesn't currently consider you a "threat" we can always tweak it to push you over the threshold! Remember that come next election, or next time you purchase something we don't think you should, or even the next time you pass us and don't give us a compliment!
Who knows...
Anyhow...
IBM? Tracking people deemed troublesome to people in government?
Invoking Godwin's Law in 3...2...1...
Do predictive analytics work for other demographics as well, e.g. middle aged white man from prominent Ivy League university running an energy company more likely to steal billions of dollars over young Latino kid living in downtown Miami?
I believe the best use of this technology is as a means for monitoring our government officials and representatives (starting with the folks thinking about using it here.) It is arguable that the harm done by the average juvenile delinquent pales in comparison to the social and economic harm done by politicians and lawless officials. We should be using predictive technology keep them in check, and ensure that liberty is being preserved for future generations...
New corporate slogan: "IBM an Integrated Best of Breed Final Solutions Provider"?
Okay, all I see here is a slippery slope argument. Juvenile delinquents who have been convicted of a crime are generally sentenced to probation, attendance in educational programs, counseling, etc. The only difference here is now they're using computer models to decide which programs are most appropriate for a given youth based upon the data they put in... instead of the court making the decision based upon a less complete set of data and a less methodical prediction of what would work best for that individual.
Now I'm not saying IBM's system works. It may or may not and that needs to be carefully studied. I have no problem, however, with computer models being used to determine which juvenile delinquents are most likely to benefit from specific programs and which are most in need of them when resources are limited. Appeals to various constitutional amendments are just empty rhetoric, given these kids have been convicted of a crime and this is part of their rehabilitation. In fact this whole article looks like an excuse for sensationalism and a reason to display cool graphics from "Minority Report". Lame Mr. Diaz.
I imagine that the software is a Bayesian filter that takes in lots of seemingly unrelated factors and combines them into a score. First, yeah, I get the obvious dystopian implications - I won't argue against the awful possibilities if it were widely deployed. That said, isn't it possible that it could genuinely help some kids? Suppose those factors like increased absences and a couple of minor contacts with police indicate that Johnny is extremely likely to drop out of school. Maybe that's a good hint that someone needs to talk to Johnny and see if something correctable is going on in his life.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Sandra Bullock and Tom Cruise are doing a movie together? I'm not sure my gag reflex is strong enough for that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It all depends on what they do with this software. My reading of this article is that this is an expert system for judges who sentence juvenile offenders. Typically judges have discretion in sentencing youth. They research the background, number of offenses, etc of the offender and pick an appropriate program. However, they don't have all the data to make a better decision. Do Latino youth who committed a second non-violent offense respond better (get arrested less often in the future) to mental health treatments, mentoring programs, or incarceration?
This system seems to automate this process. So it is possible it will save money and produce better results than the current system, while still maintaining fairness. After all, if you have committed a crime, both the maximum and minimum penalties for what you did should be fair outcomes.
Any reason why we are angry with this? The whole point appears to identify at-risk kids and make sure they get the support they need.
A: Kid is from a low income family
B: Kid lives in drug ridden neighborhood
C: Kid eats twice a day
D: Kid is in a single parent home
Kid is BLAH BLAH% likely to commit a violent crime.
A is 38% weighted
B: is 14% weighted
C: is 17% weighted
D: is 9% weighted
Per $ ROI indicates that an additional $4.22 spent weekly on school lunch program (C) will save $19.22 over 10 years in reduced criminal activity.
Blah blah blah...
Seems par for the course...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Of course, if you'd bothered to read TFA (and were able to ignore the author's histrionics), you'd realize that the idea is to use this technology to differentially sentence offenders based on the likelihood of recidivism. That is, juveniles who have already committed a crime.
The average child's behavior does have the potential to reliably predict future social and behavior patterns for the individual; however, there are outliers of varying types who would not be well served by this attempt at divining the 'future history' of individual human beings. Here are some of the types I have noticed.
1. Situational issues such as abuse at home that cause anger, frustration and inappropriate behavior at school. Children's brains are luckily plastic enough to rewire themselves when presented with a new environment that is far more nurturing, safe and empowering.
2. Schools/Neighborhoods that have been left to become warrens of crime will produce children that seek criminal behavior to 'fit in', even if they are articulate and attentive in class they may be encountering overwhelming peer pressure to conform to another set of behaviors outside the classroom or face ostracization.
3. Mentally ill children who go unmedicated can be hellions the days they don't take their meds and perfectly reasonable mature human beings when they do. The flip side of this, is dealing with the many popular NT rich kids whose parents have gotten them adderall prescriptions babbling in the back of the classroom and acting hyper aggressive on the playground.
4. Police provoked violence/crimes. I did some student teaching in a High School which shall remain unnamed and the MO of the high school police was to find the 'troublemakers' smoking cigarettes across from the school or in the alleyways surrounding and set up a cop car on one side of them and try to herd them towards it, if they ran they tried to take them down with tackling and submission holds. The kids got suspended and charged with resisting arrest at the very least some got thrown in Juvi all for smoking a cig and being confronted by a dickish bunch of cops.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Do you think that there is any realistic chance that having a Respected Criminologist(who knows how to wear a suit that makes him look like a respected authority figure; but not a pointy-headed academic) tell the jury that the Totally Trustworthy and Extremely Sophisticated Computer System has determined that the punk-ass kid currently in the dock before you is an incipient menace won't be a completely standard part of prosecution down there within a few years?
Despite the combined efforts of virtually every major consumer software vendor, Joe Public still somehow trusts computers and thinks of them as authoritative. DAs and prosecutors will absolutely eat that shit up, as will jurors.
Gizmodo links this technology to Minority Report, and certainly not without cause, but the movie that really ought to worry you here is Gattaca. What happens to kids this software flags with a high potential for future criminal activity? If companies start taking this data seriously, a lot of them won't be hiring these kids. And while it was genetics that was the profiling mechanism in Gattaca, considering we've already cracked the human genome, it can only be a matter of time before someone decides to take a similar piece of software and run it against someone's DNA.
Let's stop pretending that this is anything but a technological tool for doing what is already happening. Individuals are already differentially sentenced for all kinds of reasons, many of them terrible. Far better to use well-understood machine-learning/data-mining techniques instead of the discretion of individual judges and all its attendant biases.
N.B. This obviously has the potential for misuse (e.g. the first time some political hack suggests it is great for preemption.), but it is not a prima facie violation of individual's rights.
Eternal Vigilance, etc.
There is nothing about this that is 'pre-crime' or would have 'false positives'. This is about how to determine what to with people who have already entered the juvenile justice system (ie. post-crime), to try to rehab them. So, the question is, can analysis of risk factors for recidivism actual prevent recidivism? I don't know, but it seems silly to just dismiss it out of hand.
Now, consider IBM's press release, which seems to be the only news available on this subject, and is certainly the unlinked source of Gizmodo's fit. Previously, Florida State officials were using Excel macros to sort convicted juvenile offenders into different programs, and now they will use IBM's software to do it. Whether Florida's juvenile prosecutions or unjust or not, whether their programs are effective or not, has no bearing on IBM's part in this.
IBM has sold Florida some statistical analysis software, which they will (apparently) use to stick heavy offenders into more punitive detention programs, saving the spaces in more rehabilitative programs for newer offenders. You may think that that policy is ill-advised as well--but it is perfectly legal. At least the sorting will be (hopefully) less capricious than it was before. IBM is certainly not enabling Florida to enforce "pre-crimes" or anything of the sort. This is not even affecting the judicial sentences. Everyone being analyzed here has already been found guilty by a court.
Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality. They selected IBM SPSS predictive analytics due to the ease of use and the advanced analytic capabilities.
The organization will now utilize the new predictive analytics system as a component in many of the performance measurement analyses conducted and distributed to agency staff throughout the year. These reports assess the future of delinquency cases to evaluate what juvenile crime trends may look like in the immediate future. This information will help the organization to better plan and project staffing and other resource needs.
IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihood of prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve public safety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justice is analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSS predictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders with specific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely to reoffend than other prisoners.
It sounds like the Ministry of Justice might have something a bit more Orwellian (notice "public safety") in mind, but that will be a story for another day. Now take a deep breath, and control yourselves next time Kdawson posts a link to an inflammatory and ill-informed opinion piece. A worthier title for this event might have been "IBM enables Florida Juvenile Detention System to Become Slightly Less Cruel and Arbitrary."
You know what? I can predict who will become involved in criminal activities. The answer to one simple question can peg it every time: ARE YOU HUMAN?
People are criminals. Republican, Democrat, bullshit. You ever speed? Criminal. You ever not come to a 100% complete stop before advancing past a stop sign? Criminal. Smoke weed? Criminal. Drink before the age of 21? Criminal.
Laws exist to make us criminals. We all are. We just get away with our crimes until we piss off the wrong people.
Just think - if England would have had a technology similar to this in the 18th century, it would have "discovered" all the rebellious founding fathers, and America never would have had a chance to earn it's freedom. The potential for heinous abuse by the government of this system far outweighs any benefit it may offer. Shame on you IBM. Again.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Here is the deal - one of your sons may be prone to criminal activity. I am not going to tell you which one, so you are just going to have to "bite the bullet" and be a good father and raise both of them with love and respect.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Here's a thought, let IBM try it out on their own executives first. After it gets through nailing the miscreant executives in its own ranks, the U.S. Justice dept will evaluate it and see if it might be used on Wall Street firms. It must successfully weed out the Business School Product that wasted the U.S. economy first. The next test will be to try it out on the designers of this valuable product. If it catches the social misfits that have worked on this software, then maybe the U.S. could consider it for kids. However, we'll want to see a cleaned up IBM, Wall Street, and developer ranks first.
Let me get this off my chest first: Jesus Diaz (the Gizmodo writer) is an idiot of the most supreme caliber. His MO on the Gizmodo is to write ill-researched inflammatory articles. Over time I have figured that these must be written solely to stir up internet frenzy and increase page views. More power to him, but it automatically disadvantages his opinions for me.
Now that the ad-hominem is out of the way, let me get to the meat of it. The conclusions here are 100% wrong. What we do is provide Juvenile Justice departments (which is almost always Juvenile Probation) with tools, in the form of academically validated models, that help them determine which kids are at highest risk to re-offend. We're also able to determine, with a high degree of accuracy (thank you academia!) what the kids biggest needs areas are.
So how does all of this information actually get used? It turns out that it's used in amazingly great ways. It helps keep children placed in their own homes, not in residential treatment, juvenile hall, or the state's Youth Authority. We've had jurisdictions report out-of-home placements drop by 50% after implementing our tools. It also means that a Probation Officer can focus on kids that are at a high risk to re-offend, and have minimal contact with kids that are at a low risk to re-offend. As it turns out, the PHds that come up with these tools are able to determine that having lots of contact with the criminal justice system is bad for kids that are low risk - so it really helps to know the kids that minimal intervention is the best path for. Another benefit of this sort of classification scheme (which works just as well for adults) is that the officers (who are time constrained) are able to spend more time with their higher risk kids because they aren't spending as much time with their low risk kids. This probably seems obvious to most readers, but I'm surprised by the number of commenters that don't get that last point.
My final point is that these kids are already getting put into treatment programs, like anger management, or drug counseling, or teenage parent classes. That happens regardless of whether or not a jurisdiction uses software like ours. What this type of analytic software does is help take away the "gut instinct" part of program placement and give the officer a little more guidance into what programs will be most effective. If you can only send a kid to one program, why make it an anger management class when, after an assessment, you are able to determine that it's actually his drug use and poor school attendance that are his biggest risk factors?
So in the end, this isn't about pre-crime, or thought-crime, or any sort of Orwellian conspiracy. It is, quite literally, about helping place minors (and adults) that have already committed crimes against people or their community, into programs that have the statistically best chance of helping them not commit another crime. The best part is, the followup data from jurisdictions using this type of software suggests that it works, with fewer placements and less recidivism.
Oh, and Jesus Diaz is a idiot (man that feels good.)
If you raise them correctly, it isn't an issue.
Well, that's a chicken/egg deal, isn't it? Since you can't seem to imagine how uncertainty could exist in parenting, I'll assume you're not a parent. Personally I wonder if I'm too hard, too soft, too indifferent, too strict, too inconsistent. All parents would. There's not a play-book for everything an intelligent kid will throw at you, so a lot of time you're running no-huddle. Sometimes you screw up, and you roll with it and move on. Just like anything else, really.
That said, I'm not so consumed with hubris to believe that I, personally as their father, am the only influence on their lives. It could well be that I need to do something specific to counteract an influence that I'm not aware of, or that I trust isn't having a negative impact. I don't follow them to school, but I do talk to them after. But that only tells me what they think I want to hear, because they're humans.
Knowing if a computer thinks one or both of your kids may be prone to certain behavior should not affect how you raise your children.
Why exclude points of data? Again, you only have what you can take in through your own eyes and ears to work with. It isn't as if you get a report daily of all the things your kid doesn't want you to know about.
For example, my oldest son may or may not be walking laps around the playground by himself at this very moment, or helping the playground teachers enforce the rules on the other kids. We've discussed how important it is to not ostracize his friends, and I think he really does get it that now isn't the time to worry about being a teacher's aide. I'm encouraging him to have fun with his peers while he still can. In a few short years those carefree times on the playground will be gone.
Two questions:
1) What are my opportunities here? Or better put, how should I have predicted it and how can I correct it?
2) How do I know if he is taking my advice, or simply ignoring it? I'm at work, and can't directly supervise him daily. In the end, I'll have to take his word for it. Except he is just a kid. He doesn't really have the life experience necessary to identify what he is losing out on here.
There aren't really any clear answers in situations like this. If I push him too hard, he'll not want to be honest with me. If I ignore it, he'll probably make it into a fine mess for himself. He may come back in later years with a 'you were right, dad' but I don't want that. I want him to take advantage of every resource, as any father would for a kid he loves.
This is just one tiny facet with only one of my sons.
Parenting isn't easy, and it isn't innate. Criticize if you want to, because that's a chique thing to do on Slashdot, but I'm certain that I'm doing the best I can do, and it will never be good enough for my sons. You're going to have a tough time topping that much criticism. However, I'm also confident that neither you nor anyone else would do much better. It just isn't as easy as it looks on TV.
Raising a child right is raising a child right no matter what label IBM slaps on them.
Again, by what metric?
Which brings me back to...
You said "I'd either work like hell to change them or spy on them be the first to rat them out."
Bad parenting! You should never be concerned with "spying on and ratting out" your children
If I was made aware of a risk that I hadn't had the opportunity to intervene over, I'd do so in short order. If that didn't work, I'd try another method, or try harder. If THAT didn't work, I'd get help. If THAT ALSO doesn't work, I'll turn them over to the authorities myself.
It goes to control. If they are a risk to others, I'll use my resources against that risk. Police are amongst those. I just don't see where the gap lies here. Please clarify your sources, and share your insights.
If he spent half as much time parenting his kids as he did crafting this response, his kids would disown him.
The problem is that the problem is incredibly organic and constantly changing and moving. You push one corner, and the problem space takes on a completely different shape. As a parent, we are blamed for situations completely out of our control. We're blamed if we don't make enough money to provide the toys that other kids have. We're blamed if we work to much. We're blamed for being invasive if we spend to much time with with our kids. We're blamed for being absent if we try to give them space. It doesn't matter. Until the boy hits 25yrs of age, I'm wrong.
Sometimes, we have to hit /. just to keep our sanity. It reminds us of how ridiculous our children COULD be.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba