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AI is Sending People To Jail -- and Getting it Wrong (technologyreview.com)
At the Data for Black Lives conference last weekend, technologists, legal experts, and community activists snapped the kind of impact AI has on our lives into perspective with a discussion of America's criminal justice system. There, an algorithm can determine the trajectory of your life.
From a report: The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world. At the end of 2016, nearly 2.2 million adults were being held in prisons or jails, and an additional 4.5 million were in other correctional facilities. Put another way, 1 in 38 adult Americans was under some form of correctional supervision. The nightmarishness of this situation is one of the few issues that unite politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Under immense pressure to reduce prison numbers without risking a rise in crime, courtrooms across the US have turned to automated tools in attempts to shuffle defendants through the legal system as efficiently and safely as possible. This is where the AI part of our story begins. Police departments use predictive algorithms to strategize about where to send their ranks. Law enforcement agencies use face recognition systems to help identify suspects. These practices have garnered well-deserved scrutiny for whether they in fact improve safety or simply perpetuate existing inequities.
Researchers and civil rights advocates, for example, have repeatedly demonstrated that face recognition systems can fail spectacularly, particularly for dark-skinned individuals -- even mistaking members of Congress for convicted criminals. But the most controversial tool by far comes after police have made an arrest. Say hello to criminal risk assessment algorithms.
Under immense pressure to reduce prison numbers without risking a rise in crime, courtrooms across the US have turned to automated tools in attempts to shuffle defendants through the legal system as efficiently and safely as possible. This is where the AI part of our story begins. Police departments use predictive algorithms to strategize about where to send their ranks. Law enforcement agencies use face recognition systems to help identify suspects. These practices have garnered well-deserved scrutiny for whether they in fact improve safety or simply perpetuate existing inequities.
Researchers and civil rights advocates, for example, have repeatedly demonstrated that face recognition systems can fail spectacularly, particularly for dark-skinned individuals -- even mistaking members of Congress for convicted criminals. But the most controversial tool by far comes after police have made an arrest. Say hello to criminal risk assessment algorithms.
People want a perfect world. People don't know history and how far humanity has come. People complain about modern life like we live in 1850. People should continue to work to fix things - but the constantly bitching , finger pointing and dividing of people into groups *does not help*.
Algorithms and bad statistics are not artificial intelligence. People using algorithms and bad statistics in idiotic ways is also not ai. Words mean things. Use them with care and precision.
quote: even mistaking members of Congress for convicted criminals
If there ever was a non-mistake, that would be it.
>> Under immense pressure to reduce prison numbers without risking a rise in crime
As I've heard it, it's primarily "reduce prison numbers" because minorities are disproportionally incarcerated. If there's any "rise in crime" discussion it's typically been around the promise that "non-violent" criminals will only continue to commit non-violent crimes like (unattended) car theft, (unattended) home robbery and state-wide drug distribution, and won't escalate crimes that directly threaten or harm anyone.
We put more people in jail because of the war on drugs.
The most blatant statistic that shows cultural racism is the crime clearance rate by race of the victim.
The computer should send many more cops into 'communities of color', not doing so is racist!
They aren't getting their 'fair share' of law enforcement, as seen by the fact that blacks are shot at a lower rate than their share of crime committed. Until 40%+ of those shot by cops are black, they aren't being treated fairly.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because most risk assessment algorithms are proprietary, it’s also impossible to interrogate their decisions or hold them accountable.
You can't have secret laws, or secret government. Government and criminal justice must have the ability to scrutinize the decisions, and you can't scrutinize a secret algorithm.
This is the same thing that's happened with blood alcohol testing machines. Courts have ruled they have to allow scrutiny of the source code. The same should happen for these algorithms.
The next step is to simply decide which data is legal to make decisions on. You can't use race, but I bet you a lot of money they use where you live, and income levels. Discriminating on either of those isn't just a matter of racism, it's just not right to ding people because they're poor, or live in a poor neighborhood.
The data that gets used should be things more in peoples direct control. Like the crime committed, the number of other crimes you've been convicted of, etc.
"...courtrooms across the US have turned to automated tools in attempts to shuffle defendants through the legal system as efficiently and safely as possible. This is where the AI part of our story begins. Police departments use predictive algorithms to strategize about where to send their ranks. "
Troll article...
The first part of the sentence mentions the 'Courts'... then in an attempt to co-flate the 'OMG' emotion, almost the next sentence mentions that 'Police...' are using AI to pre-emptively target problem areas.
Those are two, totally separate, actions. The 'OMG' emotion is attached to the second, and rightly so.
Smashing two slightly connected ideas together to support your OMG headline is how fake news gets created.
STOP doing that, and STOP highlighting articles that do that.
That's actually a good description for the typical court wetware, anyway.
Being called "Your honor" all day long rots the brain. Authority rots the brain.
The United States doesn't a a Justice system, but a punishment system.
It is running off the Old Idea. If we treat the population like pre-teen kids, where punishment is an effective way to curve behavior, and prevent this from happening.
Now lets not straw man this, and talk about murderers, and the harden criminals, where harsher sentence are needed.
Most Americans Jailed are for lower level crimes, crimes of passion, or crimes because they couldn't find an effective legal way out.
The cost of keep these people in jail, is often far more then their hindrance too society that they caused.
We can be tough on crime, without jailing everyone. Jailing should be used only if the criminal is considered too much of a risk to the general public. They are other ways to punish and rehabilitate criminals. Such as Home Confinement or Monitored Home Confinement, where the criminal can still go to work, and live their life, but just cannot travel anywhere he wants and when. Giving them a life, while making sure they don't go out of bounds. There is also just general relocation, sometimes the criminal causes crime, because they are living in a place that fosters such activity. Then there should be more effort in educations, and showing people a better way out.
People shouldn't be able to get away with criminal activity. But just locking them up isn't justice. It is just being cruel, and wanting revenge for their damage.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most people aren't going to understand what you're saying.
Wait, what?
Are you saying Black Lives Don't Matter because we continue to accuse China of jailing Muslims? Or because we're NOT accusing them enough?
The emphasis on "jailing" suggests you don't believe they're actually jailing them so I don't know what you meant.
Can someone please explain?
"Criminal risk assessment" for sentence determination has no place in a Western justice system: it is punishing people for the punishment history of some statistical group rather than for their own behavior and putting punishment before (repeat and/or pretend) crime. This is just a junk-science tool in order to let the privileged get away without jail term for the same crimes that others are getting jailed for. Basically "it's not favoritism if we involve a computer and mathematics."
It's worse since statistical groups that don't have the monetary resources for a legal defense get punished for being in a group that has to accept plea deals even when innocent. Because of course crimes invented for plea deals are also part of criminal risk assessment. A computer said it.
So the AI is performing correctly in Minority Report mode, then?
Long story short, don't do things that get you in the legal system in the first place.
One person's "getting it wrong" is another's profitable business venture.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Why do people insist on calling Expert Systems "AI"? These programs didn't figure out the rules themselves, they were programmed with an explicit set of rules by so-called "experts" who had all their own built-in biases!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
We should be comparing how good the AI is against what it would be replacing. We know that a computer won't be perfect, but it's pretty damned obvious that humans are far off mark as well. Human witnesses are also terrible at facial recognition as evidence by the number of wrongful incarcerations. There's one particular case, where an expert on eyewitness testimony was accused of a rape and picked out of a lineup by the victim, but was at the time of the crime on television, where he was talking about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony of all things.
At least with a computer, we'll be properly skeptical of it. With humans, we're too susceptible to being drawn in to what they say (regardless of whether they're genuinely mistaken or willfully deceptive) and people will continue to maintain some false recollection, even if they're not being malicious, long after other evidence should be sufficient to dismiss it. Worse still, other humans tend to gravitate towards whatever they've heard from someone else first and weight it disproportionately to information they receive later. That can still happen when interacting with computers, but I don't believe that we assign them the same amount of trust.
all drugs, including the hard ones. Treat those (Heroine and the like) as medical conditions from start to finish. You go to a government facility, get your fix, and the moment you come down you're in treatment. Pass Medicare for All (it'll save $5 trillion a year) so we're sure there's care for everyone.
The only downside is you won't be able to use our drug war against populations you don't like anymore. Yes, that includes dirty hippies.
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Why do you think they call him "Weird Al"?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Quoting the Slashdot story summary: "The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world."
It is more correct to say, "The US imprisons a higher percentage of its people than any other country in the world."
Prison is a big, profitable business in the United States. The companies that manage prisons are paid up to $70,000 per prisoner, per year.
Articles:
The Economics of the American Prison System (May 21, 2018)
The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? (Nov. 7, 2018)
I have been at the receiving end of these. They are far simpler and more biased than anyone would reasonably expect. They are likely the result of a self-styled 'expert', as they are certainly never vetted in any academic sense, and they show a lot of that person/teams biases. They put the vast majority of the weighting on income and upbringing, meaning a minor non-violent criminal with a background of childhood poverty will be treated as much larger threat than a wealthy murderer. Just for a bit of background, I shot someone. I have no delusions that the money and privilege of being a white professional with a lawyer changed my outcome in the courtroom and DA negotiation side. Were I poor and minority I likely would have been in the system for life. But beyond that, once into the system, the imbalance continued. On a threat scale of 0 to 100, I rated something like a 2. It was absurd. Mainly because the questions were weighted toward things like how long I had been at an address, and if I owned or rented. Also previous convictions REGARDLESS OF TYPE. I knocked all those questions out of the park. If some poor minority kid with little education and a few tickets and a minimum wage job who had recently changed apartments got caught with a joint, they would have scored something like at least a 50 as a baseline. Which means I got an immediate and almost unsupervised walk (not a day in jail, call in once a month), while our hypothetical joint owner would have been locked up with at least a medium threat rating. TL,DR; This has nothing to do with AI, more what some white, educated social worker pulled from very flawed data filtered through their biases.
So you participated in a conference publicly criticizing the justice system... It's a safe bet the AI just flagged you as a potential law breaker.
The US is less tolerant of crime and better at catching it than other countries. That's why we have more people in prison. Black people commit more crimes so they go to jail more often. Those are facts. Get over it. There isn't some stupid national conspiracy to put non-white people in prison more. They just simply commit more crimes period. Fix it or shut up about it all being "the system's" fault.
Oh it's a mistake, just in the AI not being bribable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good fucking God trying to get to that article. I should have just waited for my magazine to arrive in the mail!
"even mistaking members of Congress for convicted criminals"
That's easy. Just teach it to distinguish between convicted and unconvicted criminals.
When "blacks" stop doing culturally stupid shit like committing acts of violence then they wont be in jail. Stop judging them on their skin color and judge them based on their actions. And most importantly, don't give anyone a pass/handycap based on race; for that in of itself is racism!
Life is not for the lazy.
Private prisons account for less than 10% of the overall prison population. We've had this problem far longer than we've had private prisons. It might be trendy to hate on companies, but they're hardly the only interested parties in keeping people locked up for silly reasons.
The rise in private prisons has merely been a direct result of the government owned facilities getting overcrowded and the inability for states to secure funding to build additional prisons. Of course these private prisons want guaranteed minimum occupancy rates so there's further incentive for the state to keep locking people up. There've even been a few stories of judges getting kickbacks, so the whole system is pretty much a racket.
I suspect that with marijuana being legalized in more and more states, we'll start to see a sharp decline in prison population. There are a sizable group of prisoners who are there for no other reason than possessing slightly too much of a particular plant or other substance. We're wasting a lot of money locking up people who could otherwise be paying taxes.
There should not be any gods-be-damned 'computer algorithms/AI' involved in ANY of this.
Private prisons also account for a tiny % of bribes being paid by the 'prison system', the vast majority of which is from the guards unions.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are a sizable group of prisoners who are there for no other reason than possessing slightly too much of a particular plant or other substance. We're wasting a lot of money locking up people who could otherwise be paying taxes.
Especially if marijuana is legalized and taxed!
They don't like computerized risk assessment.
Would they prefer HUMANIZED risk assessment, or will they also call that racial profiling? The point they don't get is that the word "stereotype" is not a dirty word until you put "mindless" in front of it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The question implied, but not asked would be, "If allowed to walk away unsupervised, would the young, minority joint owner ever be heard from again?" You walked, and apparently that worked, because you answered the phone each month. So, exactly what are you claiming is broken with the system?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Quoting the Slashdot story summary: "The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world."
It is more correct to say, "The US imprisons a higher percentage of its people than any other country in the world."
Either is correct. America is the world leader both in percent and absolute number of prisoners. China is the only other country that even comes close. China imprisons about a quarter as many people as a percentage, but even if you include the "re-education" camps in Xinjiang they are still below America in absolute numbers.
Prison is a big, profitable business in the United States. The companies that manage prisons are paid up to $70,000 per prisoner, per year.
Private prisons are a problem, and in my opinion should be shut down. But prison unions in government run prisons are also a big problem. The California prison union was a big financial supporter of the "three strikes" law that caused prison populations to soar, locking up thousands of non-violent geriatric geezers that should be in nursing homes instead of prison cells.
Private prisons and prison unions both work to not only lock up more offenders and lengthen sentences, but also to increase recidivism. It is well known that prisoners that keep in touch with their families and friends are more likely to successfully reintegrate with society. So the prisons actively work to prevent that, by moving prisoners out-of-state, denying visits for capricious reasons, and making phone calls expensive and infrequent.
It is a rotten corrupt process, and we all pay the price.
"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress."
You need a law like GDPR. Then you could demand to know the inner workings of the algorithm too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I submit that the checklists correctly identified you as a least threat to society. The rest of your rant is just making things up. Social workers care a great deal and many of them are not white.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
One important missing part of the story is how does the decision-making of algorithms fare against decision-making of humans?
Just like self-driving cars, the important thing for law enforcement AI isn't the absolute rate of errors in judgement, it's the relative rate of errors compared to humans making those decisions. Human decision making is far from perfect, so we shouldn't throw out algorithmic tools completely because they don't end up magically being correct 100% of the time. They just have to be at least 1% more consistent than we are to be of overall benefit. Remember, the goal here is to *reduce* the prison population through the use of AI. Less people will end up in prison due to the algorithms than would otherwise be there. Sure, it will make some mistakes, but overall, less people will be in prison compared to the human-judgement based system, because that is the metric the AIs are being trained to improve. If the prison population drops by 30% due to AI optimization, then that means a LOT less black people in prison, so even if the percentage error rate was a bit higher, less black people would be negatively impacted.
Put another way, 1 in 38 adult Americans was under some form of correctional supervision.
All victimless crimes need to be removed from the books. If someone wants to smoke pot, do coke, or what ever, let them. But also spend money on better education. Work on the root cause of why this is the case. Obviously there are some people who are going to waste their life. But it's a hell of a lot less than the wasted lives we have with people in prison, or who get out and will never be able to find a meaningful job afterward. Tax drugs and use the money to help people too. This eliminates the money made by current criminals in the drug trade as well.
If someone is publicly intoxicated, who cares. If they are making a nuisance of themselves, put them in a drunk tank until they sober up the next day. Just because someone is staggering a bit on the way home from the bar, who cares. Why is this something that can get a person prison time? If they are being belligerent or threatening others, that's a different case. But that's illegal even if you are sober.
Prostitution is another case. As long as it's a persons choice and they are not being forced into it, why is this a crime. Pimps should be punished for sure. But if someone wants to work for a prostitute, or group of them for an agreed upon amount/percentage I don't see the issue. At least as long as it's understood that the prostitute is in charge and not the other way around. Again, taxes and education should get funding from this. As well as testing.
While I don't necessarily agree with copyright infringement, it is not a criminal offense. This is a civil matter. But copyright law is such a mess in this county, I don't think it will be fixed in my lifetime. But no one should ever go to jail for downloading music or video. If a person gets caught for it, then they should not have to pay any more than the cost of what it would be to purchase the track on iTunes or similar service. $400,000 for one song is insane.
Some crimes should also be judged on the circumstance as well. If someone gets pulled over for a DUI, maybe we shouldn't have the criminal justice system destroy their life. But make the punishment for a second offense much stricter. Granted, the possibility of an innocent bystander getting harmed could go up too. So this might not be the best example.
The criminal justice system is in place to protect the citizenry, not enslave it. If 1 in 38 adults are somehow in the system, then something is obviously very wrong. The laws are in place to help protect the people, not enslave them. Our system of government was supposed to be for the people. The rich and corporations should not be able to purchase politicians either. When someone does more time for a joint than stealing a couple million from a pension fund, something is very wrong.
I mistyped. It's $5 trillion over 10 years. It's Monday and brain's on auto.
Still pretty damn good. We could pay off the national debt in about 40 years. Not my lifetime, but my kid's.
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the lives of my friends and family, sure. But the lives of the 45,000 Americans who will die of completely preventable diseases this year for no good reason.
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Poverty and criminals have a strong correlation with single parent households in the US: blacks, hispanic, whites, and asians (it should be noted that Native Americans are an exception to this). The trend seems to be in the UK as well. The fact that gender and race play such a strong part in sentencing is a problem.
> And most importantly, don't give anyone a pass/handycap based on race; for that in of itself is racism!
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
https://www.ussc.gov/research/...
Boy, those were easy to find.
Of course they are leaving details out. Because the details about what happened wouldn't contribute any more toward their argument. By their own admission, GP did something worse than get "caught with a joint" and yet their punishment was much less severe than that hypothetical kid would have received for a much lesser infraction. I assume by the way they worded their post that GP was able to enter a plea deal, which is an opportunity that might be denied to someone who is determined by an algorithm to be more of a "risk" - and that's exactly the issue at hand.
Note that TFA uses language such as "defendant" and not "convicted criminal"; the problem is that one does not have to be convicted of a crime to have their life ruined. Actually, one doesn't even have to be charged with a crime. Imagine a scenario where someone is detained for a day or two then released without being charged with any crime, because an algorithm decides that they might be a risk, and in the meantime because they don't show up to work they lose their job. Whereas if another person, say someone charged with a crime, is let go within a very short timeframe on promise of making a phone call the next morning, or is allowed to post bail while awaiting trial, they might not suffer any major life interruption.
The Left has asserted that EVERYTHING in the criminal justice system is dirty - cops are racist, the judges are racist, detectives are racist, prison guards are racist, etc ad infinitum.
So, every jurisdiction is trying to find some sort of objective agent for every possible step in the process. And then we have legions of data pimps insisting that AI is here, that their software can do this, etc and it looks like a godsend: we get to take all the human elements of racism out of the equation and now we have an "algorithm" that depersonifies the important decisions. ....except that's bullshit. If you're one of those that insists the system is widely racist*, then you 'd have to recognize that the implementation of algorithms simply dissipates the racism across the agencies of database programmers and algorithm-writers....ie someone harder to sue/fire/punish than some poor schlub of a cop just trying to do his job the best he can.
*FWIW: I'm not one of them. Until the same campaigners immediately apply their logic and recognize that the justice system is (by their measure) FAR more sexist than racist, I'd say they're just racist apologists. Of course, FWIW again, this is of course a canard: the idea that you would look at the prison system as 90% male as an issue of sexism is frankly stupid. I'd say that if we're saying only 90% of criminals are male is, if anything, low. By that same token, looking at the outsized black demographic to the prison population as being - by itself - some sort of "evidence" of racism is simply stupid.
Mod me to oblivion for being troll/flamebait. Denying something exists doesn't make it untrue.
-Styopa
The first is an internet opinion piece. Worth less than toilet paper.
The second is outcomes, not cause. Not relevant.
0 of 2 for sourcing. Never went to college eh?
The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
Is this because:
1. The US are better at catching criminals?
2. There are more criminals per capita in the US? (I assume that the careless quote is meant per capita).
3. The US imprisons more innocent people?
4. There are more actions that are deemed illegal in the US than elsewhere?
5. It is profitable to run prisons.
6. ???
FTFY
This is not true in Europe and Africa (possibly excluding war zones) - but is true in the Americas. There is a distinct possibility that the history of slavery in the Americas may have a bearing on this.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
or is Jeopardy more to your taste?
Or how about trying to beat Google at a general knowledge test?
(But Google is just organizing information that it reads or sees, and deciding what to regurgitate when asked.)
(Aren't we all, aren't we all.)
Good luck.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
in Pickard Voice... There... IS... NO... A... I...
One thing is that roughly 25 percent of the US prison population is certifiably insane.
In the 1950s we had about 500,000 people in mental asylums in the US.
Today, with double the population, we have about 50,000 people in asylums.
The consequences are in our public parks and in our prisons.
Consider, I'm talking about roughly .3% of the US population here. Would you believe that .3% of the US population is medically insane? Of course. In fact, the actual number if probably a bit higher. But we can at least accept .3%. That is 1 million people.
We need to reconsider "de-institutionalization" which was a push after the 1960s and finally finished in the 1990s.
Look at most of the mass shootings... Nearly all of them are known mental health risks with records of mental illness.
Look at the prisons and consider what filling 25% of the seats in the prison with the certifiably insane does to the internal prison culture? Think about that. Imagine warehoused hardened criminals being mixed with people that don't know which way is up or down.
Look at our streets, our public parks, etc... look at those people and tell me honestly if you can say "that could be me". Because it couldn't. You're looking at substance abuse and mental illness almost entirely. If were economic, then people wouldn't be coming from Guatemala to work and then send money BACK to Guatemala.
If you want to seriously deal with the US prison problem, then you have to first have the courage to admit that it was used as a dumping ground for the people that were de-institutionalized.
Any attempt to deal with the prisons without examining that with eyes wide open... is going to fail.
You can talk about computer algorithms or procedures until the stars burn cold. Actually look into what the prison population is at this point and how it has changed. The increase in US prison populations had two things happen at the same time.
1. The Drug war. Everyone knows about this and it has been discussed to death.
2. And this is masked by the drug war and in part because many people don't know anything about it... De-institutionalization. They happened at the SAME time. So the numbers don't point to one or the other. They just show an increase at time X.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is well known that prisoners that keep in touch with their families and friends are more likely to successfully reintegrate with society.
Interesting. I once heard here that recidivism is lower in Nordic countries which relocate convicts, upon release, to a location far from where they used to live. The theory was that if they're separated from their old criminal friends and contacts then they're less likely to reoffend.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Spend more on each US brand of facial detection.
Give the brands access to larger private and real time inner city data sets to work on.
Partnerships with banks, gov, city governments, police, state police, malls, shops, building CCTV networks.
Get that data out of communities with huge crime problems so crime recognition partnerships can work with quality data sets.
That will give new and emerging computer networks the raw, daily movements of inner city people. The transport patterns in an urban area.
The math of the human face is now well understood.
Gait, automated license plate readers, map software and voice pattern upgrades to what was once IMSI catchers will allow for much better tracking.
Hoe to fix this:
Public private partnerships get the most CCTV networks in place in inner city areas.
Have police add their exisiting lists of criminals to the CCTV database networks all over the USA.
Share date sets between city/state and all over the USA.
More data to work on and the math gets better per face.
Remove city politics from the math of inner city police databases. Let the police build and learn along with their data collection networks.
Stop holding city/state police back by demanding they only work with very limited data sets of past criminals on their police only CCTV databases.
Facial recognition will then work as well in US inner city areas as in any other advance normal nation that funded their police and security services.
Police and security services around the world can do it on their own populations with great accuracy.
So can any US city.
Funding.
Remove city politics from police work.
Give police the support they need in terms of computer power and the most advanced US software.
Connect all inner city CCTV in real time to advanced new police software.
Find and seek the advice of experts in the USA and around the world who worked on face detection for a generation.
Bring that advance new math into CCTV network in more US cities.
The results. Crime is down. People who thought they could be super at crime in a city get caught.
Waste, trash and open drug use is detected and reported. Police enforce city laws again.
Gentrification sets in with the reduction in crime. City areas attract tourism, investment and growth again.
More tax revenue, better rents for buildings. The city has more tax money for improvements.
Cities can support new transport, jobs, housing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Interesting. I once heard here that recidivism is lower in Nordic countries which relocate convicts, upon release, to a location far from where they used to live. The theory was that if they're separated from their old criminal friends and contacts then they're less likely to reoffend.
I just did some googling, and was unable to find a single citation for any Nordic country doing this. To the contrary, as an inmate nears release, Norway offers weekend releases to ease the reintegration with their family and community.
And you believe China's numbers? Did you know gullible is not in the dictionary.
Do you think the Chinese numbers include the internment of Uighurs?
America's high prison rate is not just a "race issue".
The UK has an incarceration rate 7 times higher for blacks than whites.
Australia has an incarceration rate 10 to 15 times higher for aboriginals than others (around 4% of adult males, similar to US blacks).
The US has a relatively low ratio of black:other imprisonment rate, 4 to 1, and there is no evidence of systemic racism in this number.
The real problem is the very high rate for the entire population!
(Which is not to say that poor young black males do not suffer disproportionately.)
https://www.theguardian.com/so...
I still don't see, what exactly is "broken". AI can make mistakes? Sure — but AI does not issue verdicts, human judges do...
That we have higher prison populations than other countries? Maybe, that's the sign of efficiency of our prosecutors (combined with the near-moratorium on death-sentences)? The "yellow jackets" in France have been marauding and burning for how long now, for example? I doubt, such blatant asshollery would've been tolerated in the US for that long.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Your don't actually think that the checklist included race as an item, do you? And do you also think that the other items on the list don't correspond to higher recidivism rates? I'd love to see your checklist that would incarcerate fewer people and have less recidivism.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
It's not really true in the Americas either.
I am not sure why the AI thinking members of congress as criminals means that it got it wrong. Seems about right to me, all things considered.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
ShanghaiBill, I think your comment is better than mine.
You’re correct on both counts, but per capita is a better means of comparison when total population varies greatly. Total population of Wyoming is vastly lower than California. To compare the two it is essential to use a per capita basis.
But ultimately what you pointed to with financial incentive is a huge problem in law enforcemnt and it has been for a very long time. Asset forfeiture is a stinking pile of corruption. I’ve heard nightmares of vending machine operators being flagged for making small cash deposits, a literal reality of their occupation, and had their entire bank account seized for asset forfeiture. Even when they prove themselves innocent they do not get that money back. One sheriffs office acquired $250,000 for themselves by exploiting asset forfeiture on a vending machine operator.
This practice goes all the way back to around the time of the great depression. It has long been argued that a disproportionate amount of incarceration occurred in order to create the workforce to build roads. At the time prisoners were regularly used as hard labor workers; chain gangs. Therefore there was an incentive to incarcerate the poorest as a means of cheap labor. The result is what has been perceived as racial disparity. I personally believe the economics played just as big of a role and anyone equally as poor would have been subject to the same mistreatment.
The very concept that any portion of a correctional system can be placed in a situation where there are financial incentives for depriving you of your liberties is so profoundly unconstitutional, that it literally violates the pretense of it, starting with the preamble. Without even citing any specific passage of the constitution, and looking at it as a whole, the idea that there is a financial incentive to deprive you of freedom is the antithesis of the Constitution itself
In California, we recently passed a law removing bail from the system. We were told bail was bad, disproportionately affected the poor and minority communities, and didn't have a direct effect on reducing people from skipping and running.
The replacement for bail was going to be an algorithm that takes into account things like past criminal record, mortgage payments, credit rating, credit history--a ton of stuff that all statistically has been shown to influence either slightly or greatly someone's propensity to flee once out of jail awaiting trial. A score would be generated and a cutoff line set: it was to be hit or miss: Stay in jail until trial, or get let out until trial based on how the algorithm determined your flight risk. No payments involved. The Bail industry screamed bloody murder, and it floating a proposition to overturn it.
However, the same groups screaming for the removal of bail are now upset because the algorithm is determining that the groups they claimed were being bankrupted by the bail system are high flight risks and cannot be released.
Why would they pay taxes? The marijuana was bought for years illegally. They'll simply keep buying it illegally.
We ALLOW them to suffer disproportionately!
We know single parent families with completely uninvolved ( in fact, proudly uninvolved) fathers have children more likely to commit crimes.
We know that young children having children leads to offspring more likely to commit crimes.
We know that certain cultural behaviors are criminal and more likely to result in the person being incarcerated.
But we won't address it because it's uncomfortable/racist/it's not their fault.
It means saying "this community is doing things wrong, you need to change". And providing actual support for that change and not the usual politically correct diatribes and "Hey, that group over there did that to you!" speeches.
Nobody will do that.
So the system properly determined that you were not a flight risk, correct? or is this your actual sentence?
Pretty sure that if you're just fighting over the comparison to one of the worst police states on the planets, you've already lost this argument.