Justice by the Numbers
February 4, 2019 5:50 AM Subscribe
Over 10 million arrests are made each year in the United States, amounting to an astounding one every three seconds. Are all these arrests necessary? What are they for, and have they changed over time? Who are the people being arrested? And where? Are arrests “equitably” distributed, or a function of where police are deployed? To answer those questions, Vera Institute of Justice recently launched Arrest Trends, a groundbreaking data tool that helps answer fundamental questions about American policing.
By organizing publicly available datasets into one easy-to-use data platform, users can access, customize, and analyze decades of policing data, including comparisons between places – data that previously had been disparately located and difficult to interpret. ... The release of the tool coincides with a new report, Every Three Seconds: Unlocking Police Data on Arrests, which includes information about the need for greater access to policing data, an overview of the Arrest Trends tool, initial findings gleaned from it, and potential areas for growth and evolution of this tool.
For example, of those 10 million arrests, only 5 percent are for serious violent crimes. Instead, the majority of arrests are for low-level offenses, including drug offenses which have increased by 171 percent since 1980, and disproportionately impact people of color. Also, arrests of men have decreased by 7 percent since 1980 while arrests of women increased by 78 percent.
(SL Pacific Standard) In other news on data analysis for justice: Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America's criminal justice system.
... In New York's courts, two algorithmic risk assessment tools now help judges decide whether or not to detain defendants like Wilkerson before trial. It's not a perfect science, Lum argues: Because software of this kind is trained with historical data, with all its gaps and inequities, it risks reproducing past injustices. And the consequences can be dire for people like Wilkerson. "It comes down to 'Bias in, bias out,'" Lum says. Her goal is to reveal those biases and, when possible, find ways to correct for them using quantitative methods.
By organizing publicly available datasets into one easy-to-use data platform, users can access, customize, and analyze decades of policing data, including comparisons between places – data that previously had been disparately located and difficult to interpret. ... The release of the tool coincides with a new report, Every Three Seconds: Unlocking Police Data on Arrests, which includes information about the need for greater access to policing data, an overview of the Arrest Trends tool, initial findings gleaned from it, and potential areas for growth and evolution of this tool.
For example, of those 10 million arrests, only 5 percent are for serious violent crimes. Instead, the majority of arrests are for low-level offenses, including drug offenses which have increased by 171 percent since 1980, and disproportionately impact people of color. Also, arrests of men have decreased by 7 percent since 1980 while arrests of women increased by 78 percent.
(SL Pacific Standard) In other news on data analysis for justice: Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America's criminal justice system.
... In New York's courts, two algorithmic risk assessment tools now help judges decide whether or not to detain defendants like Wilkerson before trial. It's not a perfect science, Lum argues: Because software of this kind is trained with historical data, with all its gaps and inequities, it risks reproducing past injustices. And the consequences can be dire for people like Wilkerson. "It comes down to 'Bias in, bias out,'" Lum says. Her goal is to reveal those biases and, when possible, find ways to correct for them using quantitative methods.
"Because software of this kind is trained with historical data, with all its gaps and inequities, it risks reproducing past injustices."
Garbage in; garbage out.
posted by alrightokay at 7:00 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]
Garbage in; garbage out.
posted by alrightokay at 7:00 AM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]
Does anyone else think the practical results of the cross between machine learning and incarceration looks not dissimilar to the fascist conception of legal jurisprudence?
Judge Thayer on sentencing a Mr. Vanzetti, who would eventually be executed: "this man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions".
I'm pretty sure they won't say it as they implement the programs, but when people start to complain about how they operate, the above quote in no way seems unlikely to reappear, paraphrased. "Oh, maybe they didn't commit this crime, but why do they insist upon their "religious coverings" if they are not complicit in a plot to overthrow our beloved state?" etc. I wish I hadn't already seen an awful lot of comments exactly to this effect, and it seems like the AI stuff is only likely to reinforce it.
I'm also thinking of something I think MeFi's own aedison was talking about, how trans women's experiences are counted as male in the data to downplay and distort incidents of misogynistic violence, creating data that appears sound till you find that one footnote, if they bother to include it. I'm hardly a big supporter of our modern legal institutions, but I have yet to hear sufficiently good arguments for replacing significant chunks of them with algorithms, given the possibilities.
5% of arrests are for violent offences, yet you still get people here on MF arguing that we need an increase in incarceration overall. 5%! So what, 18 or 19 out of every 20 arrestees are probably not immediate risks to the community? Yet they should be locked up and left to freeze regardless?
A lot of the US left seems bizzarely in love with the police. That tension isn't going away anytime soon. I don't understand how anyone could look at BLM, look at American policing practices, look at the raced nature of incarceration, and argue that they need a prosecutor up front as their leftist idol.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:04 AM on February 4, 2019 [11 favorites]
Judge Thayer on sentencing a Mr. Vanzetti, who would eventually be executed: "this man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions".
I'm pretty sure they won't say it as they implement the programs, but when people start to complain about how they operate, the above quote in no way seems unlikely to reappear, paraphrased. "Oh, maybe they didn't commit this crime, but why do they insist upon their "religious coverings" if they are not complicit in a plot to overthrow our beloved state?" etc. I wish I hadn't already seen an awful lot of comments exactly to this effect, and it seems like the AI stuff is only likely to reinforce it.
I'm also thinking of something I think MeFi's own aedison was talking about, how trans women's experiences are counted as male in the data to downplay and distort incidents of misogynistic violence, creating data that appears sound till you find that one footnote, if they bother to include it. I'm hardly a big supporter of our modern legal institutions, but I have yet to hear sufficiently good arguments for replacing significant chunks of them with algorithms, given the possibilities.
5% of arrests are for violent offences, yet you still get people here on MF arguing that we need an increase in incarceration overall. 5%! So what, 18 or 19 out of every 20 arrestees are probably not immediate risks to the community? Yet they should be locked up and left to freeze regardless?
A lot of the US left seems bizzarely in love with the police. That tension isn't going away anytime soon. I don't understand how anyone could look at BLM, look at American policing practices, look at the raced nature of incarceration, and argue that they need a prosecutor up front as their leftist idol.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:04 AM on February 4, 2019 [11 favorites]
I'm also thinking of something I think MeFi's own aedison was talking about, how trans women's experiences are counted as male in the data to downplay and distort incidents of misogynistic violence, creating data that appears sound till you find that one footnote, if they bother to include it. I'm hardly a big supporter of our modern legal institutions, but I have yet to hear sufficiently good arguments for replacing significant chunks of them with algorithms, given the possibilities.
It's obviously a horrible idea. What we need are better, more compassionate people doing [whatever method we evolve for dealing with violence, theft, bias attacks, etc] who have better and more compassionate precedent to work from.
Middle class people know fuck-all about the court system. It is monstrous, and middle class people don't get chewed up in it. I have a friend who is going through civil court right now and her experience is like one of those "cycle of catastrophe" poverty stories you read occasionally in the media - first one unfair thing (that a middle class person could beat) happens, then that creates a cascade of expenses and constraints that are almost impossible to manage without a good, secure job and a lot of savings, and then because of that cascade, the court cracks down.
The lawyers don't know. The judges don't know. The lawyer, who she was able to retain through an unusual and fortunate set of circumstances, was astonished that she didn't have a car. The lawyer didn't know how far away some of the mandatory office visits were, or that they could not be reached by bus without four transfers.
Once there's some kind of algorithm in the mix, fed on racist and anti-poor lies, things will get a whole fuck of a lot worse.
Only someone who will never, ever be on the sharp end could possibly think this was a good idea. It makes you understand why the Bolsheviks took a hard line, it really does.
posted by Frowner at 7:19 AM on February 4, 2019 [17 favorites]
It's obviously a horrible idea. What we need are better, more compassionate people doing [whatever method we evolve for dealing with violence, theft, bias attacks, etc] who have better and more compassionate precedent to work from.
Middle class people know fuck-all about the court system. It is monstrous, and middle class people don't get chewed up in it. I have a friend who is going through civil court right now and her experience is like one of those "cycle of catastrophe" poverty stories you read occasionally in the media - first one unfair thing (that a middle class person could beat) happens, then that creates a cascade of expenses and constraints that are almost impossible to manage without a good, secure job and a lot of savings, and then because of that cascade, the court cracks down.
The lawyers don't know. The judges don't know. The lawyer, who she was able to retain through an unusual and fortunate set of circumstances, was astonished that she didn't have a car. The lawyer didn't know how far away some of the mandatory office visits were, or that they could not be reached by bus without four transfers.
Once there's some kind of algorithm in the mix, fed on racist and anti-poor lies, things will get a whole fuck of a lot worse.
Only someone who will never, ever be on the sharp end could possibly think this was a good idea. It makes you understand why the Bolsheviks took a hard line, it really does.
posted by Frowner at 7:19 AM on February 4, 2019 [17 favorites]
Drug arrests are up a lot since 1980 which is to be expected since the War On Drugs. Overall, though, total arrests (reported and estimated) are either neutral or down, roughly 33% below the peak in 1997. Accounting for population differences that means the overall arrest rate dropped from ~4.4% in 1980 to ~3.0% in 2016. That's at least a tiny bit of good news.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:29 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:29 AM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
Someone I know through family (but is not family) has been in and out of jail a few times. I agreed to send this person money (to use to buy food) and also speak to this person, which required setting up a phone account for the person. As Mother Jones (and others, I am sure) have covered, the profit-making services that poor people are obligated to navigate (if they want, basically, anything) is obscene. There are a lot of for-profit private prisons and for-profit private prison services companies. It just sucks.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:20 AM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:20 AM on February 4, 2019 [8 favorites]
Even when dealing with public prisons, not the unremitting awfulness of private prisons, there's a huge number of private entities providing most services in the prison, and they are all absolutely remorseless when it comes to jacking up prices because they have a monopoly and no one cares about prisoners enough to rein them in.
Until a law was passed forbidding it, the private telecom companies that provided service in prisons were charging $14/minute for phone calls.
Pennsylvania is ending a program to let prisoners get books from the outside world and is, instead, feeding them to yet another private for profit extortion company charging outrageous fees for ebook readers and ebooks. Other states are looking to do the same.
Prisoners are seen as a great way for billionaires to extract yet more money from poor people, and state legislatures are not merely complacent in this they are instrumental in selling captive markets to rent seeking organizations.
When coupled with the fact that prison labor is paid essentially nothing it's modern day slavery with the added insult that the families of those held in bondage are required to pay billionaires obscene fees to even speak to their loved ones.
If our government was sane it'd release every single person in prison for non-violent offenses, and evaluate those imprisoned for violent offenses to see which of them were actually violent and need to be incarcerated and which were railroaded into pleading guilty to a violent crime despite not actually being violent.
We could, and should, reduce our prison population by at least 70%.
The fact that the police arrest (black) people in huge numbers for trivial offenses is simply the first step on a long chain of abuse directed at mostly people of color by your laughably misnamed "Criminal Justice System", there is clearly no justice involved.
The system can't survive without a steady stream of new prisoners, so the police are charged with the task of aggressively policing the poorest and most oppressed segment of society, arresting anyone they can (who is brown, poor, or otherwise unable to have a real lawyer) on the flimsiest of charges, and then toss them in prison to be exploited for their labor while their families and friends are squeezed for high fees by rent seeking "service" corporations.
The prison system is deliberately designed to be intolerable for day to day life without a steady supply of goods from friends and family on the outside, so as specifically to create the market the rent seekers then filled. It's a highly effective means of extracting all the money they can from the poor and vulnerable to keep them poor and vulnerable.
posted by sotonohito at 8:58 AM on February 4, 2019 [16 favorites]
Until a law was passed forbidding it, the private telecom companies that provided service in prisons were charging $14/minute for phone calls.
Pennsylvania is ending a program to let prisoners get books from the outside world and is, instead, feeding them to yet another private for profit extortion company charging outrageous fees for ebook readers and ebooks. Other states are looking to do the same.
Prisoners are seen as a great way for billionaires to extract yet more money from poor people, and state legislatures are not merely complacent in this they are instrumental in selling captive markets to rent seeking organizations.
When coupled with the fact that prison labor is paid essentially nothing it's modern day slavery with the added insult that the families of those held in bondage are required to pay billionaires obscene fees to even speak to their loved ones.
If our government was sane it'd release every single person in prison for non-violent offenses, and evaluate those imprisoned for violent offenses to see which of them were actually violent and need to be incarcerated and which were railroaded into pleading guilty to a violent crime despite not actually being violent.
We could, and should, reduce our prison population by at least 70%.
The fact that the police arrest (black) people in huge numbers for trivial offenses is simply the first step on a long chain of abuse directed at mostly people of color by your laughably misnamed "Criminal Justice System", there is clearly no justice involved.
The system can't survive without a steady stream of new prisoners, so the police are charged with the task of aggressively policing the poorest and most oppressed segment of society, arresting anyone they can (who is brown, poor, or otherwise unable to have a real lawyer) on the flimsiest of charges, and then toss them in prison to be exploited for their labor while their families and friends are squeezed for high fees by rent seeking "service" corporations.
The prison system is deliberately designed to be intolerable for day to day life without a steady supply of goods from friends and family on the outside, so as specifically to create the market the rent seekers then filled. It's a highly effective means of extracting all the money they can from the poor and vulnerable to keep them poor and vulnerable.
posted by sotonohito at 8:58 AM on February 4, 2019 [16 favorites]
From the Intercept, Life Inside a Freezing Federal Prison with No Heat: State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn, told The Intercept he was shown a cell in which an asthmatic man deprived of a nebulizer was lying on the floor of a poorly ventilated cell, trying to suck air through the gap under the door.
“As they took us inside, I saw a young man on the floor, holding a bright red inhaler, and he was saying through tears that he doesn’t know if he’s going to wake up tomorrow,” Myrie said. “This man is pre-trial; he hasn’t been convicted of anything. I grew up using a nebulizer, so I know what it’s like to need it and not have it.”
Bureau of Prisons Warden Herman Quay was standing next to Myrie during the exchange inside the prison, the state senator said. The warden was apparently unmoved. “There was no sense of urgency,” Myrie said. “He was extremely elusive, and all of his answers to our questions were noncommittal.”
Yesterday, in response, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted "Inhumane conditions do not belong and should not be tolerated in any jail or prison. People are not sent there to be sentenced to torture. And that’s exactly what this is."
It is sad that I would response so strongly to a fucking tweet. It is just a tweet. But damn, it is refreshing to hear a politician speak honestly about the situation and to seemingly recognize that individuals in jail are humans deserving of dignity and care rather than some kind of human trash to be dismissed, ignored, or worse.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:47 AM on February 4, 2019 [7 favorites]
“As they took us inside, I saw a young man on the floor, holding a bright red inhaler, and he was saying through tears that he doesn’t know if he’s going to wake up tomorrow,” Myrie said. “This man is pre-trial; he hasn’t been convicted of anything. I grew up using a nebulizer, so I know what it’s like to need it and not have it.”
Bureau of Prisons Warden Herman Quay was standing next to Myrie during the exchange inside the prison, the state senator said. The warden was apparently unmoved. “There was no sense of urgency,” Myrie said. “He was extremely elusive, and all of his answers to our questions were noncommittal.”
Yesterday, in response, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted "Inhumane conditions do not belong and should not be tolerated in any jail or prison. People are not sent there to be sentenced to torture. And that’s exactly what this is."
It is sad that I would response so strongly to a fucking tweet. It is just a tweet. But damn, it is refreshing to hear a politician speak honestly about the situation and to seemingly recognize that individuals in jail are humans deserving of dignity and care rather than some kind of human trash to be dismissed, ignored, or worse.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:47 AM on February 4, 2019 [7 favorites]
your laughably misnamed "Criminal Justice System"
Not a criminal justice system, but a criminal justice sustem?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:53 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]
Not a criminal justice system, but a criminal justice sustem?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:53 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]
« Older Kotaku writer plays every availible Angry Birds... | his music always made you think; it never made you... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by nangua at 5:57 AM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]