10 ms·

Can We Reduce Bias in Criminal Justice?

30 points by alwaysmetara 11y ago

benkuykendall 11y ago
Unconscious racial bias comes up a lot in these issues. Yet I am at a loss to see a mechanism by which we could even begin to remedy it. What steps could proposed programs take?
- pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  nice try, hitler. no, we're not going to eliminate all other races just so you don't have to feel guilty about your own ignorance. oh wait, that's what everyone wants? well, i guess that's democracy. welcome to WW3. your drone pilot station is D12-7B. please let your commander know when you need a new drone or an ammo reload. lunch is 11-2.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  Lots of ideas come to mind. Probably all bad ideas, but ideas nonetheless: * Judges and juries are only allowed to be the same race as the defendant. * Increase/decrease the sentencing guidelines by X% for a certain race. 20 years max for a certain offense for Race Y, 15 years max for Race Z. * Preferentially give better public defenders to people of certain races, or maybe just give them money to hire non-public defenders. * Pick some small percentage of cases, say 5%. For people of Race Z, just let them go free 5% of the time. Don't even have a trial. * Give nicer prison accommodations to people based on race. Similarly, make early release requirements less stringent for people based on race. * For people of the privileged race, randomly arrest some innocent ones and try your best to pin the crime on them. Like I said, these are all bad ideas, but they would counteract unconscious racial bias.
  - wernercd 11y ago
    I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. ... Except for black people... who are innocent without capable of being guilty. And Chinese who deserve a 10% increase in jail-time for being better at math. White people deserve a minimum sentence of 5 years, hard labor, for millenia of whiteprivildge.
  - buckbova 11y ago
    > Judges and juries are only allowed to be the same race as the defendant. So if a white cop shoots a black person and is arrested for it, the judge and jury should all be white? Sounds about right. They do say "jury of your peers", so a jury of white cops would be ideal in this case.
    - streptomycin 11y ago
      Good point. Change that one to: * Judges and juries are only allowed to be people of the disadvantaged race No more white judges or jury members would shake things up a bit.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    The reason those are all bad ideas is that they're all attempting to treat the symptom rather than the problem. If the problem is that people are dumping alkali waste into the reservoir, your suggestion is to ignore that and then dump in acid to even it out. Making the pH neutral isn't the same thing as making the water clean. We have to solve the underlying problem.
    - streptomycin 11y ago
      Solve the underlying problem? Babies exhibit racial bias. We're going to need some serious genetic engineering applied to the brain to solve the underlying problem. I don't think that's happening any time soon. Your solution is to ignore this and instead offer a platitude so you don't have to think about an actual solution. I'm not saying I know the perfect solution, but I'm pretty sure it's not a platitude.
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        If you ask "why" up the chain enough times you eventually end up at some immutable law of nature. But that's completely missing the point. Fixing the cause rather than the symptom doesn't mean you have to go study evolutionary biology. "Babies exhibit racial bias" doesn't inherently lead to mass incarceration and murder. There is a whole system of causes between one and the other. And as for an actual solution, the top voted comment has already provided it. You can't have bias in drug cases or police shootings if there are no drug cases or police shootings. End the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences. Demilitarize the police.
        streptomycin 11y ago
        The problem we're discussing isn't that there are too many minorities imprisoned for drug crimes. The problem is systemic disparate impact throughout the entire criminal justice system. Getting rid of drug crimes does nothing to solve that, because you see the same pattern in basically every type of crime. Legalizing drugs would reduce the number of crimes, but not the racial bias. You could just as easily "solve" the problem of racial bias by getting rid of any class of crimes. Like, let's legalize speeding because more blacks are pulled over for speeding than whites. Great. But the fundamental problem of inequality still remains in every other area of the criminal justice system. Also, how do mandatory minimum sentences lead to more bias? Wouldn't that lead to less bias, since it removes biaased human judgement from part of the process? Otherwise you'd probably see whites getting more lenient sentences than they already do.
- candu 11y ago
  If we accept that unconscious bias is a fact, the only real solution is to eliminate the possibility for unconscious bias. To fully do this, you'd need an environment in which all parties are mutually identity-blind. Some kind of virtual courtroom where everyone assumes a "neutral" avatar and speaks through a synthesized voice (again, "neutral") might approximate this. How would you get there from here? First, you'd need a prototype and substantial basic research - not within the criminal justice system - supporting up the hypothesis that this reduces bias. Next, you'd need to beef up security, accessibility, etc. before slogging through the procurement process. You'd then test it on a small handful of actual cases, thereby gathering data to support a wider rollout. In the meantime: not sure. The very least we could do would be to make sure everyone involved receives some "unconscious bias training" (e.g. make it a mandatory part of court proceedings).
  - jquery 11y ago
    Part of the point of jury-of-your-peers trials is so people can use their biases to make subjective decisions based on their life experience. The tone/inflection/appearance of the defendant plays into all of that. What you are suggesting would eliminate that. Why have juries at all, then?
    - malka 11y ago
      Yes. Why having easily manipulable group of people, instead of professional judges that are used to lawyers and criminal BS ?
      - jquery 11y ago
        "Juries are often justified because they leaven the law with community norms." "Discussions among juries could lead to more thorough consideration of all aspects of the case." (see: 12 Angry Men) "Occasionally jurors find the law to be invalid or unfair, and on that basis acquit the defendant, regardless of the evidence presented that the defendant violated the law. This is commonly referred to as "jury nullification of law" or simply jury nullification." "It may be more difficult to corrupt 12 jurors than one or several judges." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury
classicsnoot 11y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines not being snarky; i think this one is a clear 'No.'
- stephengillie 11y ago
  "No" usually is the correct answer to a Betteridge Headline.
- Hytosys 11y ago
  This is a bullshit response. Did you not read the article? It offers a fair share of proven optimism.
  - classicsnoot 11y ago
    Wow, tiger. First off, i stand by my assessment. IMO if the bias were to be stripped from the Justice System, that would mean firing literally everyone and building a new one using computers and duct tape which, as every school child knows, have no bias. Secondly, "fair share of proven optimism"? In my head that translates to, "we think that maybe this might help a little"... so... the answer is still 'No.'. Just my $0.02
    - Hytosys 11y ago
      >Secondly, "fair share of proven optimism"? In my head that translates to, "we think that maybe this might help a little"... That clearly translates to "no, I still haven't read the article."
      - classicsnoot 11y ago
        Ok. Having reread the entire thing twice (just for you) i can positively say that i stand by my "no." The phrase "reduce subconscious bias" appears multiple times with no explanation as to how that may actually work. This is a classic case of top down initiative. The leaders can say whatever they want; it is the foot soldiers that implement policy. As long as there is an entrenched, aged constabulary educating the new recruits, the inherent biases of thugs with badges will continue.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
cute.
jquery 11y ago
Isn't "unconscious bias" merely humans using their instinctual bayesian reasoning systems as priors? I don't see how it's possible to eliminate that, nor that the outcome would necessarily be desirable. Educating people that there are certain biases they shouldn't bring into the courtroom is a proposed solution, but I don't think it gets us anywhere closer to the platonic ideal of objective justice. It just mucks with the bayesian priors in a way that favored activists desire.
- majormajor 11y ago
  I've pretty much never personally seen a violent/property crime committed by someone else. Don't think I've ever been witness to a mugging, or a store getting held up, or a car getting stolen. What I have seen is media reports and then, even more vividly than news reports, movie and TV portrayals, of such and other crimes. So now, any pattern-matching I do on "this is the type of person who does that type of thing" isn't based on my own experiences, it's based on the ones people have shown me. So maybe there were things influenced what got reported on, or what types of people get written into stories in what roles—aka my bias would be based on other people's bias which would be based on... as well as questions about what types of crimes get reported on/turned into movies, etc. Violence sells, etc. This is problematic for the idea that "bias" is just the brain doing reliable and sophisticated analysis of trustworthy data.
  - jquery 11y ago
    Why have juries at all? Clearly a "jury of one's peers" is wholly unsuitable for the job, based on that logic. Which is a fair argument, but insincere when approached from the angle that what we need to get rid of is unconscious bias.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Isn't "unconscious bias" merely humans using their instinctual bayesian reasoning systems as priors? No, it's just tribal instincts against the 'other'; no prior experience is necessary; people will kill people from groups they have no expereince with because they are different. Consider homophobia: Is it because the attackers have experience being assaulted by gays? What about violence against women? (In fact, I think reality may be reverse of your theory: The same people are victimized over and over; the weak are abused by the powerful.) The solution is conceptually simple: Teach people to see the other groups as 'one of us'. It does happen over the long run; I read research that within a few generations, for example, new immigrant groups mostly inter-marry with others (arguably blacks became the equivalent of new immigrants when they finally had full legal rights in the 1960s, and racial intermarriage now is growing quickly). Consider Protestants and Catholics, who used to riot against each other. 55 years ago, a Catholic winning the Presidency was a big deal. Now nobody cares or notices; a Catholic marrying a Protestant is completely unremarkable. Rather than arbitrarily causing generations of suffering, we can learn to do better now.
mindslight 11y ago
Oh cuil. The red herring of race takes hold, distracting people away from the universal brokenness of a clock-punching judicial system that assumes everyone is guilty, police that operate with impunity, and general lack of civil recompense for victims of wrongful arrest and prosecution. The system is far from the lofty ideal you were taught in civics class, regardless of one's skin color. Fixing the fundamental issues must be done first in order to even make racial bias legible and to have an ideal to work towards.
j_m_b 11y ago
If personal bias plays a part in increasing the amount of arrests and prosecutions for a certain subpopulation, then by definition reducing the domain of law enforcement reduces the impact of personal bias. Prohibition of substances, gambling and prostitution,the overcriminilization of our society, "zero-tolerance" policies, and increasing regulatory oversight of every facet of our lives have had the net result that the personal biases of government officials have become insufferable to those most affected by it. I just hope that the conversation shifts away from "Who should be in charge?" to "Should we have so many people in charge?".

30 points by alwaysmetara 11y ago

Unconscious racial bias comes up a lot in these issues. Yet I am at a loss to see a mechanism by which we could even begin to remedy it. What steps could proposed programs take?

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
nice try, hitler. no, we're not going to eliminate all other races just so you don't have to feel guilty about your own ignorance. oh wait, that's what everyone wants? well, i guess that's democracy. welcome to WW3. your drone pilot station is D12-7B. please let your commander know when you need a new drone or an ammo reload. lunch is 11-2.
streptomycin 11y ago
Lots of ideas come to mind. Probably all bad ideas, but ideas nonetheless: * Judges and juries are only allowed to be the same race as the defendant. * Increase/decrease the sentencing guidelines by X% for a certain race. 20 years max for a certain offense for Race Y, 15 years max for Race Z. * Preferentially give better public defenders to people of certain races, or maybe just give them money to hire non-public defenders. * Pick some small percentage of cases, say 5%. For people of Race Z, just let them go free 5% of the time. Don't even have a trial. * Give nicer prison accommodations to people based on race. Similarly, make early release requirements less stringent for people based on race. * For people of the privileged race, randomly arrest some innocent ones and try your best to pin the crime on them. Like I said, these are all bad ideas, but they would counteract unconscious racial bias.
- wernercd 11y ago
  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. ... Except for black people... who are innocent without capable of being guilty. And Chinese who deserve a 10% increase in jail-time for being better at math. White people deserve a minimum sentence of 5 years, hard labor, for millenia of whiteprivildge.
- buckbova 11y ago
  > Judges and juries are only allowed to be the same race as the defendant. So if a white cop shoots a black person and is arrested for it, the judge and jury should all be white? Sounds about right. They do say "jury of your peers", so a jury of white cops would be ideal in this case.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    Good point. Change that one to: * Judges and juries are only allowed to be people of the disadvantaged race No more white judges or jury members would shake things up a bit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  The reason those are all bad ideas is that they're all attempting to treat the symptom rather than the problem. If the problem is that people are dumping alkali waste into the reservoir, your suggestion is to ignore that and then dump in acid to even it out. Making the pH neutral isn't the same thing as making the water clean. We have to solve the underlying problem.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    Solve the underlying problem? Babies exhibit racial bias. We're going to need some serious genetic engineering applied to the brain to solve the underlying problem. I don't think that's happening any time soon. Your solution is to ignore this and instead offer a platitude so you don't have to think about an actual solution. I'm not saying I know the perfect solution, but I'm pretty sure it's not a platitude.
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      If you ask "why" up the chain enough times you eventually end up at some immutable law of nature. But that's completely missing the point. Fixing the cause rather than the symptom doesn't mean you have to go study evolutionary biology. "Babies exhibit racial bias" doesn't inherently lead to mass incarceration and murder. There is a whole system of causes between one and the other. And as for an actual solution, the top voted comment has already provided it. You can't have bias in drug cases or police shootings if there are no drug cases or police shootings. End the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences. Demilitarize the police.
      - streptomycin 11y ago
        The problem we're discussing isn't that there are too many minorities imprisoned for drug crimes. The problem is systemic disparate impact throughout the entire criminal justice system. Getting rid of drug crimes does nothing to solve that, because you see the same pattern in basically every type of crime. Legalizing drugs would reduce the number of crimes, but not the racial bias. You could just as easily "solve" the problem of racial bias by getting rid of any class of crimes. Like, let's legalize speeding because more blacks are pulled over for speeding than whites. Great. But the fundamental problem of inequality still remains in every other area of the criminal justice system. Also, how do mandatory minimum sentences lead to more bias? Wouldn't that lead to less bias, since it removes biaased human judgement from part of the process? Otherwise you'd probably see whites getting more lenient sentences than they already do.
candu 11y ago
If we accept that unconscious bias is a fact, the only real solution is to eliminate the possibility for unconscious bias. To fully do this, you'd need an environment in which all parties are mutually identity-blind. Some kind of virtual courtroom where everyone assumes a "neutral" avatar and speaks through a synthesized voice (again, "neutral") might approximate this. How would you get there from here? First, you'd need a prototype and substantial basic research - not within the criminal justice system - supporting up the hypothesis that this reduces bias. Next, you'd need to beef up security, accessibility, etc. before slogging through the procurement process. You'd then test it on a small handful of actual cases, thereby gathering data to support a wider rollout. In the meantime: not sure. The very least we could do would be to make sure everyone involved receives some "unconscious bias training" (e.g. make it a mandatory part of court proceedings).
- jquery 11y ago
  Part of the point of jury-of-your-peers trials is so people can use their biases to make subjective decisions based on their life experience. The tone/inflection/appearance of the defendant plays into all of that. What you are suggesting would eliminate that. Why have juries at all, then?
  - malka 11y ago
    Yes. Why having easily manipulable group of people, instead of professional judges that are used to lawyers and criminal BS ?
    - jquery 11y ago
      "Juries are often justified because they leaven the law with community norms." "Discussions among juries could lead to more thorough consideration of all aspects of the case." (see: 12 Angry Men) "Occasionally jurors find the law to be invalid or unfair, and on that basis acquit the defendant, regardless of the evidence presented that the defendant violated the law. This is commonly referred to as "jury nullification of law" or simply jury nullification." "It may be more difficult to corrupt 12 jurors than one or several judges." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury

classicsnoot 11y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines not being snarky; i think this one is a clear 'No.'

stephengillie 11y ago
"No" usually is the correct answer to a Betteridge Headline.
Hytosys 11y ago
This is a bullshit response. Did you not read the article? It offers a fair share of proven optimism.
- classicsnoot 11y ago
  Wow, tiger. First off, i stand by my assessment. IMO if the bias were to be stripped from the Justice System, that would mean firing literally everyone and building a new one using computers and duct tape which, as every school child knows, have no bias. Secondly, "fair share of proven optimism"? In my head that translates to, "we think that maybe this might help a little"... so... the answer is still 'No.'. Just my $0.02
  - Hytosys 11y ago
    >Secondly, "fair share of proven optimism"? In my head that translates to, "we think that maybe this might help a little"... That clearly translates to "no, I still haven't read the article."
    - classicsnoot 11y ago
      Ok. Having reread the entire thing twice (just for you) i can positively say that i stand by my "no." The phrase "reduce subconscious bias" appears multiple times with no explanation as to how that may actually work. This is a classic case of top down initiative. The leaders can say whatever they want; it is the foot soldiers that implement policy. As long as there is an entrenched, aged constabulary educating the new recruits, the inherent biases of thugs with badges will continue.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

cute.

jquery 11y ago

Isn't "unconscious bias" merely humans using their instinctual bayesian reasoning systems as priors? I don't see how it's possible to eliminate that, nor that the outcome would necessarily be desirable. Educating people that there are certain biases they shouldn't bring into the courtroom is a proposed solution, but I don't think it gets us anywhere closer to the platonic ideal of objective justice. It just mucks with the bayesian priors in a way that favored activists desire.

majormajor 11y ago
I've pretty much never personally seen a violent/property crime committed by someone else. Don't think I've ever been witness to a mugging, or a store getting held up, or a car getting stolen. What I have seen is media reports and then, even more vividly than news reports, movie and TV portrayals, of such and other crimes. So now, any pattern-matching I do on "this is the type of person who does that type of thing" isn't based on my own experiences, it's based on the ones people have shown me. So maybe there were things influenced what got reported on, or what types of people get written into stories in what roles—aka my bias would be based on other people's bias which would be based on... as well as questions about what types of crimes get reported on/turned into movies, etc. Violence sells, etc. This is problematic for the idea that "bias" is just the brain doing reliable and sophisticated analysis of trustworthy data.
- jquery 11y ago
  Why have juries at all? Clearly a "jury of one's peers" is wholly unsuitable for the job, based on that logic. Which is a fair argument, but insincere when approached from the angle that what we need to get rid of is unconscious bias.
hackuser 11y ago
> Isn't "unconscious bias" merely humans using their instinctual bayesian reasoning systems as priors? No, it's just tribal instincts against the 'other'; no prior experience is necessary; people will kill people from groups they have no expereince with because they are different. Consider homophobia: Is it because the attackers have experience being assaulted by gays? What about violence against women? (In fact, I think reality may be reverse of your theory: The same people are victimized over and over; the weak are abused by the powerful.) The solution is conceptually simple: Teach people to see the other groups as 'one of us'. It does happen over the long run; I read research that within a few generations, for example, new immigrant groups mostly inter-marry with others (arguably blacks became the equivalent of new immigrants when they finally had full legal rights in the 1960s, and racial intermarriage now is growing quickly). Consider Protestants and Catholics, who used to riot against each other. 55 years ago, a Catholic winning the Presidency was a big deal. Now nobody cares or notices; a Catholic marrying a Protestant is completely unremarkable. Rather than arbitrarily causing generations of suffering, we can learn to do better now.

mindslight 11y ago

Oh cuil. The red herring of race takes hold, distracting people away from the universal brokenness of a clock-punching judicial system that assumes everyone is guilty, police that operate with impunity, and general lack of civil recompense for victims of wrongful arrest and prosecution. The system is far from the lofty ideal you were taught in civics class, regardless of one's skin color. Fixing the fundamental issues must be done first in order to even make racial bias legible and to have an ideal to work towards.

j_m_b 11y ago

If personal bias plays a part in increasing the amount of arrests and prosecutions for a certain subpopulation, then by definition reducing the domain of law enforcement reduces the impact of personal bias. Prohibition of substances, gambling and prostitution,the overcriminilization of our society, "zero-tolerance" policies, and increasing regulatory oversight of every facet of our lives have had the net result that the personal biases of government officials have become insufferable to those most affected by it. I just hope that the conversation shifts away from "Who should be in charge?" to "Should we have so many people in charge?".