I think this is a perfect example of why the tech industry needs to diversify. If these products have racial bias, it's because they are being designed by folks who have racial biases (perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) and are motivated only by profit. It's risky to let an algorithm determine who should be punished and how and for how long. It's even worse when bias is baked in.
3
There are some interesting components to bail reform that are rarely discussed. In a state where judges continue to serve by standing for election every six years, how willing will individual judges be to put their livelihoods on the line by not opting for the “presumption to detain” in close cases. I also wonder how the recall of Judge Persky for his mistake will translate into the arena of avoiding mistakes in pre-trial detention situations.
At time of emancipation proclamation was signed by then Republican President Abraham Lincoln, there were 4 millions African American slaves--all owned by the Democrats. Let's remember it was President Andrew Jackson, the father of the modern Democratic Party who's responsible for the trail of teas-- genocidal relocation of millions of Native Americans from their traditional homelands. Then in the more modern era, it was George Wallace the Democrat who said "Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow, and Segregation forever!" And as we speak, it’s Ms. Nancy Pelosi who grasping for the Speaker’s Gavel─ and power─ suppressing Democratic Party’s Black Caucus’s appeal for fair and just representation in the US Congress.
1
Hmmm, during Jim Crow, fewer than 30% were unwed black mothers. Since we know fatherless black males are much more likely to become criminals than those with involved fathers, how about a movement of Black Fathers Matter to reduce the 70% of black unwed mothers? This would go a long way toward stopping criminal problems before they becomes a problems.
3
The 'ghost in the machine' is now extending its reach to metastatic control of the body, individual and social.
"These advanced mathematical models — or “weapons of math destruction”... appear colorblind on the surface but are significantly influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system."
Also true in health care and medicine,“In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first.” Well, we are in that future, and the system is the computer." [Atul Gawande, "Why Doctors Hate Computers"— https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers]
A critical time — if not too late! — to heed M.L.K.’s warning, “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
It would be refreshing to read an honest account of black-on-White crime. Instead, we hear about how an algorithm is "racist." Any chance we can hear how massive black victimization of Whites is racist?
3
Its racist soul selling for profit dressed up as a new age solution to mass incarceration. It doesnt solve anything. Im surprised private prisons didnt protest- they stand to lose money when people are not incarcerated. Luckily, our judiciary has become a little less white male. Let me clarify- Its lucky not becuase all white males are bad, but becuase we need a judiciary that is representative of the population
As a social worker in the child welfare system I was enraged when a mother whose children found a way to open three locks on the door and go outside with few clostehs was put one house arrest wtih the ankle bracelet but the boundry was so small that when she ran into the street to get her todler out of harms way that was "bad enough' for her to be jailed again.
Oh yes! The father was sleeping to but not arrested. Only the mother was blamed.
I don’t believe in putting people in cages who do not need to be in cages.
But some people act like animals and DO need to be caged.
Some people act like delinquent children and don’t need to be caged but need to be continuously supervised with strict boundaries. All so that those fit for freedom might live freely.
If a judge has someone in front of them who shows by their own action that they are unfit to be free, needing instead a cage or a leash, sending a check to the local school system is not going to suffice to either end. The skin tone of the particular individual and aggregate statistical data regarding skin tone of all such who present is irrelevant to the immediate problem. If they need to be caged, then we need to cage them.
Inflammatory metaphors like “The New Jim Crow” are distractions from these simple facts.
6
Great work! Thanks.
When your only tool is a hammer ("racism"), everything looks like a nail. With all these recognized reforms, the writer still manages to find Jim Crow in there.
5
Thank you, Ms. Alexander. This column is prescient and not at all far-fetched.
1
The Republican Party and 45 will resort to any and all means, primarily by stealth and confusion, foment, incite, encourage, propose, and maintain a more subtle form of sophisticated high tech Jim Crow to keep racial and ethnic minorities "in their place." Their collective desperation is ostensibly evident, especially with the Democratic takeover of the House. The Democrats, poised to receive the gavel to committee chairmanships, will no doubt take up the nation’s business by first protecting Mueller. 45, besieged in his paranoiac bunker mentality, will pull out all of the stops to derail, malign, denigrate, and destroy the integrity of the Mueller investigation as well as attack the Democrats’ investigative efforts as some incredible threat to national security, while encouraging his now ever more diminishing base, egged on by Fox News, to persistently assault the Congress as not reflective of the will of the people. Fueling the flame, 45 will increase attacks on the media, and I am confident more reporters’ credentials will be revoked because of lack of respect when in fact 45 refuses to answer questions he doesn’t like and resents the racial complexion of the reporters. And, expect race baiting and anti-immigrant sentiment to rear its ugly head. Democratic chairpersons will include Elijah Cummings and Maxine Waters, both intense targets of the GOP and 45. The Black American female reporters will likewise be singled out for special excoriation.Yes. It works. Race matters.
3
An insightful person—Jesus, maybe?—once noted that a society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners, its poor, its voiceless. Grappling with this issue is difficult enough already, especially when an American president encourages police officers to bang the heads of non-convicted persons against police car doors. Introduction of the profit motive makes honest debate impossible—or at least impossibly muddied. There are plenty of opportunities for profit: golf clubs, wakesurfing boats, $70k pickup trucks, legal marijuana, steak-of-the-month clubs, you name it. But not justice. Justice is how we redress wrongs, respect victims’ suffering, keep communities safe, rehabilitate criminals who face their transgressions, and ensure a system where people who pay their “debt to society” are able to re-enter that society and make contributions comensurate with their abilities. The profit motive—whether related to money bail, ankle bracelets, or prison cartels—perverts all of these aims and has no rightful place in our country’s justice system.
2
Profit off criminal justice will always be corrupt. ALWAYS.
This issue needs to be watched like a hawk.
1
This is just a tip of the iceberg. Lefty (mainly white) progressives are more ambivalent about criminal justice reform than many admit. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a fixture on the left wing of the court, was the godfather and a driving force behind the algorithmic Federal Sentencing Guidelines, that obliterated inner city communities for over 20 years and filled federal prisons with tens of thousands of young (mostly) men for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine. All based on a supposedly scientific, unbiased and high minded sentencing model. Similarly, the state embracing the death penalty more enthusiastically than any other is the one with the largest death row in the country and where voters recently passed a ballot initiative colloquially referred to as the more effective death penalty act, drastically limiting the appellate rights of death row prisoners. That state, so in love with the death penalty, is not Texas, it's California. The same state that prides itself as the lefty heartland of the progressive Resistance. This ideological dissonance among white progressives over crime and prisoners is a taboo topic, too sensitive for discussion in the mainstream news media. But it is long overdue for open reexamination and debate.
Keep in mind that the US prison population TRIPLED under President Reagan.
(More bribes for the GOP from private for-profit prisons needing more inmates?)
5
"The Algorithm," as it is widely referred to, operates in a manner which uses a much more optimized version of selection, and confirmation bias, than its programmers could ever be capable of independently.
The mathematics may differ ever-so-slightly based on whose intellectual property it is, but 'adversarial' is the name of this game, and the matter of human bias in AI does not seem like it can be extricated that easily.
Nevertheless, there is a completely valid argument to be made that life itself is a "prison." The notion of criminalizing human 'vice' is patent oppression, as should be very plain by which of these vices have been legalized, or widely tolerated, since the days of prohibition past.
1
I don't understand with regard to prisoners why we don't draw on other countries. What works abroad. How should prison change etc. Ditto with bail etc. What is western Europe doing ... this is never argued from the point of view of significant knowledge. Without hard data it is hard to have an opinion based on fact and data not unsubstantiated hypotheses
2
I know of innocent people who have been seriously injured and killed by dangerous criminals who have been released. I don't care a whit if the person released was in for peddling drugs to willing customers. I cringe at the thought of rabid, dangerous sociopaths being released to resume their prowling. Let's be frank, it does happen, and it is happening every day. I have seen too much of it to believe otherwise. To me the safety of one decent human is worth more than the lives of 100 supposedly rehabilitated sociopaths. The lives and safety of decent people are not poker chips with which we can afford to gamble.
4
thank you for your comments. they help me better understand our divided nation. when we see those that we label with whatever derogatory terms we choose as not worth what we label as us that is bills are divided Society. I suggest we better work to understand the other and help them and ourselves be able to get along with one another.
4
No one is proposing that dangerous sociopaths be released. There is a spectrum of criminal behavior, and drug use is not typically a violent offense. Many good people become incarcerated for small failures.
I suspect you have an outsize fear of the caravan, too.
@Dan Cook: Have you ever known teen aged part time workers in a fast food restaurant, who were brutally murdered by known sociopaths recently released from prison. I have.
Richard Pryor, who was a person of color and a noted social commentator and comedian in the 1970s talked a lot about the problems of mass incarceration even back then. His brave and insightful commentary is equally applicable today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7DhFhzkjcA
1
If all who are incarcerated are let free, even with an ankle bracelet, crime is the result. Case in point - Queens Plaza, formerly a middle-class shopping center, became a drop-off point for local jails. The drop-offs were people who had served their sentences, were granted parole, and set free. Queens Plaza became a dangerous, violent place, a no-man's land of failed stores.
There needs to be a system to ease people back into society, educate, and find them jobs. Criminal justice should be run by the government, not private companies out for a profit. When tax cuts are passed and money is withdrawn from social programs such as prison reform, society unravels and we all suffer.
Americans should be educated about the results of their actions.
8
I’m against the death penalty, but if I was for it, the only thing I would recommend executed is hopelessness. Build a stronger middle class, and create a more equitable society. Build schools and libraries, not prisons.
9
How do you know if an algorithm has been manipulated? Who checks?
In Stansilaus County, the Public Defender for years worked in a conspiracy with CHP officers and the DA's office to rid the county of undesirables. That Public Defender (Frank Carson) is now on trial for a six-person conspiracy for first degree murder! Can you imagine what they would do if they could manipulate the default incarceration data?
4
The racism, sharply identified in this writing, is the proximate consequence of the financial profit from this criminal-industrial complex. As with every other enterprise formerly the province of the public sector, the thirst for profit grows, unabated by intelligence and common sense; witness education, health and medical care, water systems, and now criminal justice. Does anyone doubt that if oxygen were subject to control by "market" forces, we would pay the going rate? Absent the profiteering incentive for monitoring devices, their cost to the charged individual would be less than one-tenth of GEO Group's cost. Worse, how much variance exists between the pay of executives of GEO and the workers who do the actual work? How friendly would GEO's management be to a proposal for employee collective bargaining?
When Mick Jagger sang, "Every cop is a criminal...", who knew he meant investor, not cop.
5
There is only one thing wrong with the thesis that the proportion of people counted as belonging to racial minorities being overrepresented in the criminal justice system is proof of, “new Jim Crow” or “resegregation”. Very few people who have responsibility over public institutions have any way of benefitting from such a strategy. They consist of people from racial minorities as well as from the majority. It is attention getting but it’s just wrong. It just confuses any reasoned efforts to resolve this unjust situation. Even though some people in the white majority retain racist views, the rest don’t. It may not fit your views but all people want fairness and most white people don’t want to live in a world that is based upon racial stereotyping. The great majority of the citizens, including white people, oppose it. That may frustrate a simplistic explanation but it’s true.
If you want this situation to persist, just keep up the stereotyping.
3
Florida did not restore the vote to 1.4 million people, we passed an amendment that says they should have that right. unfortunately the new Republican governor and legislature oppose it and will try to keep ex-felons from registering through fear of prosecution.
3
If our goal is not a better system of mass criminalization, but instead the creation of safe, caring, thriving communities...
Your mention of e-carceration and getting stuck in machine driven systems evokes the Compustat system which was used as an excuse for the brutal racial profiling called stop and frisk that terrorized New York under the Bloomberg administration and finally had to be stopped by the courts. Along with Compustat data as an excuse for inhumanity, the Compustat system had to be constantly fed new data to make its numbers come out right to show that New York was fighting crime, even if that data had to be slanted or outright invented to fit machine parameters. Only real humans can stop this tyranny by machine. And that extends as well to the tryanny of voting machines set to not record or flip our votes.
4
Why should people with ankle monitors need to pay for them? They didn't ask to be monitored. This is clearly a decision of the sate/municipality, and needs to be paid from public coffers.
Paying monthly fees for monitoring is worse than paying bail. Do the "victims" of monitoring have a choice? If it's the state's choice, the state must pay for monitoring.
Again, as usual, it's always a "debtor's prison" system.
6
@ultimateliberal
It's a valid question. I would point out, however, that as an alternative to prison, being asked to pay may not be as unfair as you think. Despite Ms. Alexander's claims, they are still being awarded tremendous freedom compared to what they would experience in prison. Again, ask any inmate what they would prefer. Few would choose prison.
That said, I do know of one situation where an inmate in for a few months was planning to try to refuse parole because he didn't want to pay for the halfway house.
2
The purpose of bail or monitored release is to ensure that someone suspected of a crime appears for trial. New Jersey seems to be the first state that implemented its program to largely eliminate cash bail. I've tried without success to find New Jersey's failure to appear rate after it implemented the program. Perhaps Ms. Alexander or others at the Times can find those data and share them. Is that state's new FTA rate greater, the same, or less than the prior rate? Merely changing systems without continually analyzing their performance is meaningless.
9
The problem with the current bail system is that almost all of the people operating it, including the judges, have no understanding of the purpose of bail.
The legal purpose of bail is to insure that the defendant will show up for his / her court appearances. It was never intended to insure that the defendant does not commit a crime while out on bail. The above notwithstanding, today bail is operated as a preventive detention system to insure that the defendant does not commit another crime.
For a poor person, $100 cash bail may be more money than s/he has ever had at one time. Such a person, even if a professional criminal, is unlikely to jump bail.
On the other hand, how much bail could one set for Mike Bloomberg or Donald Trump to insure that they would return to court? Even bail of $100 million dollars would not insure their return to court if they chose not to. And collecting the passports would have little effect for someone who can leave the country by hopping on his own airplane, without going through customs or passport control. In the case of Mr. Bloomberg, he would not even need a pilot since he is a licensed pilot.
Thus, it is clear that the bail system is unreasonable, and unjust. Eliminating it as New Jersey has done, and New York City is beginning to do, is the only proper solution. Certainly algorithms to predict future criminal activity have no lawful place in setting bail.
5
I agree with this author. In addition, as we all know, once money is involved, it creates mission creep. Furthermore, these types of programs encourage less and less transparency. On the surface, they sound more humane but, in fact, they are more dehumanizing.
4
I am an affluent white man, and I am absolutely exhausted by the scope, depth, and deviousness of the machinery that corporations and self-serving politicians have established to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.
I truly can't imagine how awful and unjust this must be for the actually afflicted.
For a while, it felt like we were making some progress at disassembling this machinery. Now, it feels like every bolt is being tightened, every gear greased, and malevolent new components added.
12
Why assault NFC? I sensed no whiff of condescension in his comment, which was not an explanation of any sort.
4
I wonder, how many minutes, or possibly even seconds, would it take for me to get banned if I said the same thing to you–but without the “white” part? You know, something like this:
“Thanks for ____splaining that.”
Fill in the blank. See what I’m saying?
But no matter. The only two words one can put in that blank now and expect little to no repercussions, especially on a liberal site/publication like this, are “white” and “man”. Everything else is strictly off limits, and using another race or the other sex is simply self destructive.
1
Michelle Alexander offers a critique without offering much by way of an alternative. If we reject both incarceration and "e-carceration" then what does she propose as a pre-trial monitoring system? Or as a way to monitor those actually convicted but not incarcerated? If she and I both want to see fewer felons incarcerated for long stretches (and we do), apparently we disagree about the desirability of keeping a close eye on those same felons for at least a while after conviction. Many of her critiques (high monthly fee, software glitch) are really just requests for technical and policy fixes, not substantive flaws with the underlying idea that electronic surveillance is greatly preferable to actual incarceration.
5
Corporations have found ways to monetize the poor and get the middle class to pay for these schemes through taxes. This is why we need strong investigative reporting--to help busy working class people see how they're being played.
11
I'm with Barack Obama, who said "I will always take 'better', better is always a no-brainer."
What the author is skeptical of is, even by her own admission, better. That makes it the right next step.
Absolutely no human system is (or can be) perfect or without its drawbacks, so all we can ever hope for is 'better'. If we keep moving, keep making incremental but meaningful and positive change, eventually the upsides will vastly outweigh the downsides, at which point we're fine tuning something that's remarkable.
Jim Crow was an abomination, but it was also the best and only possible next step for that specific time in history. We had to go through the pain and suffering to grow beyond it, to learn how to evolve not as individuals but *as a culture*.
We still have a long ways to go, but things are slowly, painfully getting better for our country. We now have a more representative government than at any time in our history, with more women, gays, transgenders, and Muslims in higher positions than ever. That is at once overdue, welcome, and remarkable.
I know it's an unpopular view, but I look at our world and I feel hope, I have faith. We're getting there, we just have to stay focused and keep moving forward, always choosing 'better'.
9
More and more money going to political parties from the corporations that run the prison systems, whose profits come from money given to them by those politicians from the public purse. What could possibly go wrong?
The parallels with the Military-Industrial complex are clear.
Surely if the state is going to make the laws, appoint the judges and run the courts, it should also run the punitive arm as well.
Some politician will surely eventually come up with the idea of privatising the courts, and maybe even "privatised" judges with professional jurors, to make the system "more efficient".
1
As an alternative to bail, how about telling people that are charged with a crime and are freed pending trial, that if they don't show up for trial, they will be found guilty as charged and sentenced to jail for whatever time the judge deems appropriate? That would relieve the poor of the burden of bail and imprisonment pending trial while encouraging them to show up for trial. Or do we simply want them to be able to avoid trial and perhaps punishment with impunity?
6
Clearly every inmate would prefer to serve out the remaining sentence under house arrest rather than in jail. And, if computers can predict which offenders are least likely to be a threat, why not release them, and save tons of money? I don't see a problem with this. Obviously there needs to be some oversight -- but, even if there are problems and discrimination initally before the algorithms are tweaked, it can't possibly be any worse than the criminal justice system as it is right now.
We should ensure that the state covers the $300 for the ankle monitor, since it is saving lots more money not keeping this person in a jail.
4
@augias84 There might be a problem for their neighbors who might not want to be bludgeoned to death by the poor innocent inmate you care about so much.
1
Since she refers to imprisonment as "caging," I wonder if this writer believes that any criminal should have to be punished at all. Any critique of how we punish and deter crime should be accompanied, at a minimum, by an alternative proposal for dealing with crime and criminals. The writer is against cash bail. Without an alternative that helps ensure that the accused will show up for trial, her criticism of the system is meaningless. No bail, no ankled monitoring device? Tell us what you would use instead.
13
I think this is a thoughtful piece, which is to be expected from Michelle. However, I think the terms e-carceration and e-gentrification are awkward and distracting. They do not deepen understanding on these issues. Just use the terms incarceration predictive analytics and long term surveillance of the formerly incarcerated. These tools are in use across a wide spectrum of American public spheres. If we use more descriptive terms we’ll have a better chance of building a more just social society in he aggregate and not just in certain pockets of civic social society.
2
Does Geo Group, and the other profiteering prison corporations, get a guaranteed number of ankle monitor leases per day, week, or month?
Do those contracts include guaranteed taxpayer dollars into their CEO's pockets on a regular pay schedule?
That's how it works with the immigration prisons.
Guaranteed taxpayer dollars into bulging CEO pockets.
It seems the entire system of criminal justice has become nothing more than a massive wealth transfer of taxpayer $$$ to private corporations.
If rehabilitation and social services support for re-entry to society became the norm, a way would be found to continue the corrupt wealth transfer from government to private corporations.
Capitalism's finest hour. Deplorable!
6
The private, for-profit, corporate prison system in this country is another stain on the US and further proof to the civilized world that the United States has severely lost its way and has reduced our moral authority. The profit-first motive is killing our country.
9
The algorithms probably indicate that if you're caught sticking up a convenience store, and they let you out with no bail and you go and rob a gas station, then you're probably not a good risk. What a surprise!
5
@Jonathan
My thought as well.
1
'Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”'
This seems more a prophecy than a mere warning, and a grim one given the current state of affairs. For me, there's something eerie in the atmosphere of 2018 America; like being trapped in a horror movie scripted long ago and proceeding, inevitably, toward a tragic climax.
Martin Luther King's writings and speeches should be required reading in this nation's public schools. His invaluable leadership needn't have been snuffed out by a bullet when his words remain. This, from the same speech cited above, has, if anything, gained in power in light of our present circumstances:
"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."
How far we've regressed. Now the churches are silent, and politicians complicit.
5
GPS ankle bracelet for $300 month? Don't smartphones already do the same job and a lot more much cheaper?
7
Anytime you have profit driven corporations in charge of anything in our country - their profit motive will be more important than finding good and fair solutions. How will they make the most profits? By making sure as many people as possible will be paying them for the use of their GPS devices. Poor people, who don't have money to pay for lawyers to fight for them, will not succeed in convincing judges of alternatives to the GPS devices. The high powered attorneys for the wealthy, of course, will argue the importance of being able to get to their children's schools, and activities; their places of work, which will include their networking activities; and expensive medical appointments with their specialists.
4
So what is the author's alternative to cash bail? It is easy to be critical of any solution by offering some kind of utopian vision as an alternative "quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health". Do you really want to let people continue to be victims of cash bail while you realize that goal?
There is plenty of research to show that whether your case is heard before or after a judge has had lunch makes a difference. At least computer algorithm doesn't get hungry. Rather than fighting the algorithm perhaps concerned groups should be developing better algorithms.
4
@sanjay:
1. I don't think you read Ms. Alexander's column carefully enough.
2. The presumption that a critic of a policy or practice must present a better solution, to justify the criticism, arises from fatally-flawed logic.
5
We need a thorough evaluation of what other countries do. We also need to experment with a variety of methods to see results. This area is very complicated and I have yet to see a thorough fact based analysis.
1
I am so grateful that you are here!
1
Perhaps a microchip embedded just under the skin would be less stigmatizing. Perhaps we should all have one embedded at birth, just like puppies, and let the algorithms put us all exactly where we belong. Mao and Stalin, think of what technology could have done for you.
2
Eventually e-carceration will establish e-ghettos. Some of the law and order posters have no idea what life as a "bond" prisoner must have been for those working the sugar fields in Texas.
3
@george Don't want the time, don't do the crime. Very simple. What is life like for VICTIMS of violent crime, btw? Or for the families who lost a loved one, or saw them permanently disabled by a violent predator?
1
I don’t believe this for a moment.
The entire world isn’t against you......
4
What happens if the e-shackled prisoner is found innocent? Does he still have to pay the $300 per month e-shackle lease if he/she is found innocent?
Great choice - hang out in prison or be with your kids while taking $300 per month of food out of their mouths. What if you don’t pay - do you get to go to debtors prison?
Too bad we do not have pre-election risk assessment of candidates running for any office in government. Imagine the results such predictive algorithms would conclude for trump!
We do not need to look at the algorithm. We just need to run it with different factors and it will reveal itself as biased or not.
6
Living in a state with a lot of violence even in rural areas, I am not sure that mass bailouts of people awaiting trial are a good idea in every case. I agree that poverty ought not to be criminalized by requiring cash bail in relatively minor cases that do not involve violence. However, when manslaughter, murder and assault are on the table, some sort of surety bond should be required. This could be family land, rather than cash.
We need some way to assure that people accused of certain crimes will appear in court for their trials.
41
@Barbara The majority of violence we all encounter is primarily due to discrimination against the poor and people of color. Similar algorithms and studies decide not what services/job creation is needed, but how many people corporations can incarcerate.
@Barbara
Family land? Oh, you mean when white people are charged?
4
@Barbara
Exactly...the author may have no violence victims in her family because she seems jurassically blind to the distinction you made.
We have to ask ourselves why there are so much more people in prison is our country than in any other in the world. And when they get out, they can’t get a job or vote! Which means that they go around the cycle again! How is this our solution to crime?
I believe, and have always believed in rehabilitation- whether it’s drugs, property crime or sex crimes. If you listen to ex prisoners, they will tell you how hard it is to stay on the straight and narrow when they can’t get a job, and they don’t know how to start a clean life.
The government can create jobs for social workers, and it’ll probably still be exponentially cheaper than locking them up.
3
Our skin *color* is our sin, even in the digital age (algorithms)....all by design.
2
I wonder if algorithms have deeper meaning than the one specifically intended. I mean if a human develops an algorithm does the algorithm reflect the flaws of its creator? Would an algorithm developed by a closeted racist white man be only inherently racist like the white man or would its racism be hidden, closeted, following the lead of its creator? I would be willing to bet that an algorithm written by what is probably a privileged white guy is going to suck if you're not privileged and or white.
3
If she were honest, Alexander would admit that, (like all NYT columnists) what she really wants is a system that brings NO negative consequences whatsoever for committing crimes and harming or killing others, no matter how violent and vicious the attack might be. Especially exempt from consequences in her utopia would be predators of color. Why doesn't she just admit it?
9
@me
She's paid based on her ability to see things through a certain prism, and that is how she'll view them. Period.
1
Incorrect.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." --Kris Kristoffersen (no, not Janis; she merely sang it).
@tom:
No, not "merely." Unforgettably.
Maybe this sounds crazy, but I've got an idea for solving the problem of too many black men in jail, so let me just throw it out there. Here it goes:
Black men should try committing fewer crimes.
Okay, okay, I know, it's too radical, it would never work in a million years. But still ... You gotta admit it would be a win-win solution.
8
Is there ever a so-called improvement in the Legislative process to make changes deemed to be good for any part of the Citizenry that does not have unintended consequences?
When you have private companies running prisons and then designing and selling the monitoring systems that will be used to track people who would otherwise have been incarcerated what kind of outcomes are expected?
I, for one, do not believe prisons should be privatized. It is the State and Federal Governments responsibilities to oversee prisons. There should be no profit inducement in law enforcement.
If the excuse was that there is not enough space in our public prisons for those who are incarcerated, then non-violent offenders should be released, thereby making room for those who truly are dangerous.
This appears to be another example of Capitalism gone awry.
The money paid to ptivare prison corporations would be better spent in communities to educate and guide kids. To expose these kids to the possibilities of good jobs if they are willing to learn a trade or go to college. More money should be put into the arts, music, writing, dance, theatre and painting to expose kids to the greater world. And while we are at it, teach kids about community service, civics and how important it is to vote.
I believe if we all feel that we are an important part of a community, of our family, we would have less incarceration.
3
The profit objective is not the problem. The problem is that organizations (prisons, etc) are not evaluated based on outcomes. The outcome objectives should be simple: rates of degree or skill attainment; rates of
recidivism and employment. Business will always fill in where there are needs in the economy. As it should. But government has to regulate, formulate objectives and award contracts based on what organizations can do for Americans.
3
@Chandra
I would like to see prisons rated like hospitals. Hospitals receive a rating based on not only re-admittances but also the factors that negatively impact patients, e.x., infections.
Why not base the ratings of (and payments to) for-profit prisons on their recidivism rates? Unquestioning increased volume should not be rewarded. What are they doing while the prisoners are in there? Very expensive housing.
1
The new Congress needs to investigate "four large corporations — including the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies", and Geo Group in particular. As companies exploit the 'Prisons for Profit' business model we have not only their collecting millions in tax dollars for doing what governments have done themselves, but many loopholes they exploit.
___
For example: my family member works as a guard in a Geo-run prison in PA guarding prisoners for PA who were convicted by PA. The prison was built by and is owned by PA. The management fee and his salary are paid through Geo using PA tax dollars. Yet, for all that benefit to PA, he does not qualify for Federal Student Loan Forgiveness for a BS in Criminal Justice from Penn State (which he would get at most PA prisons) because he is employed by Geo, not PA. That costs him $4000/yr which does not save PA a penny. Same job risks, prisoners from PA courts, yet different treatment because Geo manages for PA???
___
There are documented instances of judges and other corrections officials owning stock in the companies that manage prisoners. These are conflicts of interest and should be illegal.
6
If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. What this lady wants is for there to be NO negative consequences at all to those who harm others. Why is it that liberals never admit that criminals harm VICTIMS? I would love to see ONE column in NYT about criminals whose lives have been ruined by violent criminals.
5
A good take on the incarceration industrial complex: but certainly it should be mentioned that Bill Clinton sold his soul to the devil when he created the blue print for the current prison system, three-strikes-you're-out, regressive social welfare and militarization of local policing practices. . .all of which adversely impact the poor and minority communities today. It is profoundly ironic that our current president co-opted Clinton's '96 election platform to beat his wife and win the highest executive office in the land.
3
It is impossible to administer justice using a for-profit system. That the profit motive introduces conflicts of interest that are contrary to the purpose of criminal justice is glaringly obvious.
Moreover, private prison corporations bend our elected officials to their wills with their campaign donations, see e.g. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=G7000&cycle=All&recipdetail=H&mem=Y
Criminal justice must be taken back into the public realm in order to come anywhere near the meaning of justice.
5
Sounds like an episode of "Black Mirror" or a chapter out of "21 Lessons For The 21st Century".
We the people have been deemed commodities for decades now which includes the poor working whites and poorer working whites and middle class who have been moved down a notch by these policies.
I surely don't dismiss that people of color do bear the brunt of these policies and the above whites have been brainwashed to hate others.
I worked on environmental concerns inspired by the work of Rachel Carson and my Oregon Governor Tom McCall who was a great republican. Many things were accomplished by Rachel in the 50's and beyond. We made great strides in the 60's and 70's until Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House and most of the accomplishments have been dismantled like the gains in the 60's for civil rights.
Things never stay the same but our direction is backwards.
2
I would like her to do an article about the public (and private) education system in our country with the same breadth and subtlety of analysis. I believe there are parallels with the same kind of dynamics she writes about that determine reification or worsening of existing social injustice. It would be interesting to see the parallels and the differences. Thank you.
1
Agree with conclusion except you did not suggest how to deal with people found guilty.
But maybe ankle bracelets administered by state (not corps)?
2
Forcing someone to pay for their own punishment seems like the definition of cruel and unusual punishment. It is certainly perverse.
When the state feels GPS monitoring is justified then they should pay for it. Surely it's cheaper than keeping the person in jail. Isn't it still a win-win solution if the state pays?
4
Hanging is no longer acceptable; we now have lynching by incarceration.
2
@MizTree Lynching was the practice of punishing people who didn't break the law. by a mob. Imprisonment is the practice of punishing people who have been convicted of a crime, by a jury of their peers. How can you say that they are similar? You insult the memory of people who were truly lynched.
1
Jeff Sessions must feel so happy about such insidious programs, even as he leaves the sleazy enclave of the Cabinet of that paragon of virtue defiling and despoiling the White House.
1
@teach
I'm sure Trump and his son-in-law Kushner must feel pretty proud of their push for prison reform initiatives. I know I do. You too?
I can't begin to 'calculate' how angry a man I'd be if I were "black."
I'm disgusted enough as it is -- and I'll never understand how it is that, despite 'carving' a "negro" (and female) exception to their identification of the "all" in their notion of those "created equal" (an exception made 'just yesterday' [!!!], in evolutionary terms)," our "founding fathers" are regularly esteemed as 'enlightened' men of great character and intellect.
@Thomas Murray Other people have a right to their opinions.
1
I am pretty sure that if those required to wear an ankle bracelet were surveyed, the vast majority would greatly prefer the ankle bracelet to being in jail.
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@Ro Ma
Imagine complaining about being out of prison? Only someone who doesn't really understand would find fault with ankle bracelets. There's probably not one inmate who would have a problem with that.
2
@Ro Ma
And Ms. Alexander agrees with you when she writes that if you asked them, “they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take the electronic monitor. I would too.”
The point is that our “justice system” is racist.
As long as the percentage of incarcerated minorities is greater than the percentage of minorities in America, the system is unjust. Consider this: non-Hispanic Whites make up 62% of the overall US population but only 35% of the US prison population. Non-Hispanic Blacks, on the other hand, make up only 13% of the overall US population but 38% of the US prison population.
As long as that is the case, whether inmates are placed behind bars or are put on an electronic leash, it is still unjust.
9
@Ro Ma
The author already conceded that and said she herself would make that choice if she had to choose. There's more to her argument.
10
Computer algorithms making these decisions? Remember bad in, bad out? Bad data input or faulty programming will result in the wrong computer decisions being made regarding a living, breathing human. Please, computers are not a panacea to be applied universally to every aspect of life. Where will it stop?
1
This is a very interesting article.Yeah America is once again racially divided and unfortunately,Sending people to Prison is a serious business in USA.
( if our goal is not a better system of mass criminalization, but instead the creation of safe, caring, thriving communities, then we ought to be heavily investing in quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged communities rather than pouring billions into their high-tech management and control.)
The last paragraph is the only reason why Europe is far Ahead the United State of America.
1
Right on Sister! Go on with your bad self.
When I grow up I want to be more like you. And Bryan Stephens. And Khalil Gibran Muhammad. And Ava DuVernay.
But the " Newest Jim Crow" is merely an evolutionary natural fit version of the "Oldest Jim Crow". Indeed, instead of the separate and unequal Jim Crow analytical model, this is the " Newest Enslavement". Prison is the carefully carved colored aka black exception to the 13th Amendments abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude.
See "13th" Ava Duvernay; "Just Mercy" Bryan Stephens; " The Condemnation of Blackness" K. G. Muhammad.
29
See Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”
1
Even if we listen to the Michelle's advice and avoid this problem, we're still stuck with the original problem. We have laws, we have people that break them, we have a system of deterrent and punishment, and a cadre of people who enforce the laws and administer the punishment. No matter what we do, we will have these things going forward.
The system is far from perfect. I could list the problems, but I couldn't do that topic justice with a mere 1500 letters, and anyway that isn't the point. It's been done elsewhere, and I agree with almost all of it.
I believe that as long as private money infects the system, the system will be flawed. The more people who are in "the system", the more money flows to the people operating it. That is a conflict of interest that will continue to drive these problems.
This article does a fine job of describing a possibly symptom, but it offers nothing to cure the disease. As long as there is money to be made from criminality, the laws, the courts, and the punishment systems will be rigged to keep the money flowing.
1
@mlbex - Making money off of convicting the poor and the non-white has been a primary strategy of the wealthy in America since the end of the Civil War. It has changed its face from time to time, however, making money via convicting mostly poor, non-white citizens has not diminished one iota since the end of reconstruction.
Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery By Another Name" lays bare how the practice was born in the former slave states and supported whole heartily by Wall Street. As @mlbex correctly states, as long as Wall Street and entrenched politicians see a way to make a nickel off of charging and/or convicting the financially oppressed, the for profit prison cabal will flourish.
Maybe the only practical solution is what Senator Bullworth proposed, "…
1
I have a proposal which may seem radical on first glance, but is wholly based on what the justice system preaches.
First, under the innocent until proven guilty precept, eliminate all bail. Any person under indictment would surrender all passports, visa, or other travel documents and be released on their own recognizance.
Second, actions have consequences, so any person who misses a single court appearance is then subject to pre-trial detention for this and all future indictments. They have proven that they cannot be trusted to appear, so they will be forced to do so.
2
As long as criminal justice operates as a way to make money (either for government or private entities) we will not get real justice. But cutting down the role of making money in criminal justice is an attack on free enterprise, low taxes, and the American Way of Life.
Criminal justice should be socialistic and run with transparency; it should not be a jobs program or provide opportunities for entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, this would make it unamerican.
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@sdavidc9
It doesn't seem to me an attack on low taxes. If these corporations are being paid under government contracts, we're funding their profits, are we not?
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@MisterE
The standard conservative answer is that private is more efficient than public, therefore costs less, therefore enables lower taxes.
The real answer is that taxes are acceptable when they fund corporate profits, but are tyranny when they dont.
6
There are European countries that train and develop their prisoners such that they are able to start again when released and very few return.
The whole incareration system has become nothing but a way to make a buck off of people. Poverty causes crime. It always has and it always will.
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@JMM The poor don't deserve to be automatically labeled criminals simply because they're poor. Hillary Clinton didn't sell influence because she was poor. She was corrupt because she's a criminal.
The European countries you so admire tend to be less diverse, and, specifically, less black, than the United States. You might think that the problems of African Americans are our fault due to America's history of slavery. You're wrongly knocking your own country.
Europeans were the ones who began slavery in North America. The problems of black America that are blamed on slavery are problems caused in part by European traders, European textile mills, and European consumers.
5
@JMM "Poverty causes crime." Really? Facts please? We were poor, yet only one of my many friends committed a crime--he had a horrible family life, which I believe you'll find is the basis for budding criminals; NOT poverty.
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@JMM Yes. You can see an example of this in Michael Moore's Where Shall We Invade Next?
An excellent report on serious dangers that exist in privatizing prisons and other criminal justice functions that are the actual province of government, which means that we the people are actually responsible. The prison for profit system has created the use of prison beds to create revenue for corporations (I first became aware of this in the early 1990’s). The beds have disproportionately been filled with black, brown and red bodies. Gee, how surprising. And the author’s revelation of e-carceration and the use of algorithms to make judicial decisions regarding bail and jail v. Ankle monitors (which the person must pay for????) is beyond chilling. Dystopian sci-fi fantasies become more real each day. We must stay awake. Thank you for writing this excellent commentary.
I'm in favor of criminal justice reform. It would have been nice to hear of another alternative to "e-carceration." But freedom is not free, it is born of struggle and kept a live through responsibility. "Freedom — even when it’s granted, it turns out — isn’t really free." No and yes. No: If you look at history, freedom has rarely been "granted" without struggle. The history of our nation started with the struggle to be free, and is marked by the justified continuing struggles for equal freedom for women and minorities. Yes: Since freedom is born of struggle it is not free (cheap) but rather achieved at great cost, which gives it true value. But with freedom comes great personal and social responsibility for it to be meaningful and endure. If we wait for freedom to be "granted" and than require no personal responsibility for it to be maintained, it will not be seen as something of value and discarded simply out of ignorance. This is a disservice to society and disrespectful of the generations of people who struggled before us. But the tragedy is, if you do not take personal responsibility you learn to see yourself of little value and than don't value yourself. And a sense of genuine self worth is our dearest possession.
17
The alternative?
3
Monitoring could be used that doesn’t cost the person $300/month and allows freedom of movement. Like under the bail system, no doubt people deemed dangerous would be held in jail anyway, so why keep those judged worthy of release from holding a job, etc.? Innocent till proven guilty.
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@Martha Yager
They are still being "punished" for crimes. Freedom of movement is part of it.
"...appear colorblind on the surface but they are based on factors that are not only highly correlated with race and class..."
These new automated bail systems actually ARE colorblind. They simply calculate who is more likely to commit a future crime given the subject's history. Period. There could be no more objective measure. Alexander just doesn't like the results.
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@c smith. You missed the part that those algorithms are correlated with other factors such as race or economic class. So, no, these alglorithms are somehow not lily-white (irony intended) and devoid of bias.
1
What I can't comprehend is how 64 years after Brown there can be so much de facto segregation in the United States. It is so obvious at the elementary school and high school levels but no one seems to be challenging it anymore. Why is that?
1
@Billy Glad
Ask wealthy liberals, who live in the most segregated communities. What you often find with liberalism is that wealthy people removed from crime have one view, while those who live with it have another.
1
A few observations. The only person who is immortal is Jim Crow. A computer algorithm is a fancy name for a sequence of instructions written by humans telling a computer how to process data. When I earned my BS in computer science from Ohio State in 1972 we regularly used the term GIGO-garbage in, garbage out. That is still true today. Finally, cash bail works as a system as long as the amount of the bail is tied to the amount of the defendant's income or net worth. Felony X could require cash bail of 10% of income. If the defendant makes $20,000 per year then his baill is set at $2,000. If the defendant makes $1 million per year, then his bail is set at $100,000. Some adjustment could be taken into account by the hardship caused by percentage bail in individual cases. I think this form of bail may have first been suggested by Alexis de Tocqueville, who said that the "laws of Paris treat everyone equally; they prohibit the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under the city's bridges."
1
As I see it, the racism is a factor not in justice reform but exists in the discretionary power of police to either arrest someone or let them go free. To be clear, I am not saying all cops are racists but it is undeniable that most of the people having contact with the justice system are not white. From arrest to conviction, white people usually get better treatment than non-whites. How does one explain that?
I take exception to the author’s assertion that the factors which determine eligibility for Pretrial release have any correlation with race. In New Jersey, some of the criteria include a history of failure to appear in court and the age of the defendant. Where is the correlation to race.
New Jersey justice reform has a presumption of release; not incarceration but the state moves to detain many defendants who are recommended for release; even without supervision. These decisions are made by lawyers, not algorithms. I don’t mean to imply that the New Jersey prosecutors are racists ( I can’t speak to other jurisdictions); they have a responsibility to handle whatever cases are referred to their office and are bound by policy and accountability to the public.
The fact is that even a week in jail can cause loss of employment and send minor dependents into foster care. Aside from that, if a defendant is released, prosecutors can no longer use pretrial detention as a means to coerce a defendant to plead to an offense in an otherwise triable case.
2
I understand from accounts in other media that there have already been crimes committed by those who have benefited from recent mass bailouts, and that many have failed to show up for their court hearings.
Mass bailouts pose a certain degree of risk to the public, so it would be appropriate for the NYT to investigate this problem and report on the cases in detail. NYT readers and other members of the public deserve to know when ultra-liberal public policies may pose a danger to society.
4
If "people of color" put as much energy into raising families that containing two parents to rear good young men and commit fewer crimes, these issues would not be prominent. Of course prisons are bad, but Ms. Alexander seems insistent on blaming the victims -- the society that has to manage the detritus of decimated black communities.
Keep in mind that in 1960, before civil rights, only 20% of black children lacked two parents. Today it is over 70%. Ms. Alexander ought to look inward instead of blaming others.
7
Florida restored the vote to over 1.4 million people with felony convictions
Sorry Ms. Alexander, but Florida citizens only voted that they wanted to restore these voting rights. It still has to get through the Legislature and be signed by The new Governor, which I am guessing will not happen. Voters supported legal medical marijuana and now for almost 4 years we have had all kinds of legal wrangling to prevent that actually occurring. We are still a long way from actually restoring voting rights to these people.
3
I know the solution to this problem. Don’t commit a crime. Then it all becomes irrelevant. I know... they can’t help themselves. It’s unfair. It’s not their fault, it’s my fault for being a decent human being... they just can’t stand it. Punishment doesn’t work. Deterrence is a pipe dream. We need job training, education, and counseling for these poor criminals. Sure... do all that, but there is a point at which our interests diverge. When a person hurts another... when they steal. There must be consequences. What to do?
11
You write brilliantly and make a number of great points. We should all agree that building safe communities that produce happy healthy good citizens is really job one. Still, in the background as I read this I hear the ‘Colombo’ theme song which we should also consider: ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time’.
4
@A Thorson
Agreed! But it was Baretta :-)
Algorithms can be changed. Just as one can imagine a dystopia of former felons electronically isolated and segregated, it is equally easy to imagine an America that doesn't imprison non-violent offenders for any purpose whatsoever; where a device (no larger than a wristwatch) monitors where a person (who might have otherwise been in prison) goes, and using interactivity connectivity carefully monitors what he's supposed to be doing while there. It might track health information to make sure he isn't using drugs or alcohol. Such a device could use facial recognition software to monitor who he's spending time with. Imagine punishments that make sure a criminal attends and pays attention in class, or avoids neighborhoods where known associates frequent, or avoids establishments with liquor licenses (easily done with a GPS map and access to local records). Imagine the implication for restraining orders.
The real question we should be asking is when will Apple create an i-anklet? I only say that semi-facetiously. How much cheaper would it be to slap one of these on than to lock people up in little tiny boxes. How much better would it be for their families? Wouldn't we rather have a technological behemoth with and an eye towards innovation design the prison of the future, rather than some crusty prison industry tech?
The i-anklet opens the door to all kinds of interesting forms of criminal justice. The limit at this point is more about imagination than technology.
3
Race aside, it's a fascinating read on the digital prison infrastructure that's under construction. We all know our cell phone's every move is tracked and visible in real time. From the other side, prisons and cops are linking together to digitally track and automatically dispatch and recapture those whose monitors return the wrong coordinates.
3
Long term: provide readily available and affordable family planning and birth control. Family planning allows Americans to decide for themselves if and when to have a child. Children have become a serious economic burden for poorer folks because of the lack of good, affordable child care so parents can work. And birth control is a lot cheaper than child care. Think about it. In only 5 years we could have only birth-planned children entering kindergarten. Big change.
3
So many of these type of Ideas or unrealistic. The concept of introducing birth-control goes back to the 1960s, and you can see how successful it was. In the meantime, since certain types of punishment are cruel And thereby unconstitutional text the question why violent and nonviolent prisoners are sent to the same prisons.
@memosyne
What in the world is "affordable family planning"? Medicaid covers birth control. Condoms are available for free in many cases. It's about personal responsibility.
1
@memosyne
So "affordable family planning and birth control." will stop 70+% of black unwed women from having their children? Pleeeze!
"Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell. Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery."
POC should not be burdened with wearing an ankle bracelet merely because they committed a crime. It's racist that society doesn't trust them to appear voluntarily to be sentenced to prison.
The only solution is to go to a voluntary honor system. Many of the accused will probably show up.
4
@Lakisha: Your comment is absolutely hilarious. I only hope that you intended it to come across that way.
1
@Lakisha
Dude, using your logic, why didn't these criminals just "voluntarily" turn themselves in just after committing their crime??? Try this logic: they had to be caught! (And please stop playing the race card..they're CRIMINALS).
The entire prison-industrial complex needs to be questioned given the fact that both violent and property crimes have fallen dramatically during the past 30 years while our rates of incarceration have continued to rise. Weird, isn't it? America jails far too many people. Meanwhile, obeying the laws is apparently optional for the very wealthy, the corporate and the Emolu-mental president Trump.
7
@WRosenthal - The vast bulk of prisoners are in prison for crimes of violence. While there aren't as many violent crimes as there were 50 years ago, violence is treated much more severely today.
1
The death penalty has been abolished in Canada for years. In other words murderer pedophiles and rapists are kept alive in prisons. This is showing no respect for the victims whose lives have been destroyed by sadistic criminals who often show no remorse for the pain they brought upon their victims and their family. Yet in the USA where the death penalty is applied in several states for certain crimes the various projects to free the wrongly convicted have freed so many people on death row for crimes they did not commit that it is scarry. In my opinion,for lighter crimes, judges must use in-house imprisonment with their family as much as possible when it is advisable.
3
Great article for racism tucked into what I thought was good news about cash bail. Still the public needs to prove the racial bias by getting a hold of the private company from Big Prison. It can still be assumed that a disproportionate number of people of color will be affected because more will be unfairly facing the algorithm in the first-place. Still, how do we as a people legally get the people who get our tax money to give up their ankle bracelet data?
@Jack If you don't want to do the time, or face the algorithm, don't do the crime.
@Jack Out of curiosity, do you think there should be ANY negative consequences imposed on predators who harm, even kill, others? Or do you want negative consequences only for whites? Which is it?
3
Could I get to my precinct to vote if I was wearing an ankle bracelet? What if my precinct moves out of range of my device? Sure, absentee ballots. But still. (What if I'm evicted while wearing an ankle bracelet? Do I have to confine my search for new housing to my existing permitted geography?)
2
Our country is increasingly being run by corporate algorithms, rather than human interaction. Republicans' answer to everything is to change government institutions--from education to prison to healthcare--to private corporate industrial complexes.
It's already common in healthcare, where patients are diagnosed by computers. Sure, they love private companies--not covered by got/t regulations.
Thousands of migrant children, ripped from their mothers, had been transferred to motels where they received education, arts supplies. ACLU support and therapy. Then, in the middle of the night, they were moved by busses thousands of miles away to private A/C tents at the border. Company is owned by Betsy deVos's brother.
5
The underlying issue is systemic and chronic racism, so basic that biased stereotypes are normalized. As if removing five inches of a ten inch blade in the back is relief.
2
@sosonj Stereotypes exist for a reason.
2
@sosonj But is it "racism" that causes 70% unwed black mothers? Is it racism that caused blacks to murder 7,881 other blacks in 2016 alone? Is it only racism that causes the enormous black crime rate? At some point black citizens must correctly identify the problem before there's hope of solutions. (Hint: it doesn't lie within "racism" or the Jackson/Sharpton methodologies).
Two points: one, Ms. Alexander is smart, thoughtful, reflective, insightful, thorough, detailed, organized, and writes with power and clarity. Yhese qualitiesmare exactly the opposite of what we find in the Administration!
Two, racism is a system which is a process! Its malleability and adaptability is more than the sum of bias, prejudice, bigotry, or ignorance. Racism embraces problems, assigns privilege, and leverages power disparities for the advantage of a group that benefits from inequalities. Often, racism is a step removed from its impact which helps hide its cause and effects--for an example, closing precincts has an invisible visible effect!
Crime is often tied to demographics and jobs. But the blame falls on the criminal, always. Store closings, food deserts, the absence of transportation, a closed culture can't be arrested, adjudicated and sentenced; only people can. Many arrested and sentenced are twice victimized,
But what makes racism "work" is not character weakness, moral failures, or "easy" sentences--what makes racism as a process work is it is always denied, always justified by an alternative explanation. Currently, the justifying explanation is blame. The same blame Trump uses to attack reporters, insulting and attempting to belittle and shame black women before the world, the blame of anger and fear--it's attachment to privilege--that blame is the same thinking and actions distilled into the criminal justice system.
4
This is a compelling essay. Before reading it I had assumed that electronic monitoring, at least, was a vast improvement over incarceration; yet Alexander's arguments and, in particular, the studies that she refers to in this article indicate strongly that we still haven't found a good way of dealing with the issues of incarceration, probation, and recidivism.
7
E-incarceration reminds me of a glorified way of turning people awaiting trial into quasi runaway slaves Imagine if slave owners could put ankle bracelets on slaves? The state is still forcing pre-trial detainees to pay for their freedom while awaiting trial It is bail by another name since the individuals who can take advantage of this form of monitored freedom are those with the discretionary money to pay the monthly fees for their monitoring while the private prison complex has another way to earn millions
Our prison system is barbaric We have more prisoners than any nation on earth We lock people in cages instead of solving the social problems that led them to commit crimes
Our emphasis on punishment instead of rehabilitation is ineffective and medieval
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@Martin
Criminal rehabilitation is like reversing a ship--the criminal has been formed through childhood, which is why recidivism is about 76% for burglary and relatively high for other crimes, except murder.
2
I think incarcerated-driven workers induced by private prison companies in such southern states as Alabama or Georgia, will not eliminate the cash-bond system, as for many of the little southern towns throughout these states, the cash bond system may be a major source of revenue. Therefore, a system such as e-carceration, unfair/unpredictable algorithms, or digital jails, they are just other forms of keeping monies flowing to those large private corporations especially if parolees pay "around $300 per month" ...
5
Why does an ankle bracelet cost 300$ per month? Sounds like someone is making a lot of money!
The author’s understanding of bias in algorithms is flawed. There is only one indicator that can demonstrate if risk assessment is negatively biased towards minorities—if the predicted risk for minorities is systematically higher than their actual crime rate once probation is granted. That the algorithm contains factors that are correlated with race is not evidence that biases exists, insofar as race is indeed correlated with crime.
19
@Jason
But the reincarnation rate is based not on the commission of crime but on biased policing. The police look harder at minorities than whites. The confirmation bias is already in the available data.
3
@Jason
You need to check your white male privilege and stop trying to "mansplain" algorithms to the author. She is a female person of color and her lived experience is that the criminal justice system is racist. Talking about things like statistics and "risk assessment" is one of the ways that systemic white supremacy tries to silence the opinions of female people of color.
1
You cannot be serious.
Abuses of artificial intelligence will manifest first at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, but will come for all of us soon enough.
16
"we ought to be heavily investing in quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged communities"
---
This is the answer to most of our problems. I was typing something just like this in response to the shooting the other day...
14
The only good thing about legalizing recreational marijuana in Michigan is that it will put an end to the medical marijuana scam. The very bad thing about it is all those young men and women who were smoking medical marijuana for their bad backs will continue to fill their lungs with carcinogenic smoke and fill the lungs of their children with second hand smoke. This is going to bring more pain to the people of Michigan and more expense to the taxpayers paying for the increased health woes. If there is any better evidence of the failure of public education in Michigan than the decisions by its voters to legalize casinos and marijuana, I can’t think of it.
You don't have to smoke marijuana and if you do, you can vaporize it to iliminate carcinogens. You can also eat it.
The computer code does not factor in race directly. It is actually fairly accurate about the recidivism results -- predicting who will reoffend -- based on the questions asked.
The problem with the author's work here, like with Barack Obama's community grant work, or TaNehisi Coates' genius writings, is that affluent, moved-away, black and biracial people misidentify the problem issue.
The issue is not how do we equalize the racial distribution of the prison and early-release prisoner population. The issue is: how to we best protect and provide safe / equal opportunities for those black, biracial, white, etc. people who do not want to be saddled with the problem of black criminality in their neighborhoods which they have not yet escaped / abandoned?
When you misidentify the issue, you come up with pretty-on-paper, but ineffective in real life answers. Often, we don't question their answers, policy predictions, or results, because they are black too, and seen to "represent" the black community. But as outsiders, they too often identify the criminals and ne'er-do-wells as the ones to be helped, rather than those who live amongst such circumstances and still work to rise above...
That, to me, is the sum of these upper-middle-class black people's work: misidentifying the issues. But the white liberals, also far removed from the effects of criminality, lap it up. Always promising progress. Meanwhile, very few black boats are lifted...
17
I guess this reaffirms the maxim that crime doesn't pay.
2
@MCH . . . except that crime pays extremely well to the fatten the coffers of prison-profiteering corporations and their political lackeys.
2
Wonderful to see this piece by this inestimably worthy author. An annual contract of $200 million to monitor people who are effectively out on bail. Without getting into the weeds of possible outcomes of these decisions to automate release or retention of this group of citizens, let us use our imaginations to envisage how many people our tax payer dollars could lift up.
Our big divide is that some will endorse spending any amount on incarceration while at the same time will veto any funds to uplift those at risk.
Now I see why my local Bail Bond office is shuttered. Goodbye Dog TBH.
4
I find it interesting when people claim that protecting private prisons is the reason for high levels of incarceration. The facts don’t bare this out. Only 8 percent of US prisoners are held in private prisons and in recent years the number of inmates in private prisons has been declining.
7
It seems to me that "e-carceration" is nothing more than a more expensive form of bail—charging an involuntary leasing fee of $300.00 per month. My son was on an ankle bracelet for six months after an early release. He wasn't even allowed to go into the back yard, which was totally enclosed by a fence. So, in essence, he got no "yard time" while on the bracelet—something he would have gotten in jail. Plus he had to stick by the phone--even in the bathroom--to be sure he didn't miss the random phone calls to check up on him. And, it cost hundreds of dollars. If you did the crime and paid the time then you should be free and clear from that point on in order to lead a normal life. Let me make something clear. If someone is granted an early release, then, in my opinion, it is a confirmation that their sentence was too long to begin with!
160
@Bonnie Weinstein
Prison is the carefully carved colored exception to the 13th Amendments abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude.
Thus it is no surprise that 40% of the 2.3 million Americans in prison are black like Ben Carson. Because blacks are persecuted for acting like white people do without any criminal justice consequences. America has 25 % of the world's prisoners with 5 % of humanity. Electronic incarceration is natural evolution of slave related technology.
See whitneyplantation.org
6
I was on an ankle bracelet for six months after a DUI. I had to seek special permission to attend a conference at which I was both giving a paper and presenting an award. As it happened, during those six months I was on medical leave for severe clinical depression. This made no difference to the court.
At the conference, I inadvertently ate a piece of steak that had been cooked in a wine sauce. At the time, I was both on an ankle bracelet and undergoing daily urine tests. During the conference, my ankle bracelet fell off. There was nothing I could have done to prevent this, as the woman at the agency confirmed. However, I decided that I would commit suicide if my urine tested positive due to the steak sauce. It didn't.
I spent thousands of dollars on the ankle bracelet, and I have actually written, rather indirectly, about this experience. The ankle bracelet is a disgraceful cash cow. I spent hours every night signing in and the ankle bracelet itself made a loud sound every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, so I couldn't sleep through the night for six months. Its purpose was to humiliate its wearer.
142
@Yorkiegirl Who was it that got behind the wheel while impaired with alcohol risking everyone else's lives out on the road that day? That was you, right?
16
@Yorkiegirl if you had killed someone, while drunk driving, that would be a major inconvenience to the victim. How would they present awards? Would their family get a good night of sleep? You are not a victim.
20
Edward and Tom both, you're missing the forest for the trees. The point is not what Yorkiegirl did that got her the ankle bracelet. The point is that the bracelet makes going about normal business, and even getting a good night's sleep, practically impossible. In my mind, the sleep deprivation qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment, and could have serious effects on the person's mental and physical health. These bracelets can be imposed for many crimes other than DUI, don't fixate on that.
66
This is not new, but I'm glad to see it in the news as often as possible.
The School to Prison Pipeline is iniquitous. "Uppity" kids put in jail, so they can't vote? Poor people imprisoned and fined? And they make a profit? The more they put in jail, the more of your and my tax money goes to these private enterprise scammers?
The criminalizing of poverty and "those people" is evil. Just plain evil.
102
@Susan Anderson-Let's look at who's profiting: Robert Mercer who financed the Trump campaign and backed it through manipulation of Cambridge Analytica's Facebook culled data on America's voters. Mercer is an investor in the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic), one of the main operators of private prisons and immigrant detention centers, via Renaissance Technologies. Another principal investor in GEO Group is Eric Prince of Blackwater infamy, brother to Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos and advisor to Trump.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fear-factory-robert-mercers-hedge-fund-profits-trumps-hard-line-immigration-stance-090041709.html
https://www.sheilakennedy.net/2016/12/following-the-money-prison-edition/
9
@Susan Anderson
And numerous studies have shown that teachers report "uppity" black kids more frequently than whites for the same acting out.
5
@Susan Anderson
Right on!
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack all did iillegal drugs without any criminal justice consequences. Had Obama been born and bred poor and black on South Side of Chicago he may not have been so lucky.
7
I won't speak to ankle bracelets (still mulling that over), but it strikes me as odd that any cash bail could ever have been used as a preventative measure to keep an allegedly dangerous defendant off the streets until trial.
It reminds of the time I bothered to pay a little extra to upgrade my seat class for a flight and was informed at the airport I was now able to use a separate security line that didn't require me to remove my shoes or take my electronics (laptop, tablet, etc.) out of my bag. I guess that's a nice perk, but I couldn't help but wonder how it could possibly be justified. What is the relevance of my ability to buy a business/first class ticket to the question of whether I am attempting to smuggle something dangerous onto a commercial flight?
Similarly, the purpose of collecting bail at all was ostensibly to make sure someone showed up for their trial. But even putting that aside, I don't see the rationale. If a person is so demonstrably dangerous they can't walk free until trial, who cares what amount of money they can scrape together or borrow?
As for algorithms, well, I'd be interested to know what would happen if a neutral algorithm was asked to come up with a profile for deciding who should be monitored as a potential terrorist threat, serial killer or mass murderer. Or maybe we should use a statistical algorithm to decide whether someone should be allowed to purchase a particular firearm. Think Steve Miller would be able to buy an AR-15?
3
I'm not sure the $300/ month leasing price is a bad thing. Don't people normally owe about $50-100/ PER DAY in regular jail?? That's anywhere from 1500/ month to $3000 per month . Economically, these leases are a reduction in financial burden on inmates, allowing a faster recovery when "released", right?
The algorithm should be able to be viewed and monitored by members of minority interest groups to ensure that classism and race are not being factored in as automatic catch all variables for non whites or homeless/ poverty stricken individuals.
1
Let's also not lump bail together with probation or parole. Regarding bail, one's choice previously either was to make bail at a certain set figure or sit in jail. Now, it's limited freedom at the monthly cost of leasing a Mercedes-Benz. That's just another punitive measure.
Bail is only to be assessed based upon one's potential danger to oneself/others and/or whether there is a flight risk. It's not supposed to be a penalty or punishment at all. If one is neither a flight risk nor a danger, maybe just periodically calling in or showing up will suffice until time of trial? It should.
For-profit prison corporations are like funeral homes - bodies are needed. This is just a bad idea that everyone will write about a few decades from now.
6
Algorithms are flawed methods and likely have bias built into them, even if it doesn’t seem obvious. Example: salary or location of housing are likely correlated with race.
I thought this article would also bring up the issue of arrest records. Minorities are far more likely to be arrested. An arrest record, even in the absence of conviction, are reported on criminal background checks.
5
Years ago I ate at a very hip restaurant in a large city in Europe, which as I later discovered was owned by a former convict, a guy who had served years in jail for drug crimes. Having cleaned up and trained as a chef (thanks to some other good soul that gave him a chance) he eventually bought his own restaurant and then hired other former convicts, which he trained as sous-chefs, waiters, barmen (and women as well - as far as I was told the girls there were ex-cons too). It was a lively place, with all these scarred, tattooed tough guys and gals working hard and joking around with each other and with the customers, with typical "gallows humor".
This place doesn't exist anymore but I will always remember it as an example of how at least some criminals could be reintroduced into society to become productive citizens.
A far cry from the typically American for-profit schemes described in this article, which only serve the purpose of transferring public money in private hands and do nothing to address the real problems that cause mass incarceration in the first place.
27
@Andy Kind of like how the NY Times had a story in the last couple years about how a maximum security prison in Norway has a commercial kitchen. Job skills are great at lowering recidivism.
2
Recidivism is very high amongst those that commit street crime. One and done seems the outlier.
I would like to see technology used as follows: a person that has committed street level crimes wears an ankle monitor and my smart phone has an app that warns me when that person gets within 100 feet of me and shows their picture. We need to be using technology to protect the public.
4
@Djt I would rather know which bank is ripping off their customers than who stole socks for their kids. I want to know which corporation contaminates the food I buy. 'Street criminal' has my ears ringing. The app needs to target the major criminals.
3
I work in a prison. You’d be surprised how many inmates prefer to kill their number in prison than take the chance
With a merciless probation system. They crunched the numbers. They know the fees and terms of probation are designed for profit at their expense.
26
You know you don't have to set up a predictor in which race mattes and then make it look all ambiguous how ppl get incarcerated based on race. someone sets up the prediction equations on which the decision in the computer are made in a way that I not in favor to ppl of color!
2
‘Some people are saying’ that all foreign tourists will soon be straped at the airport with the new countrywide Welcome E-Carceration Band. It swiftly locates overstayers for repatriation.
( Just testing out the Trump Doctrine, ‘Some people are saying’ to see if it converts made up stuff into reality.)
It will take nothing short of a world wide uproar to beat back the insidious privatized ‘out of sight out of mind’ prison product line that US Corporations have exported to the world. Americans ready don’t care, but Australia is finally having buyers’ remorse.
2
@BBB, on the other hand, Australia strongly enforces its immigration law, including reforms to birthright citizenship that have recently restricted and limited it due to the same kind of abuses (that continue in America); and containment of many refugees and illegal immigrants to islands off-shore until such individuals can be fully vetted and a decision made as to refugee claims vs repatriation. So it appears Trump is trying to follow Australia's example.
10
Ms Alexander's insights and corrective action plans and alternative to eliminate the mass incarceration cycle is so insightful.
5
the use of private companies to provide criminal justice services may seem like a good free market based idea, but it is not. the problem is that the government is not limited in any significant way in what it criminalizes and as the the article points out in the rules it establishes under which the private companies operate. therefore the criminal justice system becomes prey to the influences of corporate money. thus the synergy between private prisons and the criminal justice system that fed them their prison fodder produce mass incarceration. Now the money machine of the bail system is being replaced by the money making machine of monitoring systems.
2
This article is heavily inspired by Cathy O’Neill’s book “Weapons of Math Destruction,” which has the details you seek. Unfortunately, this article is very sparse on the details.
I think the most egregious examples are the use of surveys to determine recidivism risk. Prisoners are asked questions like “Have any of your friends been to prison?” and other questions which focus on their circumstances and means rather than their actual risk to society.
Such questions are used as surrogates for an impossible measurement - that of an individual’s likelihood to commit a crime. In using the guilt of one’s friends, which does correlate with recidivism, it unjustly imposes “guilt by association” considerations during sentencing. In doing so, they unfairly make the path to reform and reintegration into society even harder for society’s already most poorly served.
Cathy notes that this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t model prisoners or recidivism, but that our models should serve the population being modeled. We should not trick the convicted into giving themselves longer sentences with surveys whose purpose they don’t know - instead, we can use modeling to determine what can be done to reduce recidivism risk, and target prisoners with programs which have proven beneficial to prisoners with similar backgrounds.
Ultimately, I recommend you read Dr. O’Neill’s book. It covers much more about the intersection of justice and codewriting, including economic justice, and is seriously eye opening.
12
This is one of the big stories not getting of our times which is not getting enough coverage.
We have this far been passive towards The soft control algorithms have over our lives - controlling the advertisements we see, our likely friends on facebook, and small things like that.
But more and more, algorithms are making big decisions about what we may and may not do - what jobs we may work, whether or not we qualify for loans, even whether or not we’re freed before our trial.
All of these are matters of justice, and require an even hand and dispassionate eye to be meted out equally and fairly, which certainly points to an algorithmic approach. But these algorithms are written by people - often powerful and privileged people - and they reflect their assumptions and worldview, sometimes executing acts of gross injustice. Further, these algorithms are opaque and unaccountable to the public at large, and known and edited only by a handful tech workers.
As an example, there are recidivism risk assessment algorithms used during sentencing which take into account your friends and associates criminal history. In other words, if your friends have been to jail, you get a longer sentence. This makes sense to the numbers focussed predictive modelers, but is grossly unjust.
I recommend Cathy O’Neill’s book “Weapons of Math Destruction” to anybody interested or disturbed by the increasing influence of unaccountable strings of code on our our work, lives, and freedom.
14
If you don't want to get involved in the criminal justice system then don't get involved in the criminal justice system. Obey the law and you'll have no worries.
11
@Timothy
.....because we know for a fact that innocent people don’t get arrested or sent to jail.
3
What a dangerous and simplistic way to think. Please do some research.
2
@Timothy
Tell that to all those African American men exonerated after years on death row.
3
You object to computer algorithms in connection with bail determinations, but do not explain why or what your objections is based upon. Slogans and buzzwords are not persuasive argument. You tell us nothing about the results of these algorithms; whether they are actually biassed based upon ethnicity; whether there is an increase or decrease of recidivism. Your complaint about ankle bracelets seems to be that they are expensive and limit defendant travel. The expense issue is valid, but the solution is not just to complain about bracelets, but to demand investigation of why a monopoly exists and what can be done to reduce prices. If there is problem with limitations on travel it is not just a bracelet problem. The courts can determine what limitations to place. Limitations should not be dictated by the technology and I suspect the technology is capable of responding to judicial determinations. It is our state governments and courts who have control over all of these issues and merely bemoaning the topics accomplishes nothing.
7
@A2CJS
You correctly ask for greater detail about the effects of algorithmic decision making.
There is little to offer.
Part of the problem in reliance upon "closed box" systems is that public officials and academic researchers are running up against trade secrets held closely by the companies that offer monitoring and analysis.
It is to the benefit of these providers of services to maintain system which competitors cannot copy and public officials cannot compare against differently weighted policies and procedures.
The private prison system has too many conflicts of interest.
7
What our media has to start discussing is --- to partially quote Dr. King --when profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people , then Americans suffer the destructive effects of racism and extreme materialism.
In so many aspects of US policy, the profit motive is the higher priority over human lives, justice and well being.
Private profit corporations hold sway over our gun policy, our health care costs and access, and our voting machines. And indirectly motivate voter suppression and gerrymandering of voter districts for power. And this is all rationalized with the credo --- small govt, and private profit equals American freedom.
Thus the idea that govt of by for the people, for the public good can be demonized as a threat to our freedoms. Then we're told that govt of by for corporations for profit is what preserves our freedoms.
This is a norm that removes public control by elected govt, as govt is legally subsidized by private profit mega donors. This effectively nullifies the voice of the citizen majority. And this operates within our constitution and bill of rights, as per the Supreme Court in Citizens United equating corporate election donations with 1st Amendment Free Speech..
When this dominates our services and institutions, democracy is only a facade. When will the news media stop avoiding this underlying basis for the destructive trends we are living through?
10
What would you like to do with our criminals? You don’t want them in jail,you rightly think that bail is discriminatory. You don’t want them to wear ankle bracelets too expensive.
Having computers ( machines that can’t discriminate ) is not good enough for you. Do you think that $300/ month is too much compared to hundreds per day in prison?
Most likely in order to generate data for the computers there must have been offenses committed previously.
5
@Maria the point is that machines can discriminate without seeming to, which is why their more difficult to push back against.
As an example, there is an old practice (which I believe has since been made illegal) of considering someone’s ZIP code when modelling their risk of defaulting on a loan.
On the one hand, this is effective: certain zip code have higher default rates, and these correlations can help banks assess and reduce long term risks over large numbers of loans.
However the effects on the individual are disastrously unjust, and even racist due to the segregation of our society - a man with the same financial history as someone living in an affluent zip code may be granted a loan which would be denied to a man from a poorer zip code with a higher default rate. In areas where mostly minority communities are poorer on average than nearby mostly white communities, the result is that minorities are not eligible for loans that their equivalent white counterparts are.
Similar injustice occurs when markers like the number of friends you have who have been incarcerated are used to assess your recidivism risk. On the one hand, such markers objectively correlate with recidivism. On the other hand, they judge a person on the basis of “guilt by association,” a travesty, and have the end result of disproportionately incarcerating members of more policed minority communities.
10
By replacing the human component of "supervising" someone, we lose the opportunity to provide guidance and feedback.
We should staff more support for this, reduce the electronics use.
The rehabilitation part of the equation is gone and where is the analysis on recidivision - which affects long term costs?
Are people who are "supervised" electronically more or less likely to return to the slammer? Why?
We should not tolerate procedures which are not, in the short and long term, effective.
4
“Garbage in garbage out” is the mantra of data scientists. Machine learning has great potential to replace biased decision makers if it can be trained on an unbiased dataset. And a bigger dataset always beats a more cleaver algorithm when it comes to machine learning.
1
Automation and algorithms allow decision-makers to avoid taking responsibility for their decisions. It is a scam.
6
Sorry, but this column is liberal foolishness at its worst. Most of the reasoning in this column is down at the Don Trump rally level. At best Ms. Alexander is treating facts like Mr. Trump: something to be exaggerated and distorted. Such columns do exactly what Mr. Trump is doing: playing to her audience. She knows what will get a positive response from her audience. As Don Trump does. But she and he don't care much about facts and logic. Those things just get in the way of entertaining her and his audiences.
5
@Gordon Wiggerhaus These facts will hold up over time and from coast to coast. Unlike presidential marketing claims.
2
@Gordon Wiggerhaus
As a liberal, I do not recognize this column as liberal foolishness, but as mere foolishness. Liberals have no monopoly on hyperbole, exaggeration or cutesy slogans instead of proposed solutions.
These types of prediction tools use over 100 factors and not a single one is race.
In an independent study data collected by ProPublica on about 5,000 defendants assigned COMPAS scores in Broward County, Fla.
"For these cases, we find that scores are highly predictive of reoffending. Defendants assigned the highest risk score reoffended at almost four times the rate as those assigned the lowest score (81 percent vs. 22 percent)."
The tool is effective - where it classifies (without actually identify them by race) Black men as a greater rate to re-offend it is because they have a significantly higher recidivism rate that do white men.
You can read it all here in an excellent article from Bezos' paper
https://goo.gl/3n9L7P
So no - it is not a new Jim Crow - it is a fairer system that simply relying on a judge's hunch. And throwing around something as egregious as "Jim Crow" does nobody any favors and is inexcusable.
10
@SteveRR
"In an independent study data collected by ProPublica on about 5,000 defendants assigned COMPAS scores in Broward County, Fla. "
FLORIDA? FLORIDA? Home of suppressed voting scams, 2 stolen elections (hanging chads etcc.) Where the Gov.'s race is still too close to call because of Republican dirty tricks?
2
@SteveRR
The problem is that you’re looking at surface level results and don’t know what you’re really seeing long term. None of the data points may be explicitly about race, but many are correlated with race.
Because of situational issues, minorities are punished more frequently for crimes than whites (see for example marijuana use vs incarcerations or the tendency of law enforcement “gang intel” to see innocent fashion choices as criminal activity in blacks but actually missing real crimes committed by nazi meth dealers)
This can cause a feedback loop that criminalizes race and poverty.
Using a trade-secret algorithm is unaccountable and unjust on its own, but feeding it data based on an already biased system is racist.
1
With e-carceration as with everything else, we must always ask: Cui bono? (Who benefits?). As in so very many cases these days, the answer is private corporations, and Ms. Alexander rightly calls them out. Due to their success in quietly winning never-intended constitutional rights over the last 130 years, corporations have amassed a degree of power that completely eclipses "We the People" and will continue to do so until we stop them. Contact your congressional representative and urge him or her to co-sponsor HJR-48 without delay:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-joint-resolution/48/text
If you want to work to pass HJR-48 as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, go to www.movetoamend.org
5
This all sounds really abstract relative to what is happening in our community:
People come from up to 25 miles away to rob and steal. They get caught, arraigned, released for trial, then are caught again before they even go to trial!! There are people caught in the act, or caught within minutes with the stolen property in their cars or pockets, and they are released a day later to commit more crimes. This whole piece seems to be written by someone that lives in a community that requires a car to reach and which results in everyone traveling largely isolated in cars. Come live where I do and try solving our problem.
4
Until the white-collar criminals in government are voted out of office and/or prosecuted nothing will change for the better.
1
Of course, one could also choose to not commit crimes. That's a lot easier path since its totally under your control.
4
@Edward
Not really. Violent crime is fairly rare. People keep getting locked up for things like possession of a box cutter they use for their job stocking shelves in a grocery store. The NYPD has gotten really good at flicking open pocket knives (that are sold in NYC hardware stores) because they can get credit for arresting someone.
People get arrested for being in a car where someone else has drugs.
People also get arrested for having the wrong name (ask anyone named Tom :) seriously).
People get arrested because someone wants to get rid of them and makes a false report.
“Don’t commit a crime” is advice that is ignorant of how the real world works.
4
@Edward I know you don't live under a rock... So, your comment (see myth of individualism) must be an attempt to distract us.
I have just started to read "The Souls of Black Folk" written in 1903 by W. E. B. Du Bois. For him, Emancipation happened a generation ago, and yet, he was troubled by the perception he repeatedly encountered from the dominant White society, that, Black folk are the problem. This column reminds us that this perception persists. I am encouraged by the positive reforms identified in this article; e.g. ending cash bail, and opposing e-carceration. Reformers now, like Du Bois then, simply ask us, can people of color be who they are and be Americans? "He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and a American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face." This column advocates for finding and opening those doors of Opportunity.
11
Wow. I was feeling pretty good about Gillum and Abrams not doing an Al Gore and walking away, about the big blue wave and 12,000,000 more Americans voting for Democratic Senate candidates than Nazis.
Fine writing. Thanks for bursting my bubble. I mean that. I usually start my day thinking about ecosystem collapse and extinction from climate catastrophe, then men's role perpetuating rape culture and ask why we mostly men are at war all the time.
We certainly have enough money to create a basic income for all. And wouldn't basic income go a long way to reduce recidivism, crime in general?
Say we just pay every American $20,000 a year, Medicare for all, free tuition for education in trades and college. You get at this in your last paragraph. Invest in loving.
Isn't that a greener more just world?
I just think you can't write that piece without asking What's love got to do with it?
Dr. King Jr. and bell hooks have both written eloquently about the politics of loving. Love is letting go of fear is not just a new age mantra to repeat on my yoga mat. Love is challenging the fear body politics that drives race and class in America with the myth of scarcity, that there isn't enough.
Isn't your argument that there is enough? That is the world I want to live in...
Thanks for writing so well and having space in this page. Breath of fresh air when you consider all the opinion people in the NYT I hate on. :)
3
@Tim C Your comment made my day. What I would give for more people to think this way...
1
How is it that the algorithm has a racist effect? She didn’t explain
2
@Ron
The algorithm obviously uses key input of “public data” such as zip codes, schools attended, etc.. it’s all about using current statistical input to rationalize the institutional bias at the core of past “American” experience.
The new minority will have to take a good look at itself- should take about 30-50 years for this to wash out.
If we are taking the trial-by-computer road, that's reason #35296495 to mandate free(-dom respecting) software[1] in every government computer, and any machine where the code would impact its regulatory compliance.
Like, say, cars. Have we forgotten Volkswagen's diesel fraud? If they had to release the code the cars ran, we could've preempted their cheating by posting the code on GitHub or (now, for preferable example) Gitlab page. (VW's PR monkeys could've still been cruelly gassed though...)
In either the car code or these risk assessors, bugs and security holes can easily be scanned for, even automatically, when the code's public. When it's proprietary and even DRM-obscured, as far too usual? We can't—but putin can. His crack(ing) teams don't care about things like copyright or anti-circumvention laws, and can read built code with ease.
Of course, all that leaves aside whether the mass-private-imprisonment system that uses such code is a good idea.
[1] That of course means NO Google Apps for Government/Business, nor Microsoft Office 2099 Enterprise Edition, nor macOS or iOS; nor of course Windows, itself plain wrong for those uses for many other reasons.
1
We know what Ms. Alexander is against regarding justic reforms but what is she advocating pertaining to pre trial risk assessment.
2
I write separately about Ms. Alexander's excellent op-ed because I have had actual experience in a pretrial release program. During my law school years, I worked for San Francisco's Own Recognizance Project as one of its O.R. officers. We had an individualized system that involved the following process: (1) the O.R. officer would interview the prisoner right after he was placed in a cell and ascertain the information to determine whether was qualified for recommended release on his own recognizance; (2) we'd contact the prisoner's family and references to verify his information; (3) we'd obtain a copy of the police report of his arrest showing the charges and factual allegations supporting them; (4) based on all our investigatory efforts, we'd determine whether or not to recommend to the judge a prisoner for O.R. release. The judge would then make the final call.
I came away from my year and a half of working in the SF pretrial release program with a strong belief in its efficacy, especially in behalf of SF's minorities and the poor. These groups of people were the principal beneficiaries of the O.R. Project, in that they were the ones who generally could not make bail and therefore would have languished for months in jail due to felony charges awaiting trial or a misdemeanor plea deal. As in very state these days, they were invariably overcharged by police and prosecutors for plea bargaining purposes. Pretrial release is essential when so many are overcharged.
12
I agree with the author's description of problems, but I don't see a lot of solutions in her article.
(Bias disclosure: I am a software engineer.)
It is indeed possible to embed biases into algorithms through assumptions and training data - but these are problems we know how to audit and tackle. And once we fix them, they are fixed for all trials in a state, while it's considerably harder to check one trial at a time for unconscious racial bias.
I would suggest that we do not throw out e-bail with the bathwater of the imperfections of its initial iterations. If the permitted movement area under monitoring does not allow a felon to seek work, create a system of exceptions. If the ankle monitoring device is expensive, let the state pay for it with the funds saved on incarceration. If the algorithms and training data are opaque, *demand* that they be made public and audited.
Investing in education and job opportunities is always good policy, but there will always be some level of crime, and then we need to decide how to deal with pre-/post-trial incarceration.
A technology-based system can be flawed in its initial iterations, but is much more easily perfectible. Ask yourself: what has significantly improved in the last ten years - the iPhone or Jeff Sessions?
8
@Rd Mn
The government's software systems are many times over budget, outdated, and slow to change. The government is often not at arms distance from those it regulates. In the end this has to be people who make the decision on the release of those charged. This is leading toward AI making decisions and is an example of the danger and harm it represents.
If we don't find a person to be enough of a threat that we're willing to pay for all of the costs for incarceration, probation, parole and e-carceration, then they should be free to go. If the state pays the bill, we will be much more cautious in our throwing people in prison.
If the state doesn't pay expense, then expenses need to be assessed according to the offender's ability to pay.
States get bids in a competitive manner--but when e-prisoners have to pay for stuff--capitalism answers "what will the market bear?"
When we incarcerate people, we need to make sure they have some money and no debt--otherwise we're setting them up for failure.
2
Thank you, Ms. Alexander, for these revelations. They help me understand how being a 21st Century American can so often make it seem like my watch has been set back more than a century to ensnare me in a culture straight out of the novels of Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.
Those books document the demented processes by which society enforced and defended the worst elements of human nature, the better to resist the burdens on conscience imposed by empathy, compassion and logic.
Here, you have clearly exposed how the imitation intelligence and distractions of new technologies conceal and enforce those old devices of accepted depravity: it is a reliable source of profit and power when about 40% of the public still approve of the demagogues that preach contempt for and fear of the mostly defenseless and disadvantaged.
You've helped me grasp the shape and depths of my discontent... and my share of a fortunate citizen's shame. But there is some hope for healing by joining better souls than me in the small things I can do to help from time to time. Together, we do make a bit of difference.
6
I totally agree that we have failed to invest in our communities and or people. Our incentives are inverted, favoring accumulation of wealth over the wealth of community. That still leaves us with criminal behavior on the ground, right now, under current statute. Once we even decide to make communities better, we're a generation, or more, away from seeing the improvements take root. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system must still deal with the fallout from historical mismanagement of our cultural resources. I would love to see ideas floated that better deal with that. Perhaps the public should purchase and own release technology, instead of leasing it. Perhaps the logical structure of sentencing algorithms should be open to public scrutiny and input. Let's propose fixes along with criticism.
6
Great piece. As mass incarceration has become better understood as a failure, these companies have had to find new ways to please their shareholders. Along with e-carceration as an "innovation" is "crimmigration"--the term for the growing surveillance and incarceration of new immigrants. Remember how their stocks massively jumped the day after Trump was elected?
10
Michelle, what an excellent Op-Ed.
As usual, we see that the worship of the dollar by corporate America yet again distorts and pollutes our system.
We should propose and pass an “incarceration tax” on people in the top income tier. That would, of course, be the surest way of ending mass incarcerations once and for all since these people cannot abide paying for ANYTHING that benefits the poor or the general society as a whole.
As a side note, does MLK have a ridiculously deep, perfectly appropriate and stunningly articulate quote for EVERYTHING?
It would certainly seem so. Boy could we use his presence now!
12
Working in the computer programming industry, someone asked me if I was scared by artificial intelligence. Given the sorry state of much of the programming out there, artificial intelligence is scary only up to the point that we have inferior logic and outright bias embedded in the systems.
2
@Fredd R
Which suggests that we have a great deal to fear.
I saw this in action with a young man who works for my flooring vendor. He is Mexican by birth and has been in Arizona since his early teens. When he returned from a visit to Mexico he was locked up for six months, then releaSed with an ankle bracelet on $10000 bail. He put up about $2000 and pays a private company $400 a month for the rest, at 30% interest. He said he has to wear the cuff until he pays it off ...
5
@Ann Weninger, based on facts you provide, it suggests on one hand, the young man is a decent human being doing his best to work for a living as a flooring install person. So I have to agree as a fellow human being he deserves dignity, respect and compassion.
On other hand, it suggests he is also an illegal alien who crossed the border illegally; went home, and then crossed the border a 2nd time illegally, which classifies him as a felon under bipartisan legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996. Which was itself very diluted legislation that dropped several core recommendations of the Jordan Commission, led by African-American, Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (i.e., did not include chain migration reform; nor reduction of total immigration, including both legal and illegal, both suggested by Ms. Jordan's Commission).
Not clear if he did additional crime?
The irony is that NY Times has published a piece today that says members of the Caravan are fleeing lawless societies run by gangs and criminals and want to come to USA (whether legally or illegally) because they are attracted by its rule of law. And yet the first action for someone coming illegally is to undermine the rule of law. Directly breaching respect for arguably already weak immigration laws that have not been reformed as border state representatives such as Barbara Jordan suggested (thus arguably leading to election of someone psycho like Trump).
Let's finally enact Jordan Commission.
3
We think of workers as "human resources," and, in the capitalist system that rules the roost, resources exist to be exploited. If we think of our "free citizens" as objects for exploitation in the workplace, we surely will think of those designated as "other" as objects for exploitation in the enforcement system.
We all know early enough in life that the "justice system" is rigged to protect the rich and powerful and to exploit the poor and the weak. Privatization of the system exaggerates the problem, as the rich cannot resist exploiting those least capable of resisting the economic exploitation.
We all know that our political system is corrupt in ways more profound than mere bribery. The system is run by and for the monied and all of its impulses are to exploit the weak to enrich the powerful. Thus our courts are bound to find ways to make the poor suffer through the extraction of fees into the pockets of the rich. I'll not write for the moment of the obvious need to find a better way than our exploitive capitalist one. I point out for the moment only that anyone with a sense of moral self awareness should be sickened by the tragic immorality of our justice system and would not ignore that feeling of sickness.
6
Racial discrimination is prohibited in the Constitution. Why can't alogorithms that are used by the criminal justice system to incarcerate people be challenged in court if they are race based?
It seems the real issue is transparency.
Data isn't the issue. What the data is and how we use it is.
2
James Q. Wilson is smiling in his grave. Pre-emptive e-detention? And if you can't raise the money for cash bail, how can you raise the money for cash GPS bail?
Time to be explicit.
Awesome article. Very informative and crisply written .
3
It is super easy to avoid all of this. Don't do the crime. Other than that, I am really not going to worry much about how inconvenient the punishment is.
7
@Tom in Illinois
Innocent until proven guilty. We do not know if these people awaiting trial are guilty.
4
This article is about pre trial conditions of release, not punishment following conviction. That old innocent until proven guilty gig?
5
@Tom in Illinois This is talking about pre-trial detainees. They have not been tried, no less convicted. Some of them will never be convicted. I have a feeling that, if you were mistakenly arrested and had to pay hundreds of dollars for supervision before you finally went to court, you would change your tune in a hurry.
7
All these words about the perpetrators, and none about the victims. I know so many people who have been crime victims, including myself, who have never received a dime of restitution for our losses, let alone a quarter for compensation for the terrible life-changing PTSD and other psychological issues that come with the sense of violation and emotional rape that happens when a person commits any crime against you, especially thefts, burglaries, robberies, assault, battery, sexual assault, threats, and crimes to the person. The fact is, even in New York City, the white/Asian crime rate is akin to that of Finland, and the African-American/Latinx crime rate is akin to some central American nations. If and when every criminal takes it on himself (mostly male criminals) to contact victims and voluntarily pay restitution and damages, and shows up in court for all hearings, we can give people a slip of paper for bail and very short sentences. But 30% of people do not even show up for their political asylum hearings when they claim political asylum based on the goodwill of our nation. Ms. Alexander has her priorities badly misplaced.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/crime-statistics-landing.page
17
@Observer of the Zeitgeist I like your post.
1
This appears to be the next tool of racial and class subjugation that one of the interviewees in Ava DuVernay's brilliant documentary '13th' predicted would be coming. Because there always seems to be new ways to accomplish the same old goals.
3
"quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged communities".
This is everything rural poor Americans are missing, especially since this administration and the previous one decided to ignore the opioid epidemic to appeal to their base. Thanks for pointing out this new Jim Crow.
6
Race is not a factor in determining pre-trial and post-trial alternatives to incarceration. Michelle Alexander seems to view all of life through a racial lenze and her style of bringing up Jim Crow and slavery is counterproductive.
It is also very unprofessional to question computer algorithms without identifying a single example of statistical bias. It is grossly improper to quote data scientist Cathy O’Neil as if there is clear evidence that the models are “weapons of math destruction”.
The phrase "lucky enough to be set “free” from a brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm" is just wrong. Computer evaluation should have a lot less to do with luck than the current system of judge bias and sloppy background checks.
Sloppy reporting like this is why Congress can't agree an prison and criminal justice reform - something President Trump very much wants to accomplish.
10
New York Times: The single best editorial move you have made in years is to engage this deep and important thinker to your ranks.
I am so grateful for Ms. Alexander's presence on these pages.
7
@Sera
My sentiments exactly.
2
@Sera
I couldn't agree more.
2
This is the first time I have read an article by you in the Times and I welcome your fresh incite into a very important social issue.
Algorithms and computers ever since the 59's have been touted as money making schemes That would eliminate the middle man and increase profits. Now this is playing out all across society in a big way. notice the huge almost out of control swings on the stock market that create huge profits but also deep confusion especially for the little guy trying to enter this now arcane system.
Now this depersonalization is effecting the lives of those convicted and must live within are more and more computerized system. Actually this shift in society itself can and does effect all of us and hacking and theft of information is rampant. Phone calls we receive from unwanted marketers are controlled by these algorithms.
I do not know what to do about this creeping long term trend as it makes billions for now often anonymous people, but unless we are aware of it we can not take back any sense of control over own lives. And for those caught in our more and more mindless system no matter than crimes, actually I think most of us would like to forget about them completely, they become just numbers on a spread sheet.
As usual - follow the money.
5
Charging someone for their incarceration, whether it is behind bars or virtual, is just evil. $300 a month? The wrong people are imprisoned.
4
Why don't we just pass a law that rescinds all criminal laws?
If the guilty aren't going to suffer any meaningful punishments...
So why are we even bothering with arrest and trial...
And, since we're doing away with criminal laws and no longer need investigative and arrest capabilities, we might as well just eliminate the police and the violent physical crimes units of the states' attorneys general offices.
We could save a bundle and put a whole bunch of people into a work force actually to create some wealth.
Absurd, you say? Of course it is absurd.
But isn't that a reasoned and logical extension of Ms. Alexander's approach. is it not?
8
Excellent article. Truly excellent.
4
Why wasn't the following the first paragarph?:
"'[R]isk assessment' algorithms [used by] judges [to decide whether to release arrestees] . . appear colorblind on the surface[,] but they are . . . significantly influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system."
Those who want social reform must write to reach busy audiences quickly. Otherwise, they won't be read.
Prison confinement and it’s various characteristics is generally a reflection of society as a whole. Algorithmic monitoring is just a more sanitized version of de-humanization in our neo-liberal, master-slave cultural montage.
To end mass incarceration, we have to end mass crime.
6
Great article, and a reminder of unintended consequences.
Who should be free to be adjudicated later, doesn't seem like rocket science. Tomas O'Connor pointed out in his comments that using essential logical viewable data can out-predict an algorithm; direct contact with the individual assessing demeanor, character, honesty, and their legal history. I would think the same would apply with bail release. The repeat offenders often have more arrests for Failure to Appear than the original charges. Ask people in the neighborhood, they often know who the most dangerous members are among them.
Humans are more complex than an algorithm, I don't know of a single person who found motivation hope and trust in an algorithm. The unique bond that can form between people defies logic at times.
3
But people who are wealthy or politically connected routinely break the law and are not held accountable. Take the CEO and other executives at Wells Fargo Bank. Their only punishment for breaking the law? Resign and take tens of millions of dollars as a reward. Every day the ruling corporate class makes clear that “not breaking the law” is for the lower classes.
22
Dystopian.
There are a small number of sectors where we need a constitutional amendment to ban profit-seeking altogether. One of them in law enforcement. Another is education.
16
The criminal justice system, with its many structural components, a range of professional and non professional staff, ranges of beliefs about people, adjudicated criminals, criminal justice related concepts, theories and generalizable facts, all occurring in a divided nation which enables a toxic, WE-THEY culture which violates, daily, created, targeted and selected "the other(s)" is nevertheless DIVERSE. In many, many ways. Even as it can and does share similarities. This diversity, translates into ranges of complex, dynamic, multidimensional continua. And it is these ranges and continua, many, if not most being measurable at some levels, challenges the harmful binary banality of either prison or an e-incarceration. As for prognostications by the people-as-commodity stakeholders we need to consider realities' dimensions. Uncertainties. Unpredictabilities. Randomness. Lack of total controls, no matter the types, levels and qualities of one's efforts. Algorithms are for commodifications. Justice is not a mathematical issue.
And, not to forget, human judgments and decisions are flawed. The challenge, for all of US, is to accept "fail better."
I provide management oversight of the pretrial services office in my jurisdiction, and am amazed that any jurisdiction would charge the defendant for the GPS bracelet. Here, if the accused is referred to pretrial services with an order for a GPS bracelet to enforce a geographic condition of the bond, we do acknowledge the principle of innocent until proven guilty and thus will not charge an innocent person for this condition. Also, we are piloting the Public Safety Assessment tool, but it would be a mistake to assume that the "algorithm" dictates the bond decision. Understand that these decisions have traditionally been made by a magistrate based upon whatever they've heard from the prosecution and defense, combined with their own gut instinct informed by their training and experience. With the addition of the risk assessment, it's simply just another piece of information to consider, but it in no way replaces the other factors that influence the bond decision-- it just augments them. Why would more information playing into the decision be seen as alarming?
17
@Carlo
"gut instinct" and "algorithm". The first can be riddled with whatever bias the reviewer brings with them. The second, if it is based on past statistics, would enshrine the biases of the past system into a mathematical formula that would perpetuate it. If slavery can be said to be a system of making money off of black bodies and Jim Crow can be said to be a system keeping the poor and the black from enjoying equal opportunity, then we need to be very careful how we move forward if we are not going to repeat or aggravate the mistakes of the past.
2
As Ms. Alexander notes, there are some bipartisan efforts to improve the criminal justice system in many states, with some surprising left/right alliances: https://www.coalitionforpublicsafety.org/ .
That said, the problem of biased algorithms is a big one: "Biased Algorithms Are Everywhere, and No One Seems to Care," July 2017 ( https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608248/biased-algorithms-are-everywhere-and-no-one-seems-to-care/ ). From that piece:
"A key challenge, these and other researchers say, is that crucial stakeholders, including the companies that develop and apply machine learning systems and government regulators, show little interest in monitoring and limiting algorithmic bias. ...
O’Neil, Crawford, and Whittaker all also warn that the Trump administration’s lack of interest in AI—and in science generally—means there is no regulatory movement to address the problem."
5
One problem in talking about the injustices of the justice system is the confusion of using the same words for too many different concepts. Here, "justice" is overworked.
I will call what every person correctly deserves, "mustice." Hence, we can say that when an innocent person is arrested, held on bail, required to wear an ankle monitor, convicted, jailed, imprisoned or placed on death row, these violate mustice, the absolute right and responsibility. All such violations warrant the correct penalties for the rulers.
Eliminating cash bail is a step forward for the justice system toward mustice. But, as Michelle Alexander shows, the use of mysterious algorithms for deciding the caging of people would likely result in racist and classist policies.
The more basic problem is the violation of mustice by caging or monitoring innocent people. This is a well-known problem that has not been solved by the justice system. The reforms that Alexander proposes would be an improvement, but insufficient to make the justice system conform with mustice, insufficient to make it ethically correct.
5
@Jose
At a more basic level, justice and the law are not the same. The former is a much more expansive and abstract concept: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/ .
If there's profit involved, watch out. I would have thought the private prison (and lesser detention) industry would provide a lesson.
There was a case in Pennsylvania in which a couple of local justices were paid off to find defendants guilty, regardless of the evidence, just to provide "customers" to a for-profit detention center.
If it can be corrupted, it will be.
16
Three hundred a month for a GPS tracker is excessive; reminding one of the excessive costs for prisoner phone calls.
Also, this e-justice sounds like a "civilized" version of the Jim Crow money-maker of rounding up "vagrants" to be sent to work off high fines at some local farm.
8
"An algorithm is nothing more than an opinion expressed in mathematics." Well yes, but so is what we call "judgment."
We cannot escape opinions, whether they're in our computers or in our heads. In a computer, at least they are explicit. We can see exactly how they work. (Unless they're kept secret, which I agree should not happen when it comes to incarceration.)
Everyone can have an opinion, but opinions are not equally valid. I can have the opinion that climate change is caused by using AC power and that the world would be fine if we switched to DC. Hey, the rise of climate change coincides with the increase in use of AC power! But that doesn't make my opinion right, valid, or defensible in any sense other than that I am free to delude myself as I wish.
I am NOT defending the algorithms used in e-carceration. I don't know how they work and I don't know on what science, if any, they are built.
Algorithms are all around us. They benefit us hugely in aviation, medicine, meteorology, supply chains, and much more. And algorithms are WITHIN us. Whenever you or I say "this is better than that", we are using a mental algorithm.
There are many, many ways to write algorithms, and some are much better than others. Given the many real benefits of reducing incarceration, we ought to focus serious resources, and serious science, on getting our algorithms right. Fear of algorithms is not a solution.
5
Great article. And eye-opening. Ms Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow", should be required reading for everyone involved in the criminal justice system.
8
Are we going to let corporations control everything in this country? Corporations exist to make money for a handful at the top. They don't exist because they care about the public, yet we're letting them control our prisons, even the military to some extent, and if DeVos gets her way, corporations will control public schools and colleges.
Two hundred million to a private corporation to monitor the ankle bracelets? Prison guards barely make enough to support a family. Corporations suck the public coffer dry then convince us they're doing us a favor.
30
The answer is...don't break the law. And, if the police tell you to do something...just do it. I don't know anyone who has been in jail, and I am just short of 65 years old. I don't even know anyone who has been arrested.
The idea that we need to micromanage the criminal justice system suggests that we have developed situational ethics. This is a dangerous road for a society because there are basic values that we all share. I have learned over time that if I question whether something is right or wrong, what I am really doing is trying to discover a rationale for something that I know is not right.
12
@Rich: Don't speed, Rich. (People like you think speeding isn't "really" law-breaking. But read your own words.)
7
@Rich
As someone whose worst offense is getting a speeding ticket, I can assure you that our Justice Department has an agenda of its own and that is to prosecute and win. Period. It is not a fair system.
Former AG Holder had to tell states to back off. Overly zealous prosecutors were offering mediocre deals, and when the defendant refused, they were piling on more charges, essentially penalizing people for not taking their deals.
9
@Rich
What a blessed, privileged and fortunate life you've had thus far. But life is not like yours for the vast majority of the rest of the world. In fact, it might surprise you Rich, but even here in the world's wealthiest most exceptional nation, people struggle to get by because of poverty, racial discrimination, and/or inadequate education.
Your suggestion that there should be no consideration of individual circumstances in the criminal justice system, including in pretrial release eligibility, might make sense if America was truly a land of equality,. But we are still far from that goal line--probably no better than at our own 30-yard line, with Coach Trump having our team punting on first and ten.
Judges and pretrial release programs need to be able to exercise discretion in making eligibility determinations. Not every violation or violator of the law is the same. The same truth applies to sentencing. The idea that retaining individuality and discretion in pretrial release determinations represents "situational ethics" or a "dangerous road for society" is simply preposterous. The adoption of a purely computerized approach to dispensing criminal justice is, however, a genuinely dangerous step for any society to take.
4
I've actually set bail in criminal cases in New York City using a few simple rules -- murder defendants are not to be freed on bail, domestic violence defendants need special scrutiny achieved by setting very short adjournment dates, and there is a special need to review whether a defendant actually failed to appear for court dates in the past (after all, bail is intended to assure court re-appearances on future court dates).
There is a great, but unacknowledged, tendency to treat bail as if it should involve some calculation regarding possible guilt. Sure, consider what a criminal sentence might be because -- after all -- a really long potential sentence could motivate flight from prosecution.
But, even for bail, the presumption of innocence does play a role and is too often ignored in these discussions.
And, in the real world, the troublesome calculation is whether the defendant, if free, might undertake some independent horrific act other than the offense before you.
15
This past year, I attended an educational seminar addressing end of life issues. Most of the attendees were older and many of them were affiliated with religious groups and disabled rights groups. As we waited for the speakers to begin, a shrieking, piercing alarm blasted through the room. Startled, and irritated, many of us looked for the source of the hideous noise. I later learned that one of the attendees was wearing a monitoring device and that the shrieking device signaled the wearer to dial a phone number to check in and report her location to a parole or probation officer (or automated device (?). I suspect that the startling noise from this monitoring device does not contribute to a calm home life for the woman and her family if she has a family. And, I am certain that having to wear the device might keep the wearer from normal daily interaction for fear of the device going off. This could affect employment, engagement with community, and education. It seems to me that being forced to wear such a device constitutes a disability, imposed on someone who, the data nearly always suggests, started out with socioeconomic disabilities to begin with. Beware of the corrections-industrial complex.
76
@Debra Merryweather Interesting that the device makes such a loud, impossible to ignore noise. Why couldn't it just vibrate or otherwise discreetly alert the wearer to check in? Sounds like a device designed not just to track, but to shame.
8
When we use the term algorithms we can be talking about the math that defines a computer controlled switching system for train yards or how your computer keeps track of files, dates, etc.. It is math applied to the sorts of objective tasks that it has always served. It is dangerously naive to imagine that math can be used to administer justice, engage understanding, empathy or rule out bigoted values. Any justice system is rooted in and makes use of language, the meanings of words and the way we use them. Prison corporations want profits and those profits come from lowering costs, increasing fees and growth. "e-carceration" is a cold and nasty corporate accounting idea that is merely feeding on our neglect of the causes of crime and governments at all levels measuring their worth by the number of citizens they can find reason to put in jail.
11
I think the concern would be that a step in the right direction may produce a permanent economic incentive to keep people paying for their own e-carceration. Some of the biggest funders of campaigns against marijuana legalization are the for-profit prison companies who don't want to lose their market share.
8
"...systems that view poor people and people of color as little more than commodities to be bought, sold, evaluated and managed for profit."
Isn't this the very system we live in as capitalism?
13
@AG
Problem remains that capitalism is still the best way to lift people out of poverty. Plenty of statistics to show this is the case around the world.
4
My college age son, a white educated upper middle class boy was arrested for driving under the influence. He could have been sentenced to serve time in jail. Instead he wore an ankle bracelet which allowed him to travel to work and required him to return home after work. The ankle bracelet only allowed him so many feet to walk outside his home, when not working, for three months. For him it was highly embarrassing, which he was able to keep a secret from workers and friends. It was must a much better alternative than jail. The cost of an ankle bracelet should be based on how much a person can reasonably pay and the state pick up the rest. It's cheaper than sending people to jail.
13
But he had a home to return to and walk so many feet outside ... both the antecedent and consequence of the arrest for dui are white educated upper middle class. The reserve explains much crime, including more serious crime.
1
So what is the alternative? Send them all to college at the taxpayer expense? We know the exact sequence of events that bought these people to this pass. A single mother raising children on welfare from numerous absentee fathers some of whom are in and out of incarceration living in a neighborhood with similar families and failing schools. Getting into petty crime and drug dealing as a juvenile where the criminal justice system gives a free pass. A life already hardened in crime by the time they are adults, getting a few more passes before a major infraction or a judge finally losing their patience. It is all right to have high hopes and good intentions but you have to realize what you are working with, which is exactly what this computer algorithm is attempting to do. The truth is that the middle class wants crime free neighborhoods, and they will force their politicians to deliver, whether it is via Jim Crow, three shots and you are out or ankle bracelets. If you stop employers from having the crime histories of their prospective employees, employers are just going to get around this by alternative means or redlining because this is material information that employers need to have. What needs to change is the social ethos where people keep having children they cannot look after. What needs to happen is that people care enough for their children that they want them to live a life of dignity and respect. Civil rights activists need to stop looking at the state for solutions.
19
@Rahul
"So what is the alternative? Send them all to college at the taxpayer expense?"
That would be cheaper than keeping prisoners locked up, and would give them a REAL chance at reducing recidivism, being productive and active citizens, and building prosperous life for their families. So, yes.
46
@Rahul No. While some countries do provide college education for everyone who is qualified, very few people are suggesting that for the U.S.
Not everybody needs to go to college.
The problem is that our jails are full of people who are there mostly because they can't afford the minimal bail set by judges. While they are in jail, they lose jobs, custody of children, apartments, and economic opportunity. When they are released, and almost all prisoners are eventually released, they are shut out of jobs that require any sort of trust, and limited to either minimum wage jobs or grey/blackmarket work that puts them at risk for reincarceration.
Those "single mother families" are often caused by a father who is incarcerated.
We also lock up a lot of people for "guilt by association" in this country--someone in the car with you has a backpack with marijuana and you're all wearing the same NY Yankees' hat--that's a gang crime. So now a whole car full of men has the choice of pleading out for a year in jail or facing a much longer sentence. That's how kids end up without a dad.
Violent crime is fairly rare, and should be punished appropriately, but excess criminalization in the U.S. strips us of our greatest value--Freedom.
23
@Rahul, your comment is horrifying. Your sentence "We know the exact sequence of events that bought these people to this pass." shows smug ignorance. Your question "Send them all to college at the taxpayer expense?" shows you don't care one whit about the issue raised in this column. I suggest you rethink your emotional reaction.
11
I was the Superintendent of the security classification in a prison system that used algorithms to determine inmates' access to lower security to include minimum security, work release programs, residential correctional addiction treatment programs and electronic monitoring. We ditched the math and created a decision matrix based on the characteristics of each inmate's crime, institutional history and length of sentence. We increased the portion of the sentenced population's placement in graduated release programs from 25% to 75%, reduced the re-incarceration rate of discharged inmates from 55% to 35% and saved millions of dollars.
If something bad happens like a pretrial inmate committing a crime while on their own recognizance or a sentenced inmate committing one while they are on work release status, correctional staff can hide behind the algorithm and abdicate responsibility for the decision making. If you have to make a risk management decision based on reasoning, the blame is placed squarely on the organization that made the decision. The latter way, though more painful when it fails, leads to better decisions, better public safety and better accountability of the officials running our correctional facilities.
360
@Jerry S.
Thanks for your perspective Jerry. Nominal systems are sometimes better than numerical systems. Our system also had overrides, so that someone denied from lower security could appeal our decision and we would weigh the reasons they cited why they should be allowed access to step down programs. Every override we allowed finished their sentence without incident and were usually model inmates during their stay in lower security. They were grateful and had something to prove.
44
@Tomas O'Connor
Thank you for sharing your expertise in this matter. Your excellent comment helps to clarify the issue.
24
@Tomas O'Connor, great post, from someone with a lifetime of experience in this area. I'm a career technology worker, and something I learned over the years is that some things should not be automated just because they can be, and maybe this is one of those. A non-computerized possibility would be a simple checklist that a judge could calculate. However, one thing a computerized system CAN do is compare one person's experience to a larger population's, so there's value in that also.
What I'm taking away from this article is that we've made some progress, but we don't have all the answers yet, and this problem still needs more work.
100
It is the federal prison system which has a huge population prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes (e.g., drug distribution). Low income communities of color endure a disproportionate percentage of violent crime. The victims are within the perpetrators’ own neighborhoods - whitey is not much affected. To refer to systems designed to ensure court appearance as an extension of “Jim Crow” is to blow a different kind of dog whistle.
5
@Johnny...
Care to talk to someone who has kicked the drug habit about the problems caused by the pusher?
Drug peddling is NOT a victimless crime.
Indeed it's more like an extended murder whereby the victim's life is murdered every day that he is hooked.
4
Inequity, thy name is justice.Our judicial system is a disgrace to democracy. It presupposes guilt by race and personal wealth.
If a poor black man admitted groping women he was in contact with, he would spend years in jail and be monitored the rest of his life. Donald Trump did it, and earned a four year gig in the White House with unlimited power over millions of lives.
If the vast majority of mass shootings were done by blacks, gun reform would have already happened.
A white girl accused of shoplifting a bracelet, gets a call to mom and an embarrassing interview. A black male teenager who is accused of stealing a backpack, spends months in jail, until despair pushes him to suicide.
Eliminating bail and adding a $300 monitor won't help. It becomes an endless source of revenue and trials will never happen.
American law is dictated by vengeance, not justice.
39
@Maureen Steffek...
Point for you to remember, ma'am, is that criminal justice has always been about extracting "payment" for the crime. Been that way since communal governance emerged to assure the commonweal.
And unless you are willing to allow the man who sexually assaults you to walk free, criminal justice will ALWAYS have a healthy component of retribution.
Think before you reply.
The issue should not be about the underling societal interest in the right of the governed to the quiet enjoyment of their lives, but about how best to balance the competing interests.
I have no favor for a justice that allows one man to go free and another to pay a stiff penalty for the same crime.
But, perhaps, you should vote for states and county attorneys that are willing to uphold the laws as written or work to get them changed.
And, perhaps, you should no longer tolerate your state's government installing judges who have nothing to recommend them other than a couple of thousand dollars in campaign contributions. After all, it is the judge that goes along with the ridiculous plea deals and lets some miscreants off the hook while throwing the book at others.
2
Yes, SOME GOOD points are made. the system is far from perfect and the justice system needs a complete reworking, as does society, taxes, health care etc.
But ANY OPTION to PRISON is an INPROVEMENT.
6
We have all seen the tragedy of young black males caught in the Kafkaesque grip of the criminal justice system at an early age which will limit their future prospects in service of no legitimate societal purpose. So I ask these questions with all due respect. Is there still such a thing as a "debt to society?" And, if so, what constitutes full repayment of that debt short of fulfillment of the original term of the sentence? Surely social control is not illegitimate in all circumstances.
1
"Be careful what you wish for" is very applicable here. We try and impose what sound like good ideas, logic and order, on a population of humans who are inherently not. Case in point, gun control laws. California has restrictive laws, which did nothing to prevent last Wednesday's mass shooting. Often, what sounds good in theory, or works in the lab, fails in the real world. Open this Pandora's box much further and we might all end up under constant surveillance. We are already largely there. Do we want to push it more? Be seeing you.
6
@Patrick
But remember Michelle Alexander's article, where she recommends four solutions, one of which is mental health care. Optimal health care would require absence of stigma, correct diagnosis, and implementation of best practices.
I'm extremely grateful to Trump and his son-in-law, Kushner, for pushing prison reform. I hope that Session's departure will remove the final roadblock.
Not only would these programs address the minimum sentencing guidelines, considered out of date and extreme, but they would also target recidivism. Texas has already had some success in this are. Earlier release for good behavior would be a good start.
Worrying about racism in algorithms is an exercise for those engaged in the study of racism. I'm much more worried about reducing recidivism.
8
Digital incarceration is just another way for someone to make money by keeping a class of people enslaved with no public oversight and no accountability. All algorithms should be matters of public information and be subject to public modification. Costs should be borne by the public agency concerned, not by the subject individual who has yet to be proven guilty of the offense in a court of law. This whole thing is a way to ruin lives for the sake of some company making money, and it's disgusting.
8
@macduff15..
Of course, the little darlings had nothing to do with ruining their own lives...
It is all the fault of the fat cats...or the deplorables...or the racists.
Would it be curlish of me to point out that most of the jurisdictions that are having these problems are controlled by the left and have been so controlled for almost half-a-century?
Why is it that the state legislatures, governors, city councils and the like haven't used their absolute political control to resolve the problems?
Is it because they lack the political will?
Or, is it because they are just down-right hypocrites?
Please give us the answers to these questions...We would all like to be more informed.
1
In many ways, we have not progressed too far beyond the culture of our colonial days of having to be a land owner to have any rights. I have walked across America several times as a white guy, and I've been stopped many times by the cops and got harassed.
3
@Richard W. Shubert
Try walking across America "as a black guy", and give us a report on your findings.
They certainly would be interesting. Not very informative, but interesting nonetheless.
3
Our former minnesota attorney general, Lori Swanson, released the expunged criminal record of her former aid a, mr d,Andrea Norman, while running for the governors primary in Minnesota. Fortunately ms Swanson did not win her primary against governor elect Tim Walz. Mr Norman tried to block this action and was told it was part of the public record. Mylife.com an online search mobster, continues to send emails into my junk folder about my own supposedly criminal record. It once sent me enticements about my neighbors criminal records. I had once used this service to search for a former lover to my mistake and now horror. Now I cannot get rid of mylife.com. The Point here is, what information about a person online is just as damaging and insidious and also never goes away. This information can and certainly has been used as reasons for denials in housing and in the job market. Even your credit rating seems to be public information and a source of discrimination. This electronic shaming will not stop until the leadership in this country does something about it. Persons of color must see this as worse in some ways than Jim Crow discrimination.
1
@John Q...
Hmmm...Funny thing about "public records"...
They tend to be...well...er...public records.
As for Ms. Swanson's actions, the appropriate approach to holding her accountable is to report her to the administrative judge that heads the judiciary.
He and his panel have the ability to suspend or revoke law licences for ethical lapses of licensed attornies.
1
There isn't a presumption of innocence any longer if there ever was. And now justice costs more than most of us can afford. We can bankrupt ourselves proving our innocence. Given that we've heard plenty about how prosecutors conduct themselves in order to avoid giving out exculpatory information and how the police investigate and testify/lie it doesn't seem to matter what one's skin color is as long as one is rich. (However, I do agree that being white is a huge advantage in our prejudicial justice system.) America fails at being humane at many levels but nowhere as obviously as justice.
41
@hen3ry
The Democrats in the Senate certainly showed that a significant segment of our government doesn't believe in the presumption of innocence even when that presumption is one of the essential rights afforded citizens of our nation.
1
@hen3ry
It's worse watching how powerful people get away behavior that would be prosecuted if engaged in by ordinary Americans. I can tell you from watching firsthand how the Justice Department operates that it takes no prisoners. No regular citizen would ever get away with destroying evidence under subpoena, regardless of any extenuating circumstances, as Hillary did. If anything, Justice would have added even more charges, as it does, until people cave and settle.
2
@AACNY - Yes! And that is exactly what will happen if Roe vs. Wade is overturned and states overly restrict the right to chose. Only the rich, powerful and connected will get away with getting abortions for their daughters, girlfriends and paramours.
I'm so glad you see things my way.
2
The essay is not an attempt to address the entire incarceration/discrimination problem, but highlights a tiny - but critical- element that would be easy enough to fix because its unintended consequences destroy the benefits.
Pretending that algorithms remove or even reduce bias is absurd, though they could provide another data element for human decision making. But billing the accused for the electronic handcuff and restricting movement to an area too small to allow a person to hold a job is self defeating. In fact it is a return to “debtors’ prisons.” If a person should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and justice delayed is justice denied, why should he be asked to pay for the fact the society has not provided resources for quick trials. And when declared innocent, how will he repay the unjust debt?
30
@stephdlk..
I agree, that this article addresses a small slice of the problems in our criminal justice system.
But as it is only a small slice, it is an error to assume that the slice isn't a part of a much larger pie, and that proposals that don't consider and reflect through the greater context, as Ms Alexander fails to do, are misleading and, more likely, irresponsible.
2
The recidivism rate is 70% or above. Criminals that are punished to the full extent of the law right now are being released and committing more crimes and going right back to prison under the current system. Who really thinks we need to be softer on crime? Why is it that 13% of the population in this country commits 80% of the crime? This is because of institutional racism I suppose? I do not buy it. There are large areas in almost all of the large cities here in the US that are fallen. Failed states that police do not respond to 911 calls. Emergency personnel are routinely fired at by gang members. We all know those areas. We need to solve the crime/poverty issues in these places because that is where much of the prison population comes from. Ask the incarcerated population how many grew up in public housing in crime and poverty ridden parts of our cities. We need to address this first.
11
@Mark And if a person who is released from prison cannot get a job because most job applications ask about past convictions, and few people are willing to hire a convict, what is he supposed to do?
Our system is designed to generate recidivism. The companies running our prison system don't want prisoners released, regardless of whether or not they've served their sentences. They want beds filled in their facility, because every filled bed equals a fad wad of taxpayer dollars flowing into their pockets.
It is in the financial interest of prisons to keep recidivism rates high, that way they can keep charging the taxpayers to house the prisoners. If crime actually went down, and people who got out of prison actually managed to stay out of trouble, these companies would lose money. Obviously we can't have that.
71
@Mark
I agree (thinking specifically about Chicago and those poor residents). However, recidivism programs are crime-reducing programs and the emphasis on them is a good thing.
My own view is that prisons should be treated more like hospitals -- that is, rewarded for keeping people out following treatment and penalized for too many "returnees". If the payment to these private organizations were tied to reducing recidivism, who knows what might change?
6
@Sam Rosenberg...
Are you going to hire 20-year old kid who was convicted of armed robbery, sir?
No?..I didn't think you would.
2
This is a brilliant and cogently argued piece. Underlying it, of course, is an argument that we are locking those who are not yet convicted of anything into these digital prisons and that we are doing so out of irrational fear of anyone touched by law enforcement (arrested) or involved in criminal proceedings...even before they are convicted.
Parole supervision is a different issue (though related) than pre-trial/conviction detention. That so many comments miss this indicates just how much ignorance and fear drives public opinion with respect to stripping individuals of their liberty.
27
This opinion piece is all over the place. Everyone is against corruption within the privatized prison/bail industry. But that has little to do with the general need to keep suspects from fleeing or offending again while awaiting trial. If cash bail is too problematic, ankle bracelets sound like a perfectly good alternative.
12
@Max Cash bail and ankle bracelets are punishments for people who have not been convicted of anything yet. Can you imagine paying an additional $300 per month--when you're already poor--just so you have the opportunity to prove your innocence?
4
@Tom B
Yes, because I believe in our justice system and I don't see any reasonable alternative. When you are arrested you are placed in handcuffs even though you haven't been convicted of anything, right? There has to be a balance. We have to trust our judges to determine if an accused is a flight risk and/or a danger to the public, and act accordingly. If the person is poor, I see nothing wrong with the ankle bracelet.
@max
I work in the justice system and I think it is profoundly broken.
Look up the story of Khalid Browder for an example of what happens when you can’t afford bail or monitoring.
2
All well and good to improve conditions so we have fewer people committing crimes. But the author has no suggestions about what to do NOW to deal with bail releasees. Unless she is saying do nothing except release them. That does fit with presumption of innocence. But the bail system is based on assumptions of risk of dangerousness and of flight. Don't ask me to square the circle of those three points. But given that this is the system, and given the author's preference for less close supervision, then aren't bracelets preferable?
10
@Rhporter People who fail to show up for court dates can be arrested. Locking up a poor person because they can't find $500 is irrational. Judges often set bail without considering if the person is a flight risk or can afford it (though this is unconstitutional) because they don't want to risk their jobs for letting anyone go.
Just release them. They'll show up for their court date 95% of the time.
1
There's little in here about protecting the public from released prisoner recidivism. If families/communities/ex-felons, can be safely released into the community to responsibily stay crime-free and follow the probationary rules, wonderful.
The rub comes when some released prisoners relapse back into crime in their communities, and sometimes -- draw in other (often) younger people, via new crimes and new pregnancies. For some in society, it remains best if they are locked up. This is true especially for the denser, minority urban neighborhoods where employment is low, family influences often cannot override community influences, and the community itself is bleak.
Do you want to live safely in those places?
Sadly, sometimes the neutrally programmed computers are effective when factors like public safety are considered in articles like this too. I suspect it is more a class thing, with ex-criminals from middle-class black family backgrounds afforded early release more often where affluence can afford opportunities to keep the ex-offenders sheltered from the former criminal element.
11
@Midway
You appear to want to skip the horrendous racial skews of mass incarceration: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/ ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," Oct 2016).
You should take a look at the diverse partners in the Coalition for Public Safety, a group committed to a more reasonable criminal justice system with less mass incarceration: https://www.coalitionforpublicsafety.org/about .
7
@Midway
JSK: You appear to forget that the mass numbers of victims of crime are not middle class people, and are not "white".
I am all for "diverse partners" but until this includes poor people, black people, and those people who have to live in the communities in close proximity with those released criminals, you are kidding yourself if you think that you can achieve "racial equality" in early-release opportunities. Like you state, the underlying numbers will prove whether alternative methods to incarceration can prove effective in all communities.
Otherwise, you are simply damning more poor people struggling to stay out of criminal circumtances to exposure to more criminals, some of whom may have proved reformed and some of whom may transmit criminality and violence with them.
2
@Midway
I doubt anyone is kidding anyone. We have to cut our prison population, the highest in the world, with incarceration rates racially skewed and also subject to the problems of poverty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate (and read Coates essay linked above).
You appear to say that we should keep them locked up because they'll go back to the same places steeped in poverty that give us such huge incarceration numbers to begin with. It would be better not to lock so many people up--for quite diverse reasons--and sometimes for much too long.
You won't get any argument from me that economic inequality drives racial tensions in this country. It is going to be extremely difficult, barring some widespread crisis, to get control of this. But keeping people locked up because they are poor, which is why they were often locked up to begin with (inadequate legal representation)?
There are many issues to be addressed in our lopsided system: https://www.coalitionforpublicsafety.org/issues (sentencing, corrections, re-entry, asset forfeiture, addressing life-long consequences of a criminal record).
2
Salient points made here. As a juvenile court defense attorney I was always wary of the risk assessments completed to help the court determine dispositions. These assessments ascribed points to juveniles, and the indicators of course were skewed against young men of color, for instance, with no father at home, a mother on drugs, being raised by an aging relative, and school difficulties.
11
@Al Singer
After reading, "Just Mercy", by Bryan Stevenson about wrongful incarceration, I began reading about juvenile life sentences. A lot has been written about the state of the juvenile mind and how it's still forming. I was struck by the studies that found juvenile criminals are capable of reform. There is hope for them.
16
While I applaud Ms. Alexander's criticisms, her characterizations of the causes and motives fall short. The Jim Crow system just as today's mass jailing and policing are not failing or misguided. They are doing precisely what they have always been intended to do for capitalism. They are part of the system of labor discipline for the ruling rich. The objectives are to instill fear, ensure a supply of cheap labor, and impose and maintain divisions in the working class to weaken any attempts at resistance. The caste-like oppression of the Black working class has been integral to this, and their 'criminalization' is integral to maintaining it. However, the growing similarity of worsening conditions for workers who are white and Black is increasingly undercutting these historic divisions and will provide the basis for new struggles against their common enemy and tormentors.
Yes, the goal is not to "fix" the inhuman prison system but to overthrow and transform this inhuman society which depends on such brutal systems. It can be done.
18
Your final sentence is right out of the original End Jim Crow handbook. Perhaps certain forces are indeed trying to re-establish a milder, subtler and digital version of it. The amoral private prison lobby doesn’t care as long as its investors are happy.
5
@AR - Description? Spot-on! Prescription? Not on!
Dealing with imperfect human beings does not bode well for prescriptive solutions involving "overthrow." The ideal of equal justice under the law is the best that we mortals can hope for. "Overthrow" of a society which at least pays homage to that ideal, even if it hasn't yet lived up to it, may produce a new society whose ideals you cannot predict. There is another law you should be aware of; the law of unintended consequences.
"Transformation?" That's another story but that takes hard work, dedication and, unfortunately, time. Do you have what it takes? You are very impatient, Grasshopper, but the rewards may not be yours to experience. That's why leaving the world better than you found it is better than blowing it up and starting anew because you never know what you'll find in the rubble.
2
@RDG it's also right out of her inaugural NY Times op-ed that ran in October!
I agree completely with Ms Alexander's warnings about digital incarceration. Regardless of the method of restricting the movement of individuals, when humans are involved in creating those methods there's inevitably going to be abuse and profiteering, particularly in this dystopian Trumpian era.
Where I differ with Ms Alexander is her pointing to legalization of marijuana as progressive. From the standpoint of decriminalization and decreased incarceration, yes I think it's long overdue. But, as an Addiction Medicine Specialist, I'm not exactly thrilled with the reality that yet another addictive substance has been added to the free market along with alcohol and tobacco. Don't kid yourself that there isn't BIG MONEY behind making marijuana the next bonanza for those very companies that have hit the wall with alcohol and tobacco sales. And wouldn't it be convenient if the numbness of marijuana intoxication coupled with digital incarceration makes it that much easier for those corporations to blithely steal us blind, destroy our families and communities? There are so many insidious forces at play in this world that make self-respect and respect for others a constant challenge.
10
An anecdotal account of what I've witnessed as it relates to prison for pay. I know guys who were tethered at a personal cost that resulted in garnishment of their wages and state income tax refunds being withheld due to their failure to pay what was owed. These alternatives to incarceration for some come at a very hefty price, and I kind of think it's worked as a deterrent too. The message I get from this is to refrain as best I can from getting into any kind of trouble: it's the financial attachment that worries me more than the time behind bars.
4
I am stunned but did know enough about the horrors of private prisons to be shamed. I am such a very well intentioned person toward my fellow man right up to the point where I should do something with the knowledge that people are in pain and need and being wronged. Oh, I do ask God to help them.
3
The adage "garbage in, garbage out" holds true. Just don't limit yourself to a narrow meaning of the term "garbage." And the same is true, by the way, of "studies." Studies as a term seem to carry their own validity but by their very nature are focused, limited and often serve a special interest.
9
Condemning "mass criminalization" and "mass incarceration" is cheap political rhetoric.
Criminals destroy the lives of other citizens and deserve incarceration to protect society.
Notably absent from most "progressive" recommendations are the following practical and constructive rules
1. obey the law
2. get the best education and work skills possible
3. avoid drug and alcohol abuse
4. don't have children until you can support them
5. don't consider yourself a victim since that gets you nowhere
Any individual who violates these rules is unlikely to be successful in any country in the world.
56
Individuals who claim they know best how others must behave are either profoundly ignorant of human behavior, deliberately authoritarian or both. Just telling people what they should or should not do without admitting the structural defects of a system designed to suppress, control and profit from them is sheer privilege in the extreme.
80
@SDTrueman
Excellent comment! The degree of difficulty in following the rules proffered by jck varies wildly depending where one is in our society. The problems facing many are truly formidable obstacles, and these should be recognized and ameliorated, or at least taken into account in what is done.
11
@jck
1. Studies show that whites and non-whites tend to commit crimes at the same rates, but only non-whites go to prison ... wonder what that's about?
2. Not possible for many who attend failing schools, which just happen to be in impoverished neighborhoods of color. And by failing schools I mean schools without adequate textbooks, crumbling buildings, lack of facilities like libraries, etc.
3. Yup, good advice for all, not just identified criminals.
4. For most people, myself included, "affording" children would have meant never having a child.
5. Unless you are. Systemic racism is an observable, identifiable phenomenon. Otherwise, white and non-white children would have the same quality of education, would be treated the same in schools, would be considered with the same potential. White and non-white adults would be incarcerated at the same rates, stopped by law enforcement at the same rates, etc.
30
I don’t understand what the proposed alternative is. “Investing in education etc” is a string of platitudes, not policy. The fact is: people commit crimes if they are caught, and they have to be isolated from the community. I am not willing to trade my personal safety and property for a feel-good policy that will let dangerous people, no matter their skin color, out in the streets. Yes, the algorithms reflect the social reality of the US - how else would they function? Yes, this reality is inflected by the legacy of racism. But the criminal justice system has to deal with society as it is, not as we would like it to be. Crime rates in the US are very high compared to the rest of the civilized world. African-Americans commit crimes at a higher rates than their proportion in the population. These are facts. It does not matter what the causes are. What matters is that people will rebel if crime rates go up because of a new social policy. Witness Brazil and the Philippines where tough-on-crime populists were elected by a groundswell. If you don’t want it to happen here, put criminals in jail and use algorithms to determine who is safe to go on bail. It’s not perfect but then, nothing is.
34
@Mor
I take issue with several things.
For example, you assume that there is one reality in this country, presumably the one you see when you wake up in the morning. In fact, the social and criminal justice systems create inequalities and very different realities.
You say that the causes of criminal behavior don't matter. Just lock 'em up? Really? Nothing's perfect so why bother to improve anything? We should not address the causes of problems?
You also say that you have personal safety that you are unwilling to trade for policy changes and that changes in social policy will result in higher crime rates. Clearly you enjoy safety and security unavailable to so many, and it seems thoughtless to assume that increasing the security and well-being of others will cause crime. In fact, the opposite result is far more likely.
You say investing in education isn't policy?
You suggest that unless we lock more people up we'll end up like the Philippines? In fact, rates of violent crime have been dropping generally, and mass incarceration will solve nothing. Not only is that unjust and cruel, it is extravagantly costly in many ways, and those incarcerated will, at some point, be released into society.
Perhaps we should identify problems and address them.
7
@Mor Many scholars and law enforcement experts disagree that African Americans commit crimes at higher proportional rates. They do agree, however, that people of color are disproportionately convicted of their alleged crimes.
Something else for you to consider: check out Devah Pager's obituary in today's Times. She documented clear evidence of racial bias in the job market. She showed that white felons were more likely to get called for job interviews than black non-felons. It does seem that whites get all the breaks...
10
@Jim Hugenschmidt Addressing causes of crime is a very good idea but most criminologists no longer believe that there is a direct correlation between poverty and crime. Crime is a product of dysfunctional communities. Poverty is only one factor in what makes a community sick. I traveled to places, such as Cambodia and Vietnam, where poverty is much worse than in US and I felt safer than in Chicago or certain parts of San Francisco. So yes, cultural factors have to be addressed but it’s not as simple as “investing in education”. What kind of education? The US has one of the highest rates of per capital spending on education, and little to show for it. The two strategies that definitely contribute to lowering of crime rates are abortion and social surveillance. But since there is little appetite in the US for the kind of programs they have in China, incarceration is the next best. I am very much in favor of increasing safety and security for everybody, and this means locking up a certain percentage of people who cannot be trusted to live in society.
5
Your column provides some introduction and insight into the move to end cash as well as the systems that might replace cash bail. The prospect of privatized e-carceration is frightening. There are some essential functions of government that should local, state and federal government should be required to perform directly and not delegate, or contract out, to private persons or corporations. Confining persons accused or convicted of crimes is such a government function. The civil rights provided in our Constitution are meaningless if government both empower private persons and corporations to violate civil rights with impunity and avoid accountability by insisting that the violations are the unauthorized actions of private persons and corporations.
41
@OldBoatMan: But that lessens the chances for all those government ‘agents’ to get kick backs, pay backs, hand outs, paid vacations, etc. So, it will never happen.
When SS started the payments were supposed, after years of people paying in, supposed to rise, beyond ‘cost of living’ raises. But, they didn’t. Congress embezzled too much to fund projects the Big Donors wanted (both individuals & corporations). If they hadn’t their donations (kickbacks?) would have disappeared. Ruin a government workers (not all, quite a few are honest) ability to get kickbacks & the whole system will fail. The same is true of the Jail (pretrial) & Prison (post sentencing of the guilty) system. The Parole system, once the pretrial citizens were added, has lead to a large increase in over officiousness.Those never in the system before often believe they should be treated decently (biggest joke in the universe). When many levels of the system are crooked, no one has a chance.
1
The long pull of rehabilitation of communities to enable the rehabilitation of people gets no political traction today. There is zero interest in other than managing and controlling people for profit. The crime of privatized prisons is being compounded by the crime of e-carceration by algorithm. It's akin to saying "we're going to poke out one of your eyes so you can still get around, but if you make the slightest mistake we'll poke out the other one".
15
This is a very clear explanation, for which I am grateful. However, it overlooks that things must be this way. Our policy options are relatively crude, and they are adjusting a very complex system.
"Unintended consequences" are outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action.
Actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.
This is because such things are done in very complicated systems. It is not all the way to chaos theory, but it is along that line. It is not a failure to foresee what could have or should have been foreseen. It is that we just can't foresee it all. It is just too complicated.
Anyway, our options are crude, and their effects not precise. We proceed by approximations and fixes as new effects emerge. We can't, and don't, apply complex detailed policies all in one go to produce a perfected outcome. We approximate.
Think of it as tuning an old radio knob. You go past it, you go past it back the other way, but less so. Eventually you get it pretty good. That is policy in complex matters.
It is important that we realize that is what we are doing. It is all we can do, in any one adjustment. We must not get arrogant, and think one twist of the knob is all it will take to get it right.
8
Having taught in both women's and men's prisons for my university, I am appalled by the latest developments in turning our penal systems into money-making profits for corporations. I know how much inmates want to return to the families they have been separated from but these new restrictions and costs will drastically limit their efforts to be productive members of society.
125
@sayre sheldon-Some of the private prison companies guarantee a certain number of incarcerations.
2
@sayre sheldon
America leads the world in mass incarceration.
The 2.3 million Americans in prison are 25 % of the world's prisoners with 5 % of humanity. And 40 % of the world's prisoners are black like Ben Carson even though only 13 % of Americans are black. Because blacks are persecuted for acting like white people do without any criminal justice consequences.
Our prisons are too full of people with a medical health care conditions aka alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. A health care problem is being treated as a criminal justice issue is inhumane.
Our prisons are too full of people who are poor, uneducated, black and brown. Having any of these conditions should not be a crime.
Our prisons should be full of organized and career criminals who do the most damage to our socioeconomic educational and political damage. Such as the new robber barons and the new malefactors of great wealth in the new gilded age.
Our prisons should be full of violent criminals. Rehabilitation and release if possible should be a goal of prison. Along with deterrence and punishment.
There should be no private for profit prisons. Crime is a public government problem requiring a public government solution.
5
As a society we continue to put profits above humanity and are increasingly reliant on algorithms, not human judgment, to shape treatment of our citizens. Computers and programs are cheaper than people, but the information they contain reduces everything to yes/no bits of data. No judgement is involved.
19
This new development is frightening as it places automation above human understanding. It is a step toward enslaving us to machines. Judges are called judges for a reason. They pass judgement. They interact with peoples lives on a very personal level. Would you want your pastor, your priest, your rabbi, your imam to be a computer algorithm? I didn't think so. So why your judge?
This is most likely another money making scheme for corporate America that drives profits for Wall Street. Facebook has already ruined news, now they want to impose another set of algorithms that imprison us. The robot overlords are already here.
179
@Bruce Rozenblit
Right on!
See films " Robocop" ; "Judge Dredd" ; " Minority Report"
9
@Bruce Rozenblit-You're right, of course. Two investors profiting from the prison system: Trump funder hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and Trump advisor Erik Prince, of Blackwater infamy and Betsy DeVos's brother.
12
@Bruce Rozenblit
I think the data fed into the algorithms may be informative but that is all it should be, one input among many. End of the day, it comes down to humans making decisions that impact other humans’ lives. That process must include human discretion including empathy, nuance, and potential. Hope for each and recognition of malice needs to be balanced.
3