Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis (msn.com) 80
America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison," reports the Wall Street Journal, "when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years."
Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner might be kept in a dozen places... Now a group of 19 prison systems are tackling the problem with digital tools and artificial intelligence in some cases. They are contracting with San Francisco nonprofit Recidiviz, whose computer systems bring together prisoner data from its disparate sources into digital dashboards. From there, corrections staff can see information — such as court records and notes from parole-board hearings — about a prisoner or parolee all in one place.
The company says its efforts are working: Recidivism has fallen 16% in the prison population its systems track. It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end," says Clementine Jacoby, chief executive officer of Recidiviz. Some criminal-justice groups show that recidivism is trending downward in general, though most of that data is nearly a decade old... The statistics from 11 states stop at 2019, and for four states stop at 2016. With 10 other states, no data was reported.
The company says its efforts are working: Recidivism has fallen 16% in the prison population its systems track. It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end," says Clementine Jacoby, chief executive officer of Recidiviz. Some criminal-justice groups show that recidivism is trending downward in general, though most of that data is nearly a decade old... The statistics from 11 states stop at 2019, and for four states stop at 2016. With 10 other states, no data was reported.
Betteidge's law (Score:1, Insightful)
No. It can't.
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There is no question that states are betting on AI.
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Additionally, the way it's phrased, as a "bet," is implicitly skeptical.
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It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end," says Clementine Jacoby, chief executive officer of Recidiviz.
In other words, we changed the paperwork so it looks like we accomplished something. Complete and utter bullshit.
There is a certain percentage of the population who are just horrible, evil people. No amount of "digital tools and artificial intelligence" can change that. Remove them from society, permanently, or else you are not serious about actually solving the problem.
Re: Betteidge's law (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Betteidge's law (Score:5, Insightful)
ok cool (Score:4, Interesting)
America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison,"
A noble and excellent goal. 90% of Americans can support this (the others are profiting from it).
bring together prisoner data from its disparate sources into digital dashboards. From there, corrections staff can see information — such as court records and notes from parole-board hearings — about a prisoner or parolee all in one place.
Ok, sounds like a great thing for computers to do. If they can get AI to help, then great. (Note: the AI isn't going to open manila folders).
The company says its efforts are working: Recidivism has fallen 16% in the prison population its systems track. It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end,
Sounds like they are not releasing people with a high risk of recidivism. In other words, they haven't fixed the problem of recidivism, they've just kept people in jail longer.
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they've just kept people in jail longer.
See, they found a way to get the support of the ones profitting from it.
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16% sounds pretty low, but it's probably reasonable. There are a lot of people in prison who can't be let out. I'm sorry, you stab someone, the chance of rehabilitation is very low. If they get 20 years, they need to stay in 20 years. Maybe they'l
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people who have no right to privacy anyway due to the harm they caused others.
Your problem starts here. Right to privacy is a human right, and these were established as response to the 3rd Reich catastrophe. One characteristic is that you cannot lose a human right, regardless of what you do. It can be temporarily restricted if another thing has priority, but it cannot be removed. Hence people like you are into violating human rights and as soon as that starts to be a general sentiment, a state/group/organization is on a very dark path. Yes, you may be able to get some statistic to lo
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Sounds like they are not releasing people with a high risk of recidivism. In other words, they haven't fixed the problem of recidivism, they've just kept people in jail longer.
Exactly. There are many people who just know they messed up, and in reality, have no intention of doing more crime. Then there are people who perhaps have little to no impulse control, or for one reason or another just think criminally. There are some people who just can't be rehabilitated.
Occasionally , it is a chemical thing, like lead in gasoline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. His research was pretty shocking, as lead damaged people tended to be involved in violent crime.
But there are some cases
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There are some people who just can't be rehabilitated.
No that is too strong a claim. The best you can say is, "There are people we don't know how to rehabilitate."
Our understanding of the brain and psychology is so weak that over the next century or so, our knowledge is going to increase dramatically. Not long ago, people were seriously doing lobotomies (there's an argument to be made that we are still doing it today, but with chemicals. Certainly our understanding and treatment of ADHD will improve dramatically in the future, and what we do now will seem ar
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Our understanding of the brain and psychology is so weak that over the next century or so, our knowledge is going to increase dramatically.
The potential is there, but I do not think it will happen. Respective research would find out things that are massively unwanted by the rich and powerful. Just think about research into the mindset of malignant narcissists and you should immediately see what I mean. Or the (very solid) results that conservatives are dumber than liberals. Or that most people cannot fact-check. Or the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Bottom line is that we already know a lot, it is just not used because society and the leaders it choses
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As I understand, people who are in your first category (earnest desire to avoid crime in the future) find that nobody trusts them. Their criminal history follows them around so jobs are unavailable to them, promotions are unavailable, etc. This creates the very economic conditions that drive them right back into crime.
I don't know how much this actually happens, it's just a plausible narrative that I read about a while back.
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i know someone is that situation, after being incarcerated for less than a year.
he does have assets & some savings he hasn't touched yet but were it not for that, he'd be screwed.
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I do not think there are mysterious cases. There are just some where people chose not to cooperate enough for us to make a determination and that is their right.
Also note that there are quite a few "too important to jail" cases, see, for example some prominent stock scammers or rapists and child abusers or murderers/war criminals. These cases are probably the worst, because they give not-smart people the impression that you can get away with it. And hence overall ethics decline.
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TLDR "listen up liberals, my wife left me"
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If they're keeping the habitual criminals in prison, and it means fewer crimes committed against decent law-abiding folk, then what's the problem? Isn't the purpose of our laws and penal system to protect the innocent?
No AI required (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the prison models of almost any other industrialized Western country - make even the slightest genuine effort to reform people instead of considering them subhuman to be inhumanely tortured by the circumstances of their confinement followed by blocking them from participating in the economy upon release and results will improve.
Improve public education and remove inequalities and you remove crime as the best option for catching up to everyone else.
AI won't be used to help convicts, because nobody in the US wants to help them. It'll be used to better manage their shackles for increased profits.
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https://www.unibocconi.it/en/n... [unibocconi.it]
https://www.instituteforgovern... [institutef...ent.org.uk]
Norway is good, though.
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Ideally the recidivism rate should be zero. It's not easy, though.
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It's like calling the Democrats leftists, even though they are pretty far center right compared to other European parties.
people always be saying this but it isn't true, it's just a meme. example, bernies m4a plan was way more leftward than even european health care systems
also europe has its own right wing issues right now so maybe they should cram it just a teensy bit before saying this anymore, just because america has problems doesnt mean eu doesnt as well
Re:No AI required (Score:5, Interesting)
And most importantly, stop employers looking up your criminal history with the exception of a very few cases, like jobs working with children. Once you've served your time, you've served your time, and shouldn't be locked into a permanent future of being unemployable.
Re:No AI required (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some things where I think it's fair to never trust that person fully again. Ever. But we need a way to trust them enough to let them live and participate in society if we believe they are rehabilitated while still protecting everyone around them.
I'm sure that's not easy, but it has to be easier than lifetime incarceration.
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There are some things where I think it's fair to never trust that person fully again. Ever. But we need a way to trust them enough to let them live and participate in society if we believe they are rehabilitated while still protecting everyone around them.
I'm sure that's not easy, but it has to be easier than lifetime incarceration.
Off the top of my head, maybe RCA. Root Cause Analysis.
Say a guy gets depressed and murders his family. RCA finds underlying history of depression and pressures of work led to the event. Maybe mandatory anti-depressant treatment and monitoring, and he's never allowed to have a high-stress job.
Say someone keeps doing B&Es. RCA finds it's because they're homeless, poor, uneducated, and drug-addicted. Maybe shelter, basic food, and mandatory education can break that addiction.
Basically, people d
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There are some things where I think it's fair to never trust that person fully again. Ever.
Trust should be limited to the activity you can't be trusted. Where I live employers can request from the police an approval. But that approval is compared to the requested job position.
E.g. if a bank askes the police for this history of a convicted paedophile, they will get a reply saying there's nothing of concern in the history. Likewise if a school asks about the criminal history of someone committed of money laundering they'll also be told there's nothing of concern. On the flip side if the school asks
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Indeed. But the religious fundamentalists want people to be damned forever (!) and hence that is the prevalent sentiment in the US. Guess what, people that get no chance to reintegrate into society do not do so. Also makes for a nice "us vs. them" world-view, something the fundamentalists absolutely love.
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And in the Soviet Union everybody knew many of these were not real criminals ...
Sounds like AI isn't really a significant part... (Score:5, Informative)
The story makes pretty clear that they've been working this a long while, before at least the current hyped LLM was available.
To the extent "AI" might even play a role given their timeline, it was stuff that was pretty useless. People tried unleashing machine learning on these sorts of records and it just didn't do much.
Sounds like it's just a run at modernizing records keeping and access, which is fine.
Here's a thought (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Wikipedia, the US has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 549 per 100,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Canada - the country next door which is very similar in broad cultural terms - comes in at almost exactly one sixth of that number. So maybe the States might get serious about addressing the huge social and institutional forces which are largely responsible for that discrepancy?
A good start might be to make prisons NOT part of the for-profit private sector. This incentive to 'create' prisoners seems to be a contagion which has spread into policing and the whole justice system. Then you could maybe fix the public education system and introduce universal healthcare. Again, a major culprit here is having ceded care of public-good institutions to for-profit interests. These jobs are neither simple nor easy - but they need to be done.
Huge corporations whose number one mandate is to maximize profit and shareholder return at the expense of all else - are a worldwide problem. We all need to be fighting that fight. And it seems that the US needs to be fighting it more than most other countries.
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Absolutely correct. If prisons are run by for-profit corporations, recidivism is in their interest. More "customers", you see.
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Indeed. As is creating criminals. Hence school-to-prison pipelines and other utter evil.
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Also a problem is the entire support industry for the private prisons. All the special supplies for both prisoners and guards that come from a handful of companies. You know these companies all collude and jack up prices because they're the sole suppliers.
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A historic motive was that prisoners can not vote and felons lose their voting rights. If you didn't know, that was a plan to take black people out from voting. The tradition continues with other excuses covering for it. It's way more about poor people today and there will be many more poor people... with AI powered policing and legal processes you could be a felon quite easily in the future. Hell, if you just oppose fascism you are now a terrorist Antifa supporter (look it up, it's actually happened. BTW
Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their...? (Score:1, Troll)
Big Brother is watching (Score:1)
ChatGPT knows whether you've been naught or nice.
Has anyone ever seen Sam Altman and Santa in the same room together?
We know how, just don't want to. (Score:5, Interesting)
The nordic prison system has a recidivism rate is 20% within the first 2 years and about 25% within 5 years. The US system is 39% within 3 years.
Why don't we use something closer to Norways?
Because the Conservatives call it 'soft on crime'. They have 3 levels of prison: High, Low and Transition. The Low Security prison they use for non-violent first time offenders is what the GOP calls a 'country club' type with private rooms, lots of classes, library and therapy.
You only get their High Security if you were violent or become violent in the Low Security prison.
They also have a half way house/ transition system where they live in a prison but are allowed to go to work outside.
But this is clearly not "Hard on Crime", so Americans refuse to use it.
Note, in my opinion the "Hard on Crime" approach fails because normal prison is hard on crime so when someone claims to be Hard on Crime, what they end up doing is:
1) Push Judges and Police to be hard on SUSPECTS, resulting in more false accusations and more time in Jail waiting for a trial - both of which encourage people to commit more crimes.
2) Push newbie criminals to make friends in jail with the criminals as the guards are cruel and dismissive of the prisoner's concerns.
3) Prevent criminals from getting training and other resources they need while in prison, resulting in a much harder time getting out of the criminal life.
Re: We know how, just don't want to. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Norway wasn't founded by Puritans and Calvinists and fundamentalist Christians. Predestination makes is easy to rationalize that a person belongs in prison forever.
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I do not know whether predestination plays a role, but wanting to damn people for all eternity (or at least the rest of their natural lives) is a common theme with religious fanatics.
Re:We know how, just don't want to. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get back to me when places like NY and CA stop letting repeat violent offenders out on 'cashless' bail.
If you're accused of assaulting someone for the 2nd (or 3rd and more) time before your first case even makes it to court, you should not be free to continue your rampage.
Equally, we should not make any conviction a lifetime sentence of un-/under-employment. People need the ability to rejoin society and a normal, productive person who made a mistake.
Lastly, when a significant portion of the money spent on prisons is going to corporate profits, we are doing something very very wrong. It's a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders.
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1) You have been tricked by conservative propaganda. Cashless bail did not increase the rate of crime as compared to cash bail.
2) NY law (and NJ and Illinois) explicitly refused to release violent offenders on cashless bail. California does NOT have a cashless bail law, but the state supreme court has encouraged judges to set cashless bail for non-violent offenders. Both states have explicit language about non-violent only..
3) There were cases when people arrested for non-violent crimes were released on
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Yes. The claims they want less recidivism are simply lies. It is known how to get these rates down. It is well-known that positive reinforcement works a lot better than negative. It is known that making it easy for people to reintegrate into society, most will go for it. But they want to be "tough on crime". That is denial of reality and that never gives you good outcomes.
On the plus-side, large prison populations are good for keeping our citizens in fear and laws that criminalize everything and anything al
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Conservatives (not the tribal brand, actual meaning) are only correct by accident:
The philosophy is founded upon appeal to tradition which is a logical fallacy. They will fire up their brains sometimes and rationalize excuses in a reactionary defense which is inherently flawed and anti-science; rather than use their brains to discover truth, they do what feels good (often selfish) then use their brains to excuse what is arrived by thoughtlessness.
Contradiction, hipocracy and distraction a constant problem
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This also doesn't so much apply to the obvious thing, private prisons (although those are an issue they really are a small percentage of prisons in America) but moreso what nobody likes to say it's the funding ("profit") of law enforcement. Your local PD, sheriffs office and state police all are incentivized to arrest and incarcerate as much as possible and maintain their sky high funding levels.
My town just increased property taxes this year and over half of those funds ($230 million) is going to law enfo
In the past, filling up (Score:2)
LMMFAO! (Score:2, Interesting)
So if I read this right (Score:3)
As it is NOW, they don't even KNOW that they are recidivists, since they do not have the data from previous times.
God I'm tired of being lied too (Score:1)
One of the things that really pisses me off about these obviously corrupt government contracts is that people see this shit and just decide that government is completely irredeemable and worthless. Meanwhile government funded scientists are the ones making all your medicine and you drive on government roads and you're not dealing with feral teenagers because of public schools. Education
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amen, brother!
Americans can't solve any problems and the place is stuck in a doom spiral. It's like trying to convince a believer their religion is just a mythology inherited from their upbringing not much different than flat-earthers of the past ( present ones bring up a whole another example of fools.)
The USA always was #1 for cults for a reason!
Besides lacking critical thinking and an anti-intellectual culture (largely countered by educated immigrants but that no longer the case) the culture is all about
Prison Recidivism (Score:1)
The real solution (Score:2)
Focus on the people, at both ends (Score:4, Insightful)
A small % commit most crimes. Worst of the worst. Focus on them. 3 strikes and you're out
Require inmates to get a GED and learn a trade to get out. So they don't think they need to be criminals to survive. And get them off drugs.
We don't have enough plumbers, mechanics, welders, electricians, machinists, etc
Some states want recidivism (Score:1)
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I wasn't aware of some of those details, but you're dead right. There is a zero probability that any for-profit prison would not want to maximize recidivism.
And the government-run ones... Add county jails into this picture. In 2004, the Brevard Co., FL jail was horrid (someone very close to me was in it). Lunch? Green baloney. Anyone could claim that someone should be on suicide watch, and they were *not* isolated, but put in glass-walled cells, zero privacy, *with* bright lights on 24/x, and the a/c crank
Prison-Industrial Complex Boondoggle (Score:1)
The problem was never AI (Score:2)
They literally solved the problem and then added AI to the mix.
Recidivism rates (Score:2)
US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%
US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.
There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.
Guaranteed income & nutrition reduces recidivi (Score:2)
"Guaranteed income helps people leaving jail and prison, and that helps everyone"
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b... [prisonpolicy.org]
"Upon coming home from prison, people face the same â" and rising â" costs of living as the rest of us. But they have to bear additional costs imposed by the criminal legal system as well, all while navigating additional and unique barriers to employment. The resulting financial insecurity makes it harder to succeed at reentry. Cash assistance (often called â
Better options (Score:2)
"America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison," Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner might be kept in a dozen places.. ...nonprofit Recidiviz, whose computer systems bring together prisoner data from its disparate sources into digital dashboards. From there, corrections staff can see information â" such as court records and notes from parole-board hearings