Legal and Ethical Issues in the Prediction of Recidivism

Use of predictions of recidivism is ubiquitous in American criminal justice systems from pretrial detention to parole release and proceeds largely oblivious to fundamental ethical problems that were widely recognized and examined in the 1970s. They include the false positive problem that most people predicted to commit acts of serious violence would not, and their confinement for that reason is unjustified, that common use of fixed characteristics such as age and gender punish people for matters over which they have no control is per se unjust, that commonly used socioeconomic factors such as marital status, employment, education, and living discrimination, because they are heavily correlated with race and ethnicity, effectively discriminate against members of minority groups, and that use of some of the same socioeconomic factors punishes people for making lifestyle choices that are neither the state’s nor the law’s business. prediction of recidivism, false positives, indirect discriminatio

Public Prosecution and Hydro-engineering

There are inherent tensions between conceptions of public prosecutors as elected officials who respond to public intolerance of crime and criminals and as officers of the court who answer to normative injunctions of fairness and dispassion. Discussion of prosecutors\u27 roles has progressed little beyond recognition of inherent tensions. There is no literature on prosecutorial strategies. The empirical literature on prosecutorial operations is scant

Doing Injustice: Exchanging One “Arbitrary, Cruel, and Reckless” Sentencing System for Another

Marvin Frankel’s characterization of American sentencing in Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order remarkably successfully distilled ideas that were in the air and emerging. His main proposals—a sentencing commission, sentencing rules, requirements that judges explain their decisions, and meaningful appellate sentence review—would in a better America go a long way toward establishing the kind of rational, humane, and just process he imagined. Despite some early, partial successes, however, Frankel’s proposals remain largely untested. In retrospect, he underestimated, misunderstood, or chose to ignore formidable political impediments to serious sentencing reform in late twentieth century America. He also largely ignored two intractable problems, America’s extraordinarily long maximum and often—his word— bizarre authorized prison sentences and the overweening powers, then and more now, of American prosecutors. Despite all that, Criminal Sentences is a remarkable accomplishment. The ideas were ahead of their time. The writing is simple, clear, often witty, sometimes eloquent, an exemplar of good writing for lay people about legal subjects. In some gentler, kinder future its proposals may show the way to creation of American sentencing systems that take justice and human dignity seriously