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

Sentencing Commissions and Their Guidelines

Sentencing commissions, administrative agencies charged to develop and promulgate standards for sentencing, were first proposed early in the 1970s and first established in 1978. Of four recent major sentencing reform approaches-the others being parole guidelines, voluntary sentencing guidelines, and statutory determinate sentences-only sentencing commission systems continue to be created. Despite controversies associated with the highly unpopular federal guidelines, commissions and their guidelines have achieved their primary goals. Some commissions have achieved specialized technical competence, have adopted comprehensive policy approaches, and have to a degree insulated policy from short-term political pressures. Guidelines have reduced disparities and gender and sex differences in sentencing and by tying policies to available resources have enabled some jurisdictions to resist national trends toward greatly increased prison populations