Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis (msn.com)
- Reference: 0184023908
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/06/21/2340231/several-us-states-bet-that-ai-can-solve-their-prison-recidivism-crisis
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/states-are-betting-that-ai-can-solve-the-prison-recidivism-crisis/ar-AA25Zviy
> 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.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/states-are-betting-that-ai-can-solve-the-prison-recidivism-crisis/ar-AA25Zviy
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.
Re: (Score:3)
> they've just kept people in jail longer.
See, they found a way to get the support of the ones profitting from it.
Re: (Score:2)
Since "computers cant be held accountable", that is where this is going.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the idea is identifying people most likely to succeeded and get them out. This makes slightly more sense for LLMs, if you're just talking about reading a lot of public data for people who have no right to privacy anyway due to the harm they caused others.
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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 [1]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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Needleman
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
TLDR "listen up liberals, my wife left me"
No AI required (Score:3, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://www.coe.int/en/web/cpt... [coe.int]
[2]https://www.unibocconi.it/en/n... [unibocconi.it]
[3]https://www.instituteforgovern... [institutef...ent.org.uk]
Norway is good, though.
[1] https://www.coe.int/en/web/cpt/-/anti-torture-committee-once-again-deplores-prison-overcrowding-and-worsening-detention-conditions
[2] https://www.unibocconi.it/en/news/state-our-prisons
[3] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-local/england-and-wales-prisons/summary
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com]
Ideally the recidivism rate should be zero. It's not easy, though.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-country
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
> 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: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The purpose of a system is what it does. The US has about 4% of the world population, and about 20% of the world prison population. The last country to have that statistic was Soviet Union.
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:4, Insightful)
According to Wikipedia, the US has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 549 per 100,000: [1]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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Re: (Score:3)
Absolutely correct. If prisons are run by for-profit corporations, recidivism is in their interest. More "customers", you see.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their...? (Score:1, Troll)
No, I don't think this will fundamentally change the behavior of AI CEOs. It's probably better to just get rid of them in the worst way possible.
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:4, 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:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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)
In the past, filling up vacant prison places had a higher priority than keeping people out. So much so that some justices were incentivated to distribute long prison sentences whenever possible.
LMMFAO! (Score:2, Interesting)
"Well, we can't get it to stop suiciding kids, but we are pretty sure we can get it to non-criminal all of our criminals" :-D
So if I read this right (Score:2)
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)
This is obviously just graft and grift given to well-connected companies to do bullshit that has no effect on anything.
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
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Of course keeping the criminals locked up permanently would work also, right?
The real solution (Score:2)
Don't blacklist people from working. They paid for their crimes, let them live
Focus on the people, at both ends (Score:2)
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)
Some states (like Florida) LIKE recidivism. Where the private prisons, and all the contractors for the state owned ones are owned by the legislators, their families, and their big campaign contributors. They've removed all counseling, education, and training for trades from the prisons, including the GED classes that were paid for by the feds and which actually turned a small profit for Florida. They've skirted around the 14th amendment against slavery by paying the inmate workers with "gain time". Exce
Re: (Score:2)
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
Betteidge's law (Score:1, Insightful)
No. It can't.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But the headline didn't pose any question - it made a statement.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no question that states are betting on AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Additionally, the way it's phrased, as a "bet," is implicitly skeptical.
Re: (Score:1)
> 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)
I think that is the idea The donâ(TM)t âoereturnâ to prison, If the never left. If the full past history is known the max sentence is given.
Re:Betteidge's law (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also another thing at play for the ones who would be otherwise redeemable: most prisons are hellholes of punishment, not rehabilitation. If you choose to run a system that way do not be surprised that the likely outcome of people who have been in the system for any real lengh of time is recidivism.