The Rationality of Criminality

One of my favorite article titles is The Deterrence Hypothesis and Picking Pockets at the Pickpocket’s Hanging, written by David A. Anderson. It has long been my intuition that, unless eyewitnesses or the police are nearby, most people actively contemplating crime are rarely deterred by the prospect of being caught and are virtually never deterred by marginal differences in the sentence they would receive if convicted.  Anderson’s article reinforces that view. As Anderson’s title suggests, in merry old England, pickpockets thought they were so good at their trade they plied it even at the execution of one of their own. Anderson argues that the same dynamic applies today. Based on interviews with prisoners and a review of the literature, Anderson concludes that most violent criminals and the majority of all criminals “are impervious to harsher punishments because no feasible detection rate or punishment scheme would arrest the impelling forces behind their behaviors, which might include drugs, fight-or-flight responses, or irrational thought.” (P. 308.)

But that suggestion has not deterred(!) economists from continuing to focus on the optimal means of preventing crime. In The Economics of Crime: An Introduction to Rational Crime Analysis, Harold Winter, a Professor of Economics at Ohio University, provides a primer of the relevant literature. The opening chapter begins with a question that brings home the importance of economic analysis even if one is predisposed to discount the influence of premeditated cost-benefit calculations on putative criminals. Winter asks, Would you want to live in a society where murders never happen? Winter’s own answer is a strong no: he would “much prefer” (emphasis his) to live in a society in which murders occur. The benefits of a murder-free society would be far outweighed by two costs: the cost—in terms of infringements on freedom and privacy—of an all-out effort to stop homicides and the cost—in terms of diverted resources—to other important societal goals if such an effort were made. Echoing famed economics scholar Gary Becker, Winter suggests that a full cost-benefit calculation may even require factoring in the benefit of crime to the criminal. Overdeterrence can be just as costly as underdeterrence. Continue reading "The Rationality of Criminality"

Border Wounds

The use of electronic surveillance and dataveillance in policing are topics of ever-increasing interest. In the pages of JOTWELL, Chris Slobogin recently provided a helpful introduction to Sarah Brayne’s Predict and Surveil, which represents an important contribution to this field of study. In this post, I want to celebrate Ana Muñiz’s contribution to this growing body of work: her latest book, Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond.

While Brayne focuses on the LAPD, Muñiz initially trains her scholarly gaze on the practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). She explores the surveillance and information sharing practices that these agencies pursue as part of their efforts to identify and remove alleged gang members and “criminal aliens,” which is the term the federal government uses to describe “a noncitizen who has had contact with the US criminal justice system.” (P. 15.)  Of course, her research quickly extends right back to agencies like the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, whose labeling and surveillance practices shape, and are shaped by, federal immigration enforcement prerogatives. Continue reading "Border Wounds"

The Sociology of Big Data Policing

Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (2021).

For those of us law professors who write about policing, sociologists have been a real boon.  From the pathbreaking work of scholars like Jerome Skolnick and Michael Brown to the more recent research of Monica Bell and Issa Kohler-Hausmann, these trained observers and interlocutors of human and institutional behavior, who usually obtain much of their knowledge by embedding themselves in the criminal system, have provided law professors with extremely valuable insights about how things actually work.  One of the newer sociologists to join this group is Sarah Brayne, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas.

In her book Predict and Surveil, Professor Brayne paints a detailed portrait of how the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) uses big data and, in doing so, gives us a glimpse of what policing might look like in the future. The third-largest police department in the country, the LAPD has been at the forefront of the move toward predictive policing, the use of fusion centers, programs that compile detailed data about police-citizen interactions, and reliance on private companies to help make sense of all the information collected by police and other agencies. Over the course of five years, Professor Brayne’s research into these practices involved ride-a-longs in patrol cars and helicopters, dialogues with all tiers of the LAPD’s hierarchy, interviews with people in federal agencies and technology firms, deep dives into LAPD archives, and trawling the data the department uses for its investigations. (Pp. 7-8.) Continue reading "The Sociology of Big Data Policing"

The Costs of Privacy

Most scholarship about the impact of technology on policing has been of the sky-is-falling variety. The typical author recites a litany of technological advances, points out how those advances have made policing much more intrusive and pervasive, and then calls for a warrant requirement, some version of “privacy by design,” or perhaps even a prohibition on whatever surveillance technique is at issue. Maintenance of privacy is the main, if the not the dominant, goal.

In Smart Surveillance, Ric Simmons takes a completely different view. Adopting a cost-benefit analysis, he embraces technology that can make policing more efficient. The common scholarly refrain is that maximum Fourth Amendment protection must be imposed whenever technology gives the police a leg up—whenever, as the Supreme Court’s opinion in Carpenter v. United States put it when explaining why a warrant is required to obtain cell site tracking information, new technology makes enforcement efforts “remarkably easy, cheap, and efficient compared to traditional investigative tools.” To Professor Simmons, this stance makes no sense. Such thinking, he says, “turns the cost-benefit analysis on its head by seeking to deter some of the most productive searches available to law enforcement.” (P. 121.) Continue reading "The Costs of Privacy"

Gauging Genetic Privacy

James W. Hazel & Christopher Slobogin, “World of Difference”? Law Enforcement, Genetic Data, and the Fourth Amendment, 70 Duke L.J. 705 (2021).

Human beings leave trails of genetic data wherever we go. We unavoidably leave genetic traces on the doorknobs we touch, the items we handle, the bottles and cups we drink from, and the detritus we throw away. We also leave a trail of genetic data with the physicians we visit, who may order genetic analysis to help treat a cancer or to assist a couple in assessing their pre-conception genetic risks. Our genetic data, often but not always shorn of obvious identifiers, may be repurposed for research use. If we seek to learn about our ancestry, we may send a DNA sample to a consumer genetics service, like 23andMe, or share the resulting data on a cross-service platform like GEDmatch. If we are arrested or convicted of a crime, we may be compelled to give a DNA sample for perpetual inclusion in an official law-enforcement database. Law enforcement might use each of these trails of genetic data to learn about or identify us—or our genetic relatives.

Should law enforcement be permitted to make use of each and every one of these forms of genetic data, consistent with the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? That is the question that motivates James W. Hazel and Christopher Slobogin’s recent article, “World of Difference”? Law Enforcement, Genetic Data, and the Fourth Amendment. Hazel and Slobogin take an empirical approach to the Fourth Amendment inquiry, reporting results of a survey of more than 1500 respondents and probing which types of data access respondents deemed “intrusive” or treading upon an “expectation of privacy.” Their findings indicate that the public often perceives police access to genetic data sources as highly intrusive, even where traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine might not. As Hazel and Slobogin put it, “our subjects appeared to focus on the location of the information, not its provenance or content.” That is, intrusiveness turns more on who holds the data, rather than on how it was first collected or analyzed. Hazel and Slobogin conclude that their findings “support an argument in favor of judicial authorization both when police access nongovernmental genetic databases and when police collect DNA from individuals who have not yet been arrested.” Continue reading "Gauging Genetic Privacy"

Reconciling Risk and Equality

Deborah Hellman, Sex, Causation and Algorithms: Equal Protection in the Age of Machine Learning, 98 Wash. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at SSRN.

States have increasingly resorted to statistically-derived risk algorithms to determine when diversion from prison should occur, whether sentences should be enhanced, and the level of security and treatment a prisoner requires. The federal government has jumped on the bandwagon in a big way with the First Step Act,1 which mandated that a risk assessment instrument be developed to determine which prisoners can be released early on parole. Policymakers are turning to these algorithms because they are thought to be more accurate and less biased than judges and correctional officials, making them useful tools for reducing prison populations through identification of low risk individuals.

These assumptions about the benefits of risk assessment tools are all contested. But critics also argue that, even if these instruments improve overall accuracy, they are constitutionally suspect. While no instrument explicitly uses race as a “risk factor” (which in any event is probably barred by the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Davis2), several do incorporate sex (with maleness increasing the risk score) and many rely on factors that are highly correlated with race or socio-economic status, which is said to violate equal protection principles.3 Continue reading "Reconciling Risk and Equality"

The Next Steps in Criminal Justice Reform

A number of books and articles have taken aim at America’s mass incarceration debacle. Smart Decarceration, a multi-author edited volume, assumes that the tide has turned. As the editors point out in the first chapter, several states have begun depopulating their prisons, eliminating mandatory minima, and creating more alternatives to prison, a movement sometimes dubbed “Smart Sentencing.” Smart Decarceration is about the sequel. Authored by academics with degrees in criminology, sociology, history, public health and social work, as well as by leaders in community organization, practicing lawyers, pastors, and formerly incarcerated individuals, this book is devoted to picturing what optimal decarceration should look like.

The diverse perspectives provided in Smart Decarceration ensure a nuanced, multi-disciplinary treatment of that issue. But there is also an overriding agenda, perhaps best summarized by Kathryn Bocanegra in her chapter, when she states that “exclusively focusing on reducing prison populations without considering the sustainability of such an effort is potentially dangerous.” (P. 115.) Continue reading "The Next Steps in Criminal Justice Reform"

Did Black Baptists Join the War on Drugs?

In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr. shows how African American voters in Washington DC lobbied for longer prison sentences and more police officers. Forman’s argument complicates the story told by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnesswhich is that white conservatives increased prison sentences and police in order to impose a new system of racial control on black Americans, all under the rubric of a War on Drugs. Underlying Alexander’s argument is the claim that African Americans were not in fact the primary consumers of drugs in the United States; whites were, though they suffered comparatively lower rates of incarceration and arrest.

Forman concedes Alexander’s point about white drug use, but argues that African American leaders played a significant role in the rise of mass incarceration. As he tells it, problems with narcotics coincided with a proliferation of firearms. Guns became the weapon of choice for drug distributors, who turned to crime out of economic necessity and used extreme violence to eliminate competitors, increase market share, and create an illicit, street level, drug market. This market driven violence, maintains Forman, became so intolerable that African American majorities voted for higher prison sentences and more police, effectively joining white conservatives in what Alexander has termed “mass incarceration.” Rather than a coordinated, right wing plot, however, Forman suggests that the story in Washington was a tale of incremental choices by desperate officials who implemented radical policies that had unanticipated effects. Continue reading "Did Black Baptists Join the War on Drugs?"

How and Why is the American Punishment System “Exceptional”?

Anyone interested in American criminal justice has to wonder why we have so many more people in prison—in absolute as well as relative terms—than the western half of the European continent, the part of the world most readily comparable to us. This book, consisting of eleven chapters by eminent criminal law scholars, criminologists and political scientists, provides both a detailed look at how U.S. punishment is different and an insightful analysis of why that might be so. While many chapters in the book describe previously declared positions of the authors, there is also much that is new in the book, particularly with respect to non-prison sanctions; whether veterans of the field or newcomers to it, readers should find this collection of the area’s leading scholars extremely useful. As the primary Reporter for the recently complete revisions to the Model Penal Code’s sentencing provisions and director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at Minnesota Law School, editor Kevin Reitz is ideally situated to bring this impressive compendium of material together.

In the opening chapter, Reitz lays out the reason for the book, describing the well-known American mass punishment phenomenon in ways that present the problem in a new light. For instance, he notes that the U.S. would have to release 1.8 million inmates simply to achieve the same imprisonment rate as England and Wales, western Europe’s leader in per capita imprisonment. Whether the focus is long-term confinement, the use of probation and parole, or the imposition of collateral consequences, Reitz notes, we “beat” all western European countries hands-down. Continue reading "How and Why is the American Punishment System “Exceptional”?"

The Causes of Punitiveness

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a look at the recent history of African-American attitudes toward crime. In many ways the book is a codicil to Michelle Alexander’s well-known work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of the Age of Colorblindness, and to the writing of people like Glenn Loury and Ian Haney Lopez.  Alexander, Loury and Lopez argue that today’s hyper-incarceration and long sentences result from a white-dominated legal system bent on removing blacks from the streets, using the “war on drugs” as a cover, and imply that things would be different if blacks had been in control of the system. Locking Up Our Own contests those views.

Making Forman’s case is difficult, because largely white legislatures were and still are in charge of criminal justice in most jurisdictions. But Forman’s focus is on Washington, D.C., where, from the mid-1970s through the end of the twentieth century (the period covered by the first five chapters in his book) African-Americans were in power. Not only were that city’s chiefs of police black (as was the case in many major cities), but the municipal council—the body effectively in charge of crime definition and sentencing in D.C., given Congress’ acquiescence in matters of criminal justice—was usually majority African-American as well. Yet the criminal justice policies in that city were at least as punitive as those in other jurisdictions. Continue reading "The Causes of Punitiveness"

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