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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very interesting data driven article that will make you depressed. I recommend it.

> Technological solutions, like electronic anklets that monitor an individual’s whereabouts, are another option. Even sending text-message reminders to show up in court makes it more likely that a defendant will do so. All these options are cheaper than incarceration.

I hope this gains popularity. Cash bail discriminates against the poor and is unfairly applied (see article); using technological tracking, check-ins, and similar might be a fairer solution that can be applied uniformly.

I would like to say on a more general note: The influence of money in US criminal justice seems to corrupt everything it touches. From prisons, to parole, to representation, to sentencing, and beyond. Everything we can do to get money's influence out of criminal justice we should do.

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If I'm a bail bondsman, I'm probably already sending text messages to my clients to make sure they show up in court, because if they don't, I'm the one out the money unless I go pick them up and take them to the county jail myself. I'm not sure about ankle bracelets, but there's no reason they couldn't be part of the current bail system, either--if I'm a bail bondsman, I'd give a discount to any client that wears an ankle bracelet that I can track.

The thing is, there's only one county court. If the county court has a program of ankle bracelets and text messages and supervised release and that program doesn't work, there's no incentive for it to change. And there's no alternative for the suspect, either--the judge has final say. With cash bail, there might be a dozen bail bondsmen in the county all in competition, each with the incentive to provide competitive terms to the suspect while guaranteeing their presence at court.

How much competition is there going to be the bail bondsman for the homeless guy who gets picked up for vagrancy, or a poor person working paycheck to paycheck who already owes his soul to the local payday lenders?

Your proposal sounds like a great way to get excellent bail services for people who have money, but that’s not how the courts are supposed to work.

I'm not opposed to judges from releasing people of their own recognizance or under a different form of community supervision if that would be appropriate in that particular situation.

> Your proposal sounds like a great way to get excellent bail services for people who have money, but that’s not how the courts are supposed to work.

Sure about that? The way this country is heading is "One dollar = One vote". And once a sector gets accustomed to a stream of cash, there's no way to stop that flow of money.. No matter how dirty that money is.

I am sure that’s not how they’re supposed to work. How they actually work is another matter.

Are you being descriptive or normative?

I'm afraid I don't understand.

Are you describing the world as you see it (that's descriptive; obviously you are, not sure why GP is asking) or as you think it should be (that's normative).

I don't think private bondsmen in the US can legally contract to require people to wear ankle bracelets.

More fundamentally though, these sorts of "free market" theories tend to assume an unreasonable amount of options and knowledge of potential clients. See: payday loans. Sure, in theory all the details of the loans are pre-agreed, and customers sure do have a lot of options. In practice, the most ethical providers tend not to be the most successful.

I bet they have apps they could require people to stick in their phone which do the same thing.

If not, and you feel like contributing to the dystopian hellscape we live in: business oppos!

Phone aren't always on, aren't always in coverage and the app would have to be actually active when the phone is switched on anyway. How do you think it would work?

It would be a reminder app, and otherwise work exactly the same way as those creepy "spouse tracking apps" people use to catch cheating housewives.

Unless you plan on surgically implanting the phone, I don't think that's a bulletproof plan

I dunno have you seen human beings lately? Most people seem to be surgically attached to their nerd dild^H^H^H phones. Assuming the bailee is a rational and well intentioned actor (the article does seem to imply many people miss court because they forget), this is probably a reasonable thing to do.

> I don't think private bondsmen in the US can legally contract to require people to wear ankle bracelets.

Well, that's something to think about, then. It wouldn't even necessarily just have to be between the suspect and the bondsman; you might also allow judges to allow bail contingent on the suspect wearing a locating device.

This is the fully privatized "justice" system that Neal Stephenson parodied in Snow Crash.

Private bail bonds are an almost uniquely US phenomenon. Most other countries either go harsher and keep everyone awaiting trial in jail, or more humane and allow bail on conditions not money. Only America sees it as an opportunity for economic exploitation.

The best way to wither the system would be to speed up court proceedings.

The article also proves things that people were unwilling to accept in this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253333

There people always made the point that human judges making just decisions based on fairness. Well, clearly not.

Algorithms would be another, better way to know exactly what makes the determination if a person should be released awaiting trial or not.

I'm very much against algorithms in criminal justice, particularly where it concerns a person's freedom (as in the case of bail and sentencing). I disagree very much with the entire premise of statutory treatment of alleged criminals. Indeed, many of the things people dislike about "bad judges"-- a lack of empathy/kindness/tolerance, an over- or under-estimation of the seriousness of the crimes or the seriousness of the threat of recidivism, a lack of interest in or consideration of the context in which the crime occurred, and an unreasonable faith in statutory sentencing-- can't be fixed with an algorithm. What the criminal justice system needs is not more rules. It's more flexibility.

>Algorithms would be another, better way to know exactly what makes the determination if a person should be released awaiting trial or not.

Isn't it a source of constant concern that the algorithms that end up being used in law enforcement inevitably end up employing the same stereotypes that their flesh and blood counterparts have?

But wouldn't algorithms be easy to examine? At the least you can test it with similar circumstances and modify the "race" variable and see if the results are consistent or different. Humans have many self-image protective layers when questioned (e.g. "I'm not racist, I have black friends!"), Bbut hopefully algorithms are more transparent...

Race variable is often correlated with other data.

Look at red lining in real estate/banking. They marked black neighbourhoods with red boxes, white neighbourhoods with green. The bank would approve business and home loans depending on if you were in a red or green area. Algorithmically the banks did not engage in a racist practice but systemically they are.

But did they mark red areas because they were black neighborhoods or because historically people in those neighborhoods defaulted on loans?

An algorithm as simple as "mark neighborhoods with high default rates as red, low default rates as green" would probably turn out to be "racist" even if it is also flagging poor white trailer parks with red.

There's no easy way to solve that

At least in the case of historic redlining (i.e. where the term came from), we don't have to wonder - there has been a ton of research done on this, and it was pretty clearly a racially motivated discriminatory practice. A fact which resulting in, among other measures, the fair housing act in the late 60s....

And it is very well known how to test and correct for that. In a human, however, it cannot be corrected. As you point out, it can be very hard to see what rules have to do with races.

I would argue that in some cases it's bloody hard to see that you're doing it yourself.

An algorithm can be racially biased, or have biases that significantly correlate with race, without actually having a "race" variable.

I think what he's suggesting is feeding the input data that differs only on that variable, and if the algorithm produces differing output, then it is by definition racist (and then you send the authors back to the drawing board to figure out why).

That's fair.

Machine learning models in particular are famously, fiendishly difficult to examine.

While agree with your general sentiment, you ought to point out that this very much depends on the algorithm in question. Things like decision trees/forests are quite observable.

> But wouldn't algorithms be easy to examine?

Examine by who? And would they be trustworthy?

They would be, but it turns out that humans make their own similar algorithms without realizing it.

>Algorithms would be another, better way...

Humans are flawed, and any system made by humans will be flawed. That's just reality. Whether the system is composed of human judges or human built mechanical judges, it will display the same biases of-, and will be vulnerable to the same manipulation by-, humans that exists today. People like cops and DA's will figure out, "Hey! Just feed it the right input, I'll get the output that I want!"

So if you want to switch to digital judges because you want to save some bucks by not having to pay the humans, well that works. But if you are expecting a better system at the aggregated mean, you're likely to be very disagreeably surprised.

we have ways to compensate for human flaws - like having a diverse group checking and balancing each other. it’s (seen as) inefficient but that doesn’t account for hidden costs like people’s lives being destroyed by injustice.

"There people always made the point that human judges making just decisions based on fairness."

I once had the 'pleasure' of working with a Magistrate. She was the most bigoted, opinionated person I've ever worked with. Judges are at best, just like everyone else.

I personally think the biggest problem is that people even track their "conviction rate", ESPECIALLY public prosecutors.

But it's worse for prosecutors: they get evaluated on it. Convicting people is all that matters. And then people complain the prisons are too full ...

If we replaced that metric by "how many years of freedom without serious crimes" did you create in defendants, using punishments ... and using just letting them go ... that would make a world of difference.

Those who will live by the algorithm will die by the algorithm.

People can be reasoned with, appealed to, threatened, or compelled in any number of circumstances, and that is human. Algorithms will simply be gamed and abused by those who control them.

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