Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm putting on the very old, tired and threadbare "software developer tries to solve real-weird problems as if they were software" hat but these kind of stories are both legion and seemingly conceptually simple. Stepping back from the messy injustice of it all and treating the problem as essentially a customer support scaling problem, my off-the-cuff analysis is that we have a process which is too high-touch (the appeals process) which is being subjected to unexpected and unservable scale demands (the bored prisoners) leading to pathological results (prisoner appeals are ignored or subject to desultory binning).

My annoying, uneducated and probably arrogant response is that we need to introduce a lower-touch triage process in between the prisoners and the high-touch, overloaded CS department (the courts) to reduce spurious or unmeritworthy tickets (appeals) taking up too much time and increase the time departments have available to look at the meritworthy ones.

I know it's "not as simple as that" and doubtless I'm missing a million devils hiding in the details but I wonder if there's anyone in government actually tasked with finding these suboptimal aspects of the system and if not, why not? It would surely be a huge bang for the buck.

It actually is as simple as that. Well, if you could actually get funding. The number one problem with our legal system is that only the rich can afford to play. Before someone says, "but... public defenders", let me suggest that even a truly great lawyer (and many of the PDs I've known were) is going to have a hard time with a caseload approaching 200 files. On the civil side there's... nothing, at least since the LSC was cut to the bone back in the early 80s and put on a very short leash. So, although I'm all for eliminating all immunities, sovereign, absolute and qualified, that won't do a damn bit of good for ordinary people until free (because no one in the working or even middle class can afford a $1,000 emergency, let alone a pile up of legal fees at $200 per hour) representation is available for every and any legal matter. Once that's in place, you can set up your "light touch" triaging mechanism. Then if you also abolish all immunities, you might even get some justice.

Interestingly enough, AI with humans in the loop is probably perfect for this.

The first tier of review can be AI. It will get a deluge of pro-se requests from prisoners just like the current system. People will (rightly) insist on an appeal process. Most prisoners will appeal, so the queue will be just as long as it currently is.

But, now there will be a short queue of some high-quality pro-se lawsuits that are given more weight, and a queue of dubious-quality pro-se lawsuits with diamonds in the rough that is at least no longer than it is today.

I don’t understand what you mean by low touch. If high touch is the many appeal system what’s the low touch alternative?

I didn’t write the original comment but I would guess that “low touch” means “requires less time from a knowledgeable human.”

Yeah I got that part but how exactly do you go about achieving that, especially for something that can significantly alter a person’s life. Only thing I can think of is an AI based filter but that seems dangerous.

> My annoying, uneducated and probably arrogant response

Coyness is a pathetic trait. A miscalculation, in which by trying to hide our ego, we let it appear stark naked.

— Marquis de Gramont

Maybe not the best source considering his own hubris got him killed.

To paraphrase another 2023 film: "That Russian a-hole is going down. What's he gonna do, snow on me?" -- Napoleon

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