Ben Silver writes:
I’m an incoming postdoc at the Center for Justice, working with Prof. Geraldine Downey. I’m going to be teaching a course in the fall called Laboratory in Justice Data Science (PSYC4890). There’s a prereq currently listed on the website, but we’re working on getting that removed.
Here’s the description:
The course will provide the rigorous data science training and core content knowledge students need to use data science to effect meaningful policy change in the direction of a more just society. The course will leverage the academic expertise of psychologists, lawyers and data scientists, the perspectives and experiences of community members and students affiliated with the Center for Justice, and policymakers from government agencies and community organizations. The focus will be on collaborating with community and government organizations to propose research-and-data-informed solutions that center problem-solving on those most impacted by the problem.
Feel free to make whatever snarky remarks you want about Columbia University and “Justice” in the comments section. I’m sure some of you have wanted to do this for awhile; this is your chance.
In all seriousness, this looks like a good course that could be of interest to many undergraduate and graduate students here at Columbia.
Hi Ben, any chance of making the syllabus and course materials available when you launch?
Thanks! -Paul
This ended up very confusing. I was curious about the Center for Justice, and there on there page it listed Kathy Boudin as part of the staff, for those of us of a certain age and bent, yes that Kathy Boudin. But I am certain that Kathy Boudin died a couple of years ago, and Wikipedia seems to confirm it. Her son I believe was acting DA in San Francisco at one time.
For those who don’t know, it has to do sort of indirectly with Bob Dylan and which way the wind blows. I knew a number of people who got quite messed up by all of that, both from being part of it and on the other side suffering the consequences of the actions of that group.
Roy:
On the website, Kathy Boudin is described as a cofounder of the center. I don’t know anything about the center so I’m just speculating here, but I don’t think they’re trying to minimize the harm done by people who have been convicted of crimes, I think they just believe that mass incarceration is not the best solution to these problems. From my perspective, I think it should be possible to support the center’s efforts without feeling any need to excuse Boudin for her actions.
I agree totally. I was surprised for a lot of reasons (how do you say “remembrance of things past”), and it wasn’t meant to be a comment on the work the Center does (I have no idea about it) I was mostly surprised to see her listed because I believe she died in 2022. Also I hope I made it clear I knew a number of people involved in a lot of what happened, it was pretty tragic on a lot of levels.
If you either read up or this or know about this more directly, there is a connection with Boudin and some people who were involved in the political scene in Chicago and came somewhat to the fore when Obama first ran for President.
So the tl;dr version is I was being anything but snarky and I know nothing about what the Center does.
“Feel free to make whatever snarky remarks you want about Columbia University and “Justice” in the comments section. I’m sure some of you have wanted to do this for awhile; this is your chance.”
That is a bizarre and depressing statement.
If criticism of reparative justice and carceral studies strikes you as snarky or laced with vitriol, that’s because so much of this woke nonsense deserves contempt. What about crime victims who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic? To ignore them is on its face racist. If a claim is made that there are better ways to reduce their risks, I say show me the evidence.
In any case, the solution to all this is to have other disciplines address the scientific questions that used to be in the wheelhouse for sociology and criminology. Apparently, this is happening.
I know this from personal experience. Since 2018, I have worked part-time as a low wage retail store worker in Yonkers, New York. My coworkers are 75 percent Hispanic. During the height of the shoplifting epidemic – which progressive judges and officeholders denied is happening and completely misunderstood – the physical threats and intimidation to my co-workers were so bad that I’d be driving home frightened 19 year old after most shifts. Ironically, many of them commute from the Bronx because they felt Yonkers is a safer environment. The crime continues and has taken new forms.
One of the satisfactions of my work is to appreciate how the views and realities of my co-workers are so different from those of the activists, politicians and academics who claim to be helping and speaking for them.
Joey:
I was expecting snark–this is the internet, after all–but sincere comments are fine too.
Regarding your specifics: again, I’m just guessing because I don’t know exactly what they do at this center, but I doubt they are ignoring crime victims, and I’m pretty sure they are looking at evidence, given that “research-and-data-informed solutions” is part of course description. And this is happening in the psychology department, not in sociology. So, at least in some ways, I think this is something like what you’re looking for.
New course this fall at Columbia: Laboratory in Social Justice Warrior Data Science
Thanks for posting Andrew! The lack of curiosity by some is hard for me to understand. Some of these worldviews have so many epicycles to explain away that I just can’t relate to them. If mass incarceration were the answer, wouldn’t we know by now? Why does the US incarcerate the largest percentage of its citizenry of any ostensibly democratic republic? This is obviously a set of issues that requires sophistication and wisdom- seems like a great idea to bring the best tools of data-driven inference to the table to help guide decisions..
Thought it was well known that’s the “war on drugs”, which results in more of the X like every government “war on X”.
There’s something I wonder about this idea though:
If a government really gets rid of capitol punishment and incarceration, how will it get people to pay taxes?
Seems like the end of that government to me. A new gang that *is* willing to use aggression to collect protection money will soon pop up.
Anon:
1. The U.S. has had essentially zero capital punishment for many decades (see here). I guess the main role of the death penalty has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with keeping the median voter happy, which seems to be satisfied by (a) keeping capital punishment as part of the system, while (b) executing very few people.
2. I don’t think there are any plans to get rid of incarceration. The proposal is to end mass incarceration, which is the practice of throwing millions of people into jail and prison as routine practice.
3. I agree that if people break the law, something needs to be done. That “something” doesn’t have to be incarceration. There are also aggressive ways of collecting protection money without involving prison; for example the government seems to be doing this now with tariffs, cutoffs of appropriated funds, threatened lawsuits, and other opportunities for bribery.
“Why does the US incarcerate the largest percentage of its citizenry of any ostensibly democratic republic?”
Because removing an extra ~1million criminals from their victims dramatically reduced crime. If you took those individuals and dumped them in another ‘democratic republic’ they’d be faced with the choice of either locking them up or suffering epic levels of crime too.
It’s not that complicated.
Yes it is much more complicated. Just look at the work done by Innocence Project to free innocent people from death row.
Or how about the fact that people in prison are the a form of legal slave labor allowed in the US today?
Why are private prisons and VC investors investing into this industry? Why should it be profitable to incarcerate people and who should be able to profit from incarceration.
And lastly, the President just said, we dont have the ability to give them all trials, so lets just lock them up in foreign jails without any due process.
Be anonymous, yep, punch down.
Oh there are lots of explanations for why it’s all so much more complicated and nuanced. They have a tremendous variety of merits and demerits.
But one thing they all have in common: when the powers that be start taking them seriously the crime rate skyrockets.
IDK Glasgow was an extraordinarily stabby city circa 2005 and taking those ideas seriously was contemporaneous with an enormous improvement in public safety
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-38678509
More recently, Boston had the single largest YoY drop in homicides
https://www.bu.edu/met/news/dr-shea-cronin-credits-bostons-reduced-crime-statistics-to-coordinated-approach/
Anon, you realize this answer is non-responsive though right? Those extra criminals just “appeared” in our society (how? not clear to me), and we have risen to the challenge with dehumanizing rhetoric and mass incarceration (as opposed to playing hot potato and sending them elsewhere). No. The question is, why do we have a higher incarceration rate than say the UK, or Norway, or Sweden, or New Zealand or Australia or South Korea or…
I agree we can’t just stop policing communities that suffer high rates of crime. Nobody actually wants that. We want systems that actually work, and it seems to me that having good data and models would help a lot with this.
Criminals can’t terrorize new victims if they’re locked behind great big walls.
I believe and trust that infinitly more than your “data” or “models”.
Anon:
One reason that we use data and models in economics, political science, sociology, etc., is that there are tradeoffs. To take your example: if 100% of the population are completely restrained, criminals will terrorize no new victims; on the other hand, all of us would be in jail too and there’d be no blogging, no food, no economy at all. If 0% are restrained, then one might expect a wave of street crime, in the same way that we’d expect lots more cheating on tax returns if the IRS were defunded. The appropriate amount of restraint (this does not necessarily have to be through jail or prison; there can be house arrest, electronic monitoring, etc.) is somewhere between 0% and 100%. It’s fine to trust your intuition more than you trust data or models; unfortunately, intuition doesn’t answer the policy question. And, as commenters have pointed out, the rate of incarceration varies a lot geographically and has varied a lot over time. And that’s not even getting into the question of who gets punished. Back in the day they executed people for forgery.
“why do we have a higher incarceration rate than say the UK, or Norway, or Sweden, or New Zealand or Australia or South Korea?” … I don’t know, perhaps because Americans commit more crimes?
In the hypothesis “mass incarceration does not work”, there seems to be suggestions that something else (something that is already done in Australia and in South Korea) works. Name so we can arrange for it across the world.
Until you provide evidence for that other Korean-Australian pre-crime policy, spare us, the paupers, a life among criminals enjoying early release.
Manithungage:
Proposed alternatives to mass incarceration include speeding up the court system so that people don’t spend so much time in jail awaiting trial, shorter prison sentences or alternative to prisons for nonviolent offenders, decriminalization of some nonviolent offenses, sanctions other than prison, more use of probation and parole, etc. Just for example, if someone is a repeated violator of traffic safety laws, you can take away their driver’s license, take away their cars, sentence them to public service at the local hospital, etc. etc., rather than waiting until they kill someone and then throwing them into jail and prison.
I understand your concern about “criminals enjoying early release.” The problem is that there are lots of criminals already at large, and meanwhile there are lots of nonviolent criminals in prison. Incarceration is expensive and represents criminal-justice resources that maybe could be better used elsewhere, even beyond concerns about all the problems that prisons have.
MCSKS, you write
“I don’t know, perhaps because Americans commit more crimes?…In the hypothesis “mass incarceration does not work”, there seems to be suggestions that something else (something that is already done in Australia and in South Korea) works. Name so we can arrange for it across the world.”
This too, is non-responsive to the question. In addition to the excellent ideas that Andrew lists, we could also actually try to answer and rectify the *reasons why* American’s apparently “commit more crimes”