Offending Nature?

Might voluntary DNA analysis after a conviction one day be useful and workable in some societies?

“Identifying the criminality of [a] person from their facial image will enable a significant advantage for law-enforcement agencies and other intelligence agencies to prevent crime from occurring.”

The publisher, Springer, withdrew the paper following a campaign by scholars concerned about its racial assumptions, who wrote: .

“Machine learning programs are not neutral; research agendas and the data sets they work with often inherit dominant cultural beliefs about the world. These research agendas reflect the incentives and perspectives of those in the privileged position of developing machine learning models, and the data on which they rely. The uncritical acceptance of default assumptions inevitably leads to discriminatory design in algorithmic systems, reproducing ideas which normalize social hierarchies and legitimize violence against marginalized groups. Such research does not require intentional malice or racial prejudice on the part of the researcher. Rather, it is the expected by-product of any field which evaluates the quality of their research almost exclusively on the basis of “predictive performance”.

The authors of the paper, likely because it is not their forte, did not show any interest in how their proposal would have profound effects on societies. And yet by arguing for application of their research to public policy they went well beyond an exploration of their research domain and entered into advocacy on matters of social policy and politics.

In addition to the around seven million people in the US justice system either in prison or on some form of supervision, millions more are awaiting trial.

It is sometimes assumed that identifying natural causes of offending leads to mitigation pleas in court and a denial of personal responsibility; this in turn lends a pinkish political hue to the notion of natural causes. Yet the opposite judicial trend equally likely to be true. A judge told that an offender is naturally predisposed to serious re-offending may decide on a longer sentence for greater public protection since re-education or a change in environment may not have much effect.

The wholesale application of DNA analysis to citizens with no criminal record is, for reasons related to the problems related to the surveillance society details given above, likely a political non-starter. But what if actual offenders were offered the opportunity to have their DNA analysed in order to help inform tailored programmes aimed at reducing thier likelihood of re-offending?

Genetic analysis of offenders would be cheap; the main cost would likely come from translating the results into workable personalised development programmes. The societal context would be critical, of course; it is hard to see any appliction in the present United States for example. But might there be room for an early pilot elsewhere under the auspices of a research team which contained both scientists and social scientists? Perhaps it wouldn't be scalable in the end, but it might. A worthwhile potential avenue of research?

Related posts:

Over a seven-day period last week, the Loup Ventures team decided to go phoneless. We used only a cellular Apple Watch S4 and left our iPhones turned off. We wrote more about the psychology of going…