A little black hole in prison science

The following essay is my personal opinion and does not reflect any official position of my employer.

In her book Carceral Capitalism (2018), Dr. Jackie Wang presciently exposes the ways that predictive and algorithmic models in policing serve to disguise racial bias and naturalize mass incarceration.??She claims,

"Not only are black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt.”

Within the political coordinates of white privilege, this may sound like a hysterical claim. But from a nuanced historical lens, the objectivity of criminal guilt is precisely at issue, and needs to be exposed in its bias regarding who decides, who is harmed, and who profits.??

Dr. Wang writes about this subject from the perspective of a woman whose brother had been sentenced as a juvenile to life without parole. Hence, she writes about predictive models in policing and criminology from the position of a family life destroyed by them.

Paralleling Dr. Wang’s arguments, I propose to look again at how a criminological science model in the 1990s led politicians from both parties, including Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, to buy into paranoia around a forecasted wave of juvenile “superpredators”.? While this tsunami of juvenile crime never materialized, it led to nation-wide adoption of “tough on crime” sentencing guidelines for Juvenile Life WIthout Parole (JLWOP), that still falls heavily on imprisoned black and brown bodies today.

This simple predictive model has the pedagogical value of being “settled” history, but the larger algorithmic dynamics remain very much with us: Beneath a veneer of seductive and rigorous objectivity, data science models can smuggle in “innocent” elements of fantasy, paranoia, and science fiction, and go certifiably, rationally “mad”.????

The black hole of prison

In her first sentence of the chapter “Packing Guns instead of Lunches”, Dr. Wang admits, “There is a political knot at the center of my life, a point of great density, around which orbit my questions about the world and how it is structured.”? This hole in her life turns upon the sentencing of her brother to life without parole in Florida, for a crime he allegedly committed when he was seventeen.

She writes poetically,

I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside, looking in..

Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk

Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static.

We were teenagers when he got locked up, and now he’s balding.        

As for Dr. Wang herself, she tells us she lived an itinerant life after college, with depression, although certain chutes of brilliant accomplishment appear: her admission to a year-long film-making workshop in Scotland for women of color, an invitation to work on a book by a publisher.? She applies to a number of PhD programs, “expecting to be rejected from all of them.? I was broke, without a job or a place to live.”

Then, a hearing.

We had been waiting for the hearing for nine years. [But] when the day finally arrived, I could immediately tell by the judge’s body language and the way she bullied my brother on the stand that it was not going well.

Then all at once, our hopes were deflated. The judge determined that the new evidence, which revealed that my brother acted in self-defense when he was being jumped by a group of boys, would not have changed the minds of the jury.

She does not deny her brother was involved in a violent incident. She wonders why the judge seemed pre-determined to refuse any clemency, based upon newly discovered evidence of self-defense.

Dr. Wang is accepted into Harvard’s PhD program.? Over the course of the next three years, she struggles with her mental health and her guilt, that her life goes on while her brother's is trapped in stasis.??

More on her story later.

The juvenile black super-predator

In 1995, young Princeton professor John DiIulio published a landmark article in the Washington Post, “The Coming of the Super-predator”, where he warned of a massive crime wave of “stone cold predators”. Ventriloquizing the Philadelphia DA at the time:

We're not just talking about teenagers… We're talking about boys whose voices have yet to change. We're talking about elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches. We're talking about kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.

Throughout, he characterized juvenile crime in the context of proportional black crime, thus spinning what Dr. Wang calls a “truth-effect” that was already racially coded.

And make no mistake. While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods (italics added), other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland…

… The numbers are as alarming as the anecdotes. At a time when overall crime rates have been dropping, youth crime rates, especially for crimes of violence, have been soaring. Between 1985 and 1992, the rate at which males ages 14 to 17 committed murder increased by about 50 percent for whites and over 300 percent for blacks.

As Dr. Wang points out, the main thrust of the argument was a demographic trend about an expected? population boom that predicts, “More boys beget more bad boys” – with the emphasis that “more boys” will be disproportionately “more black boys”.

By simple math, in a decade today's 4 to 7- year-olds will become 14 to 17-year-olds. By 2005, the number of males in this age group will have risen about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks.

To some extent, it's just that simple: More boys begets more bad boys.

Dr. DiIulio went on to draw upon a series of cohort studies in Philadelphia that emphasized both the viciousness of the 6% who do the 50% of the crime; and the compounding lethality of these crimes with every generation.

Yet, he admitted,

Still, demography is not fate and criminology is not pure science. How can one be certain that the demographic bulge of the next l0 years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips -- known as O.G.s, for "original gangsters" -- look tame by comparison?

The capstone to his argument was in fact a? “common sense” component that didn’t really demonstrate anything, but rather presumed everything.??

The answer centers on a conservative theory of the root causes of crime, one that is strongly supported by all of the best science as well as the common sense of the subject. Call it the theory of moral poverty

In the extreme, moral poverty is the poverty of growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings. In sum, whatever their material circumstances, kids of whatever race, creed, or color are most likely to become criminally depraved when they are morally deprived.

He illustrated how “moral poverty” works, with a notional profiling of black populations in the South:?

Among other puzzles, the moral poverty theory explains why, despite living in desperate economic poverty, under the heavy weight of Jim Crow, and with plenty of free access to guns, the churchgoing, two-parent black families of the South never experienced anything remotely like the tragic levels of homicidal youth and gang violence that plague some of today's black inner- city neighborhoods.

At the same time, he affords himself the cover of race-neutrality by footnoting this point with the mention of white underclass neighborhoods, where the same trend is incipient (but not yet dominant, like it is in black underclass? neighborhoods).

It also explains why once relatively crime-free white working-class neighborhoods are evolving into white underclass neighborhoods.

Thus, black social poverty is conjugated into a moral poverty of traditional family values.? As some critics have noted, this argument works like a mathematical black box, whose exact internal connections between inputs and outputs are vague and veiled over.?

This little black box emits no illuminating analysis, yet radiates outward with a veiled paranoia that sets the tone for the whole logical proof. In a sense, it forms the dense gravitational core around which the paranoid tone of the argument is enunciated and rendered plausible, from the very start.

The little black box of “moral poverty”

We can actually engineer an explicit language for how this argument from “moral poverty” works. We can engineer the input and output variables of this little black box, so that it does the formal axiomatic work the author needs in his proof.

Theorem: The absence of a traditional church-going, two parent family causes social poverty, family abuse, and inner city conditions of youth crime.??

There’s nothing self-evident about this axiom.? It completely discounts how social poverty, drug addiction, structural unemployment, lack of state funding, corruption, a history of racism, intensive surveillance, and perhaps the simple absence of second chances, all may contribute to reproducing social poverty,? family abuse, and statistically higher? juvenile black crime.

What makes the argument congeal with its disavowed political force are certain normative terms that come from outside the formal model, which Dr. DiIulio cited as rhetorical “common sense”.

Expanded Theorem: The moral failure to sustain a traditional church-going, hetero-normative two parent family causes social poverty, family abuse, and inner city conditions of (predominantly black) youth crime.??

Thus, black social poverty is conjugated into a “tidy” argument about moral poverty of family values. Put another way, “moral poverty” becomes meme-ified as a cleverly demonic pun on black poverty.

Dr. DiIulio would go on to write several articles on moral poverty and black crime, including “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours” in 1996.? Further, he would go on to defend the race-neutrality of his argument, and charge his african-american critics with an “unreasonable black paranoia” about the justice system. (It is, of course, the nature of paranoia to project itself upon others, as their paranoia and their hysteria.)?

Super-predator hysteria

The “super-predator” crisis would go on to become a hysterical meme in the media, in the 90s. As the Marshall Project has documented,

Although juvenile homicide rates already declined by 40 percent after hitting a peak in 1994 (Snyder, 1998), the "super-predator" kids were still represented as a national crisis. The evening news often depicted violent juvenile crimes from all over the United States.?

This media prevalence directly led to a political milieu where “tough on crime” measures like Juvenile Life Without Parole made bipartisan common-sense.

Through their extensive media coverage, legislators felt the need to retaliate by introducing a bill titled the "Violent Youth Predator Act". This bill offered 1.5$ billion in law enforcement grants so states could toughen their laws in cooperation with federal standards and allow 14-year-olds to be tried as adults (Templeton, 1998).

At the highest level of office, Hilary Clinton, in a broadcast speech in 1996, referred to gangs of kids as “super-predators” who have to be “brought to heel.”??

Donald Trump would later call Hilary Clinton on the use of this term, but this would be an instance of a “pot calling the kettle black”. Given Trump’s own hysterical calls at the time for the death penalty of five juvenile suspects, who would be falsely imprisoned for the Central Park murders, his actions were, as the Marshall Project claims, “ a reinforcement of the stereotype of the animalistic, inherently criminal black male.”?

Yet? the predicted juvenile crime wave never materialized.? John DiIulio would later recant and apologize for his earlier work.? In an amicus to the Supreme Court case Miller vs Alabama (2012), which he co-authored:

Many states changed their laws regarding the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal system in response to this increase in juvenile crime, subjecting juvenile offenders to sentencing regimes that were originally conceived for adults, including sentences of life without parole...

…However, the fear of an impending generation of super-predators? proved to be unfounded.? Empirical research that has analyzed the increase in violent crime and its subsequent decline demonstrates that the juvenile super-predator was a myth and that the predictions of future youth violence was baseless…

As a result, in 2012, the Supreme Court would rule that mandatory sentencing for Juvenile Life Without Parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment.??

Researchers would go on to propose more sober models that better explained some of the trends. Some proposed that the spectacular lethality of the worst juvenile crime correlated better to the increasingly easy availability of increasingly lethal guns.? Alternatively, in a Mother Jones article from March 2016, journalist Kevin Dunn proposed that juvenile crime correlated to lead poisoning in black underclass neighborhoods? – and the unanticipated decrease in inner city crime with federal measures to ban lead paint and lead gasoline.??

Yet the “super-predator” rhetoric, and its judicial regime, persists in most states to this day. Again, the Marshall Project has noted:

The United States is the leading country in incarcerating juveniles. By March 2020, about 52,000 kids were held in confined facilities. Most of them are locked up for offenses that are not even crimes, such as technical violations of their probation, running away, absence at school, and incorrigibility (Sawyer and Wagner, 2020).

Nowadays, the internet does not forget, and forgiveness is even less likely. Hillary Clinton and John DiIulio, issued each a different kind of apology for their contribution to increased juvenile crime incarceration. Alternatively, Donald Trump did not issue one at all.???

At the inception of this hysteria was a simple and tidy econometric model – which was capped with a “little black box” about the presumption of black juvenile moral poverty.? This became a literal black hole, by which young black and brown bodies were thrown into prison for life.

The black hole of prison

In 2016, “time stopped” again for Dr. Wang and her family.? In Montgomery vs. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory JWLOP was not only unconstitutional, but this ruling applied retroactively.? This ruling didn't forbid discretionary JLWOP sentencing, but it entitled her brother to another re-sentencing hearing.

Another hearing date is set, and delayed, several times.? The prosecutor promises a deal, but the deal never solidifies.? Meanwhile, in prison:

Judicial limbo.. The manipulation of time becomes a way to psychically wear someone down.

…How does someone experience the passing of time when he is condemned to live out his entire adult life in prison?

Finally, the hearing.

I flew to Florida. In the morning, to look "respectable" in the court of law, I covered my green hair with a brown spray my father used to cover his baldness. The lawyer said she might call me to the stand to testify first, but when I got to the courthouse, the psychologist was already testifying about my brother's mental disabilities, caused by an anoxic brain injury suffered at birth.

The judge was not paying attention – he was not even looking at the witness.? Then it was the prosecutor's turn to make a statement. He was a young man who seemed completely indifferent to the case…When [he] reviewed the details, he was all mixed up about the basic facts of the case. It occurred to me that he had probably not even read the file.

Then it was my brother's lawyer's turn to make a statement. While she was talking, the prosecutor stood up to offer a deal. The lawyer went over to the prosecutor to discuss the terms with him: forty years.? When the lawyer went over to give my brother the news, I watched my brother cry out in agony and weep with his head in his hands. Forty years!

Lawyer: "But you won't die in prison."        

The lawyer cajoles her brother into accepting the deal.??

I knew that by the time my brother was released, my parents would likely be dead, and that sometime in my late fifties I would inherit a brother who has never spent a single day of his adult life outside of prison. Would I have my life together by then?

“Presumed guilty” and Black Lives Matter

Dr. Wang writes:

"Not only are black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt.”

She explains with more nuance, that? there are good black men, of an immaculate and non-threatening standard (like Obama, Powell, etc). But these are exceptions that prove the rule.??

In an important topological sense, racial bias and the rhetoric of legal guilt align, so that the reality of the first is masked by the second.? And on this side of the myth, the liberal speaks of himself as color-blind.?

Racism itself emits no light, even as it bends the warp and woof of America. In this sense, color-blindness is one of America’s 21st century modern myths, an anthropological force as powerful as any totem from a pre-modern age.?

Dr. Wang goes on to look at the rise of algorithmic policing since 2009, and critique the “naturalistic” assumptions by which PredPol modeled neighborhood crime on the science model of seismic earthquake activity.? She proposes there again, that the “naturalistic fallacy” of the AI model belies how the underlying demographic and crime data was already biased toward intensive scrutiny of black neighborhoods.

To the extent that our data science provides machine models that keep constructing the future according to the same myth, we build our imminent, supermassive AI dystopia.

North stars and revolutions

To contend with the ways that data science and algorithms perpetuate racial codes, Dr. Wang presses for prison abolition.? This radical stance tends to trigger an immune reaction from white liberals as well as conservatives.

Yet her final chapter is more poetic than analytical.??

She sings of how, even though black and brown bodies might be imprisoned, the mind and spirit can be free.? She writes of the poet-prisoner vs. the paranoid guard.? But she admits, she writes vibrationally, and not in a strictly scientific sense.

For some time I have been thinking of how to convey the message of police and prison abolition to you, but I know that as a poet, it is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening your desire for another world.

She cites prison abolitionist Mia Mingus:

We are building a reality that we have never seen before. We are asking people to flex their visioning and dreaming skills, something that is not readily supported in our society.

This is a very different type of model for how to build the future.? It is a resurgent dream of hope? that nonetheless admits,? it is hard in today’s dominant political coordinates how to construct itself precisely.??

We shouldn’t take this vision to be monolithic, rigid, or entirely expressible in today’s dominant political coordinates.?

Nonetheless, the dream emanates light, as a north star vision for how to build, not simply a better world, but rather a revolution in our thought models to enable us to actually get there. In this sense, it could be a science-fictional vision of our better future, in the most elevated and practical sense.

But there is a danger of regarding this vision as a specifically AI utopia – as a sort of purified machine utopia of transparent policing, that AI designers can deliver through pervasive surveillance algorithms that are freed from bias by “clean data” and “smarter” feature engineering.

As Harvard systems biologist Yarden Katz pointedly argues in Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence” (2020), what’s missing in the data science frame is structural state violence, and the voicelessness of those black and brown communities most impacted by intensive surveillance. Citing a study by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition:

Those surveyed often spoke of needing more places for kids to play, more cultural spaces, more resources, shelter, food and respect, and called for disarming the police and abolishing the police state. An obvious theme here was the need to invest in communities – what liberal policing reforms or different mechanisms of data collection and audits, cannot provide.”

Consider the health care crisis and state government neglect in black and brown communities today. Consider, most notoriously in Flint, Michigan, where toxic lead poisoning still gets pumped into black underclass homes, schools and public places.

The measures being called for by aggrieved communities are not hindered by a lack of AI know-how, but rather political forces, global and local, that sustain structural racism and the carceral system.??

“They are not blinded by AI.”? What seems like a wish for utopia is a much more urgent matter of the grappling with the truth of history, and learning to learn from the lived experience of these communities.