Facial Recognition Software might have a Racial Bias Problem
"In 16 'undisclosed locations' across northern Los Angeles, digital eyes watch the public. These aren’t ordinary police-surveillance cameras; these cameras are looking at your face. Using facial-recognition software, the cameras can recognize individuals from up to 600 feet away. The faces they collect are then compared, in real-time, against 'hot lists' of people suspected of gang activity or having an open arrest warrant.

Considering arrest and incarceration rates across L.A., chances are high that those hot lists disproportionately implicate African Americans. And recent research suggests that the algorithms behind facial-recognition technology may perform worse on precisely this demographic. Facial-recognition systems are more likely either to misidentify or fail to identify African Americans than other races, errors that could result in innocent citizens being marked as suspects in crimes. And though this technology is being rolled out by law enforcement across the country, little is being done to explore—or correct—for the bias."

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration http://t.co/ppGKS8aRjM

— Crim Library UTL (@CrimLib) September 18, 2015

Where Do We Go From Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights
"On the surface, crime and punishment appear to be unsophisticated matters. After all, if someone takes part in a crime, then shouldn’t he or she have to suffer the consequences? But dig deeper and it is clear that crime and punishment are multidimensional problems that stem from racial prejudice justified by age-old perceptions and beliefs about African Americans. The United States has a dual criminal justice system that has helped to maintain the economic and social hierarchy in America, based on the subjugation of blacks, within the United States. Public policy, criminal justice actors, society and the media, and criminal behavior have all played roles in creating what sociologist Loic Wacquant calls the hyperincarceration of black men. But there are solutions to rectify this problem.

To summarize the major arguments in this essay, the root cause of the hyperincarceration of blacks (and in particular black men) is society’s collective choice to become more punitive. These tough-on-crime laws, which applied to all Americans, could be maintained only because of the dual legal system developed from the legacy of racism in the United States. That is, race allowed for society to avoid the trade-off between societies 'demand' to get tough on crime and its 'demand' to retain civil liberties, through unequal enforcement of the law. In essence, tying crime to observable characteristics (such as race or religious affiliation) allowed the majority in society to pass tough-on-crime policies without having to bear the full burden of these policies, permitting these laws to be sustained over time."

Racial fairness gaining ground in the justice system

By Marc Mauer
July 30, 2008

Nearly a million African-Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails, and a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, if current trends continue. People of good will disagree about the causes of these dramatic figures. Competing explanations include high rates of involvement in crime, differential rates of prosecution through the "war on drugs," racial profiling and inadequate family support. In fact, there is a good deal of documentation to support each of these contentions as at least a part of the explanation for the disparity.While the numbers are distressing, the good news is that there are growing efforts among policymakers at the federal and state level to provide constructive approaches to sort out the causes and address them.

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Interesting opinion piece by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. Tom