Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Prawfs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Legal Commentary

: Prawfs

Actuarial Criminal Policy

By Dan Markel, Ethan Leib, Rick Garnett, Matt Bodie, Paul Horwitz , Steve Vladeck, and Orly Lobel

ADVERTISEMENTS

A student of mine sent me this article from the Wall Street Journal about efforts in LA to develop an actuarial model to determine what children are most at risk of joining a criminal street gang. It is exciting to see state officials say things such as this:

Previously, city officials depended on what they concede was a patchwork of information to build gang-prevention programs, often using anecdotal tips from local beat cops or high school teachers. "We were not relying on data," says Rev. Jeff Carr, an evangelical minister who is the city's "gang czar," leading outreach and prevention efforts. "We had gang-prevention programs, but no criteria to determine who was in a gang."

The article also points to a silver lining of the current economic downturn as well. With state resources drying up--a particular problem in that financial basket-case called California--the need to allocate resources carefully grows. As the article continues:

In Los Angeles, Dr. Klein's theories are appealing to policy makers eager to stretch limited resources. This year, the test is being given to children for the first time, and officials say they will use the results to determine whether some of the city's $24 million annual budget for gang prevention is being spent on children who aren't at high risk.

Of course, identifying who is a gang member is only the first step; the next is to develop effective interventions. Here, however, the article raises a big red flag. Describing current efforts, the article states:

So far, 958 children who live in active gang areas have taken the test; of that group, about one-third have been identified as potential future gang members and will be enrolled in prevention programs. But city officials won't know for several years whether the test failed to pick out children who went on to join a gang.

It looks like all 958 have been enrolled in programs. So there is no control group to see if the intervention works. Ideally, a random sample of those testing "positive" should not be enrolled to see what effect the program has. Such randomization is rare, particularly in criminal policy, but not impossible. Without such randomization, it will be hard to know how effective the interventions are (unless, perhaps, the goal is simply to compare the relative effectiveness of different programs against each other, rather than against an absolute bar of "effective or not," although even then I would like a control group).

This failure to randomize raises another problem. In the future, the police will be able to identify the false negatives--those not classified as potential gang members but who later join gangs--but not false positives. With all at-risk people committed to treatment, it becomes much harder to know if those who later do not join gangs fail to do so because of the treatment or because they were false positives.

But these design flaws aside, the program in general represents a positive step forward, of moving past anecdote and intuition towards something more rigorous.

Full post as published by Prawfs on May 22, 2009 (boomark / email).