Some thoughts about the militarized response to recent protests:

I've heard people say things like “What else was administration going to do?” or “You need to enforce the rules consistently.”

I think these arguments are based on a fallacy. 1/ The fallacy is one of control. That governing bodies both have and *should have* ultimate control.

They have ultimate control because they can call on the power of police.

They *should* have ultimate control because they represent law. 2/

So pleased to see my paper out in the BU Law Review!

This paper surveys 50+ years of randomized control trials in criminal justice and shows that almost no interventions have lasting benefit -- and the ones that do don't replicate in other settings. 1/

bu.edu/bulawreview/fi…
While this might be disappointing from the perspective of trying to engineer change, I argue it teaches us something important about the structure of the social world. 2/

How "risky" does someone need to be to justify pretrial detention under current law? @sandy_mayson and I lay out the legal & empirical framework to answer this. We show that jail is so harmful that virtually no one is "dangerous" enough to warrant it. 1/
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Each year millions of people are detained pretrial, many ostensibly due to crime risk. But existing law and scholarship provides no answers to the level of crime risk that could legally justify pretrial detention. 2/

I want to say something about conflict of interest in research; something particularly important in the study of criminal justice. When access to data depends on maintaining warm relationships with the agencies you are studying (eg police) this distorts what you can say! 1/ I interviewed for a job at the NY branch of the Chicago Crime Lab a few years ago, and a large part of our conversations had to do with how important it was to maintain good relationships with NYC agencies, and how delicate that was. 2/

Friends, I’m telling you this because I love you: everyone should use Dragon voice dictation software to write papers and emails. Your hands are delicate birds, don’t send them to work in the coal mines all day long. Plus it’s faster. 1/

https://twitter.com/grant_mcdermott/status/1204879528348139520

I started using Dragon because of RSI in my hands. At this point though, I will never go back to typing emails or papers. Voice recognition technology has gotten pretty good and it’s just easier and faster than typing. 2/

When you give an algorithmic prediction of future offending to a judge to use in felony sentencing, she may use it in unexpected ways...

Tweet summary of my new paper with @jenniferdoleac

"Algorithmic Risk Assessment in the Hands of Humans"

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

1/ First we show that judges use risk assessment. Defendants who score right above the risk-score cutoff that separates "high risk" from "low risk" defendants have a substantially higher probability of incarceration and sentence length than those who score right below. 2/