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How to cool down our New Year brains
This article titled “How to cool down our New Year brains” was written by Daniel Glaser, for The Observer on Sunday 7th January 2018 15.00 Asia/Kolkata
Feeling a little bruised after the excesses of New Year and the festive period? In these cold, dark days we may find a treatment for more serious neurotrauma instructive. Since the 1940s, many studies have shown the benefits of therapeutic…
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How to cool down our New Year brains
This article titled “How to cool down our New Year brains” was written by Daniel Glaser, for The Observer on Sunday 7th January 2018 15.00 Asia/Kolkata
Feeling a little bruised after the excesses of New Year and the festive period? In these cold, dark days we may find a treatment for more serious neurotrauma instructive. Since the 1940s, many studies have shown the benefits of therapeutic…
View On WordPress
How to cool down our New Year brains
This article titled “How to cool down our New Year brains” was written by Daniel Glaser, for The Observer on Sunday 7th January 2018 15.00 Asia/Kolkata Feeling a little bruised after the excesses of New Year and the festive period? In these cold, dark days we may find a treatment for more serious neurotrauma instructive. Since the 1940s, many studies have shown the benefits of therapeutic…
View On WordPress
“One source of bias that Hogarth calls "availability" is the tendency to attach undue importance to easily recalled information, such as highly publicized cases, when assessing the risks with a particular case. This bias impedes systematically looking at the record for the majority of similar cases. Another source of bias is "selective perception," which is the tendency to seek information consistent with one's prior views and to disregard or to downplay conflicting evidence. Among the many others are what he calls "order effects," which is the tendency to be disproportionately influenced in one's decision by the first case of the type that one encountered or by the most recent case rather than by a cross section of all cases. Also, to reduce mental effort in routine decisions, we develop "rules of thumb," he points out, without adequate knowledge of their long-run consequences.
Another common source of bias in risk assessment by criminal justice officials is an excess conservatism that comes from statistically biased feedback. Police officers who release juveniles with mere warnings, judges who grant probation, prison officials who place inmates in a minimum security setting, and parole board members who release prisoners before the maximum sentence is served are informed much more regularly and vehemently of those released offenders who use this increased freedom to commit new crimes than of the majority, in most settings, who behave properly.
The more officials are "burned," as they say, by learning of their bad assessments of risk, the more cautious they are likely to be the next time. This long prior experience of senior officials with biased feedback probably explains why diversion programs such as those providing supervision and assistance to offenders in the community, which are intended to reduce the number who are incarcerated, are typically used instead to "broaden the net" of the justice system by receiving offenders who would normally be released without supervision .
Confronted with evidence of poor risk assessments in subjective decision making, officials typically call for more staff and better staff training. They may also take the precaution of requiring that decisions be reviewed more by higher officials or be approved by a committee before they are carried out. Although two or more heads may make decisions with more protracted deliberation than those made by one official alone, expansion of the subjective decision-making process by making it include discussions with others frequently only imposes the more conservative biases of the senior officials on the judgments of their juniors. An alternative approach is to change risk assessment to a more objective procedure.”
- Daniel Glaser, “Classification for Risk.” Crime and Justice, Vol. 9, special issue on Prediction and Classification: Criminal Justice Decision Making (1987), pp. 254-255.
“In an article that has become a classic to sociologists of law, David Sudnow (1965) described how attorneys in a public defender's office acquire -and share with the prosecutors and judges with whom they negotiate pleas - a consensus about the risks in various types of sentence for what they call "normal crimes." Thus, as a normal crime in the court that he studied, "burglary” is seen as involving regular violators, no weapons, low-priced items, little property damage, lower- class establishments, largely Negro defendants, independent operators, and a non-professional orientation to the crime." "Child molesting is seen as typically entailing middle-aged strangers or lower-class middle-aged fathers (few women), no actual physical penetration or severe tissue damage, mild fondling, petting and stimulation, bad marriage circum-stances, multiple offenders with the same offense repeatedly committed, a child complainant, via the mother" (p. 260). The consensus among these lawyers included notions of the risks typically involved with each of the normal types of offense. Negotiation on every separate case usually begins with arguments as to whether it is a normal type of the particular offense or whether it involves a defendant who is a better or worse risk than most others charged with this crime. Usually, the guilt of the accused is assumed.
As Sudnow points out, these risk-classification norms vary between courts and are probably different for private rather than public criminal defense lawyers. Attorneys new to the process have to learn the local norms before they can efficiently resolve cases to the general satisfaction of their coworkers and with a minimum investment of time and effort per case. Comparative studies of the operations of criminal courts in different locations have found that a "courthouse subculture" develops in each, giving each court somewhat different norms as to the risks involved in alternative dispositions for particular types of cases.
Risk-assessment norms probably also vary from one collective workplace to another not only for courts but also for other types of criminal justice agencies. Thus the criteria for evaluating risk are likely to be somewhat diverse among different police stations where decisions to arrest and to book are made, penal institutions where prospects of escape or violence must be judged in allocating housing and work assignments to inmates, parole boards that have release discretion, and probation or parole supervision offices that must decide which releasees should get the most surveillance or other kinds of controls.
These normative variations reflect a basic principle of sociology and anthropology that I call the law of sociocultural relativity: social separation fosters cultural differentiation. Cultures are acquired by communication and tend to be continuously changing. When people in different workplaces do not interact with each other, their subcultures are likely to diverge.
The influence of local subcultural norms in risk assessment is objectionable from at least two standpoints. First, their variation conflicts with the ideal of maintaining uniform justice practices throughout a jurisdiction. Second, local norms may generate quite inaccurate judgments of risks. The inaccuracies of risk-assessment norms, however, probably reflect psychological principles that affect human thought in all types of settings.” - Daniel Glaser, “Classification for Risk.” Crime and Justice, Vol. 9, special issue on Prediction and Classification: Criminal Justice Decision Making (1987), pp. 252-253.
From Energy War to Currency War: America’s Attack on the Russian Ruble
http://dlvr.it/CSr2BM
By David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States aims to use new sanctions imposed on North Korea over the cyber attack on Sony Pictures to cut off the country's remaining links to the international financial system, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.
U.S. takes aim at North Korea's remaining financial links
By David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States aims to use new sanctions imposed on North Korea over the cyber attack on Sony Pictures to cut off the country's remaining links to the international financial system, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday. Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, said past sanctions had already discouraged "hundreds" of overseas banks, including China's major commercial banks, from doing business with North Korea. New sanctions announced by President Barack Obama on Jan 2. ... http://dlvr.it/85kCnk
