This article was written by Farmer John, a member of the Philosophy for Humans Learning Community
We’ve had two meetings of Philosophy for Humans since our last dispatch. This semester we are spending more time on pre-incarceration than abolition. In our first meeting in February, we explored chapter 2 of Jennifer Lackey’s Criminal Testimonial Injustice, covering false confessions and agential testimonial injustice. Volunteering to facilitate this meeting, I had to attempt to glean Lackey’s meaning in order to create a plan to break this chapter down for the community, and then continue the discussion beyond the book.
To begin the meeting, I felt a lighthearted topic was in order. We opened with an icebreaker wagon wheel with three questions related to science or science fiction. The first was: what do you think the coolest human achievement was in the last year? The second: what from science fiction do you wish were true? And finally: what is your most favorite and least favorite science fiction movie? I always enjoy putting our philosophy professors out of their comfort zones. Needless to say, there was an abundance of joy and exuberance in the discussion.
On to business. We discussed Lackey’s take on how we attribute varying degrees of credibility to people in the legal process and how this credibility changes relative to the specific information being offered and the timing of the testimony. One example is, when a confession is received in an investigation, immense credibility is given to the confessor even and often despite evidence to the contrary. Yet, that person does not receive as much credibility if they later recant for any reason. While this bias is obvious in this scenario, Lackey contends the variation extends throughout the legal process for the accused, the victim, and legal professionals as well. The surprise ending of Lackey’s analysis: in treating the confessing self as more credible than the recanting self, and in extracting confessions through tactics that undermine a testifier’s rational capacities (that is, a subject’s ability to respond to reasons or evidence), the state is effectively saying to its citizens: “you are worthy of being believed only when we undermine your epistemic agency” (page 72).
In order to dig into these issues, I led the community into a series of small group discussions. First I asked them to discuss: what problem(s) does Lackey find with how confessions are given and received? and, is she missing anything from this analysis? On this point, many outside members of our group were surprised to learn that the police are legally permitted to lie to people who they are interrogating about what evidence they have obtained of their guilt or innocence. And many inside members were shocked to read of the nine steps of the Reid Technique, which rang true of own interrogations. One particular pernicious outcome: police are able to erode people’s trust in their own faculties “not through reason but rather through manipulation, deception and coercion” (page 59), leading them to make false confessions.
Then I asked small groups to discuss: what are Lackey’s solutions? and, are there additional solutions that she does not acknowledge? Lackey argued that confession evidence is weighed too heavily but instead should be treated as highly fallible and as such should be treated as only a piece of evidence that needs corroboration before it is conclusive. One solution worth considering that she did not include: the root cause of these tactics is a system that values closed cases, “winning”, and saving money over the truth and healing. Only when we embrace these latter values will we build a system of accountability that avoids causing so much harm in its response to harm.
Finally, I asked: how do we want these ideas to contribute to our work and to our growing understanding of abolition and transformative justice? We want to share the Reid Technique with other incarcerated people and their families so that they are aware of the tactics that will likely be used against them. We also want to share broadly the reading of Miranda rights included in her chapter: these rights are not so much about remaining silent but rather about protecting and encouraging speech that “is the product of the unfettered exercise of one’s own will” (page 51).
Our discussions on these topics eventually had to be cut short so that our project groups could meet for a little while to advance our projects: the second issue of our ‘zine, a podcast on the prospects of transformative justice within ODRC, and our writing group project. We hope to be able to share the outcome of these projects soon.
In the next meeting, we took a break from our philosophical reading for a presentation on algorithmic bias in risk assessments, a session facilitated by outside member Jacob. He also chose to start us off with some levity in doing a love/hate activity where a topic was presented and we all had to choose which side of the room to stand on. We were asked to take a stand on horror movies, and then musicals. After some vivid horror stories about horror movies and a bit of song and dance about musicals, we turned to the task at hand.
The focus of this meeting was an algorithm that reports high accuracy when correct, but fails in a clearly racially biased way. The algorithm in question supplies a risk assessment of the likelihood for someone to re-offend upon release. When the algorithm gives a correct rating, it is correct regardless of race; so a white person and a black person who each score a 7 are just as likely to be rearrested. But when it fails, it predicts that white people are lower risk than they turn out to be, and it predicts non-white people are a higher risk than they turn out to be. The question then: if it has a high success rate that proves to be unbiased and a low failure rate that is biased, is the algorithm acceptable to use? Or, in fixing the bias in the failure rate does that mean that it will be biased in the success rate? This was another lively discussion with an interesting mix of opinions and perspectives. It always refreshes me to exist in a space where all opinions can be openly discussed and even respected even if disagreements exist.
Our group is a safe place for all. Kudos to Jacob for bringing us a timely and interesting topic!
