Geography of crime intersects with philosophy and law

Sometimes, no, make that often, I wonder and worry that academics often ignore understanding and debating the potential ethical and legal issues even as they relentlessly and zealously pursue intellectual inquiry.  The analytical and reasoning brain, to an extent, is a curse for our species.  Of course, I would never, ever, argue for censoring intellectual pursuit.  But, can we at least pay a little bit of attention to issues larger than the intellectual puzzle itself, even as we keep moving forward?

At a couple of meetings of the Association of American Geographers, I was curious about the sessions devoted to the geography of crime.  This is pretty much what I do when I go these meetings--I attend more sessions outside my areas of familiarity compared to the sessions related to the topics I usually read, write, and teach about.  To me, such sessions are wonderful opportunities to know something about topics that I otherwise would have no clue.  Further, the geography of crime struck me as something a tad creepy, but I couldn't quite identify why it felt so.

Having been a "student" at those sessions, it turns out, came in handy when the university where I teach decided to launch an academic program in "crime analysis."  After initially contributing my two-cents worth, I rapidly pulled back.  On top of my typical unwillingness to participate in moneymaking ponzi schemes that increasingly universities develop, it was that lingering creepy feeling that pulled me back even more.  By then, I knew what was beginning to worry me: focusing on developing technical approaches to crime analysis and prevention without paying enough attention to the numerous philosophical and legal issues.

I decided not to engage my fellow faculty and administrators on this troubling notion because, over the years, I have come to understand that raising such questions mean that they are ignored or brushed off or, worse, become the reasons for me to end up in even more trouble.  There was at least one conversation with one faculty member, "B," where I shared some of my concerns.  But then "B," like me, is an outlaw most of the times, and I knew that we were not going to achieve anything, other than elevating our blood pressure!

Ronald Bailey articulates well that creepy feeling I continue to have:

[We] should always keep in mind that any new technology that helps the police to better protect citizens can also be used to better oppress them.

The worry about police oppression might be strange, given my personal life that is nothing but worse than plain vanilla.  But, hey, this is not about me :)

Bailey writes that researchers claim:

to have developed computer programs that can predict not who will commit a crime, but at what locations they are likely to occur. Welcome to the brave new world of predictive policing.

Yes, Virginia, we are quickly, and unthinkingly, morphing into the futuristic times of Minority Report!

How might predictive policing interfere with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee that Americans are to be free unreasonable searches and seizures? Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia notes in an article, "Predictive Policing: The Future of Reasonable Suspicion," forthcoming in the Emory Law Journal, that police must have either “probable cause” to search or “reasonable suspicion” to seize an individual. Such determinations are actually predictions by law enforcement officials about the likelihood they will find evidence of a crime when they search a premise or detain a suspect. Can computer programs improve these predictions and thus help police identify would-be perpetrators while excluding the innocent?

Ah, yes, the Constitution. The Bill of Rights.

These are the kind of issues that further highlight the importance of liberal education.  Not the liberal education where we offer bizarre courses on Lady Gaga or about Rock Music.  But, a rigorous liberal education where we actively and seriously engage with students on weighty content.

Instead, academe is increasingly focused on how to make the content more sexy for students.  And, sometimes, the focus is on the "sex" of the word sexy.  More than once, I have joked with students that I should include the word "sex" in all my course titles and that will draw more students in.  A dull boring course title of "Urban Geography" will then be "Sex and Urban Geography."  Then, a simple bait and switch and students are trapped in a class from which they cannot withdraw :)

Oh well.  I keep thinking and blogging along these lines while the Criminal Justice department itself is perhaps the fastest growing departments on campus, with all its various majors, minors, and certificate programs, including "crime analysis."  But then, I have always argued with vigor that I am the global village idiot!

A selection of responses to my opinion piece

So, it was an interesting few minutes reading the comments to my op-ed in the Oregonian on the "college dream."

A reader, "Eddy Rock" writes:

That’s odd isn’t this a geology professor talking about social science. Perhaps what he means is that geology degrees are worthless. Or maybe he should become a sociology professor instead. Perhaps then he could better understand the complex nature of political, economic and cultural Norms.
...
A Higher education is paramount to a better future for everyone… or we can all go back living in terror of our shadows and killing small animals with our teeth. Maybe Khe, you should propose programs that help students become more informed about job requirements rather than torching the whole system. Way to slander your own profession there guy!
I think I will take one of your classes since I go to your collage.

Hmmm ... in case "Eddy Rock" reads this:

• As the byline stated, I am not a geology professor, but I work out of the geography department, which is housed in the social sciences division of the university.
• And, yes, I constantly hassle students who seek my advice about the need to do internships, even if unpaid, in order to improve their employment prospects.
• And, yes, looking forward to having you in the classroom.

Another reader, "Rlindsl" writes:

The link between degree level and employment rate is very strong. The BLS reports unemployment for Masters degree holders at 4% while non HS diploma holders is 15%, with a steady correlation for all levels in-between. Of course doing your research and checking your facts to verify expected outcome is part of a planning and management process that you learn in a school of business, so Khe probably doesn't support that kind of approach.

I refer you to this, and this, for starters, which are all based on facts.  I suppose I follow a Keynesian approach: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Reader, "whatgoeson" writes:

If this writer thinks I'm going into debt to have someone lecture me about Plato, when I can access the info online basically for free, well, it's drug test time.

 Nope, my argument was/is that it is a waste to force everybody to read about Plato. 

And then this strange letter to the editor. I suppose the comments in response to the letter address many of the issues there.  It will be interesting, however, to find out how many graduates of the program referred to have been placed--if any, at all--in those wonderful $100,000 jobs the letter-writer refers to, and about the employment and remuneration of the rest of the graduates.

Chart of the day: Worse than Rwanda, .. or Cuba ...

ht

Crime and punishment ... is less of both possible?

The subheading to this piece in the Economist says it all, eh:

Spending more on education and private security are cost-effective ways of cutting crime

Of course, we want details:

Why is private security apparently so cost-effective? One reason, says Mr Cook, is simply that guards are paid less than police officers. Another is they are dedicated to a single district and are directly responsible for making it safe. Guards can specialise. They know which shifty characters to look out for and which policing works best in their area. Unlike policemen, they are not called away to supervise a parade or protect a dignitary.

How about the role of education?

Are there ways to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place? In principle, a lengthier education ought to reduce crime by raising people’s future earning power from legitimate work, making a criminal career less attractive. School also keeps would-be criminals in touch with the right sort of peers and social attitudes. There is plenty of evidence that a lack of education goes hand in hand with criminal behaviour. Studies of America’s jail population in the 1990s showed that most inmates had not finished high school. But few studies have established that less education is actually a cause of crime.

Which is why I joke around that it is better to house people in institutions of higher education than in penal institutions :)  And if we didn't have faculty jobs, some of us would be in yet another type of institution--the mental institutions .... ha ha

But, wait, how my state spends on education versus on corrections is no joke :(

State per capita spending on the Oregon University System has declined 44 percent in the past 15 years while spending for prisons has climbed by 50 percent ...

The decline of the English department

I blogged about this a few months ago, and my reasoning was that among other things,

the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students.

And this is a deep, deep disappointment for me. Because, I have gained so much from reading, and re-reading books. This past summer, I re-read Fathers and Sons after almost 25 years. It was many, many times more profound than it was when I first read it. And then I read Kafka. Simply awesome short stories. And, how can I forget One Hundred Years of Solitude,, which I read again after quite a few years.

Anyway, Professor William Chace has a lengthy essay in the American Scholar, and is disappointed with how English, and the rest of the humanities, is more a liability now than an asset. Chace writes,

at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

Yes, sir!
By the way, where then are the college students headed, if they are bypassing the humanities?

With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

It is a similar story with geography too. We don't offer the kind of courses that many students would like to take, because we think they are all "old school" and not some cutting edge courses. Ahem, no wonder that our fate is not very different from that of the folks in English.

The two largest majors at our campus? Business and Criminal Justice. Kind of interesting that pair, eh! One set of graduates can throw the other set of graduates in jail. muahahaha!!!