![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/files\/2022\/08\/Jail-300x75.png\")
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This was another interesting task to work through, as I surprised myself with some of the choices that I made.<\/p>\n
As a general rule, my political beliefs hold that as a society we rely too heavily on incarceration as a rehabilitative method. I feel that the public tends to view jail as a mechanism for punishment, not rehabilitation and therefore attitudes tend to skew towards \u201clocking them up and throwing away the key\u201d whenever someone is deemed unfit or unsafe to participate in society. As such, I felt right from the get go that I would likely be releasing the majority of defendants and that public opinion would be very much against me.<\/p>\n
When I actually began the exercise, I was a bit surprised at my own choices. When reading the descriptions I found myself leaning a bit more towards detaining the defendants, especially when the risk of committing a crime or violence was deemed to be high. In one case a defendant even pleaded that they would lose custody of their children if detained, but when I saw that their risk of violence was \u201chigh\u201d I thought to myself \u201cgood! You SHOULD lose custody!\u201d It was an odd feeling, a bit of a Stanford Prison Effect- when given just a little bit of power, I found myself wielding it with a sense of righteous authority.<\/p>\n
But things got even stranger after that. As the exercise continued I found that I was spending less time deliberating. The three categories- Failed to Appear, Commit a Crime and Violence were color coded for each defendant with green meaning low risk, yellow medium and red high. I noticed that in all cases where Violence and Commit a Crime were red, I would default to incarceration. Soon, I wasn\u2019t reading the contextual info at all, I was just zipping through making my judgements solely on color. This is concerning because I don\u2019t know exactly what criteria was used to evaluate the defendants in the three categories. I just blindly trusted the information I was given. Upon finishing the exercise I did some further reflection and realized that in each case the defendants face was blurred out, yet the color of their skin was plainly visible. Could this also be a contributing factor on my decision making, even unconsciously?<\/p>\n
As a whole, the exercise was a great opportunity to reflect on biases in decision making. Not just the inherent bias present in algorithms or hard coded into the justice system, but my own personal biases as well. I don\u2019t believe bias can ever be fully removed from the decision making process, but acknowledging it is a good first step towards making choices in a fair and equitable manner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was another interesting task to work through, as I surprised myself with some of the choices that I made. As a general rule, my political beliefs hold that as a society we rely too heavily on incarceration as a rehabilitative method. I feel that the public tends to view jail as a mechanism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71907,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71907"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jordon540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}