Month: August 2015

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice is an enlightening and well-structured book about the ways in which the current US criminal justice system fails us. Adam Benforado, an associate professor law and a former attorney, focuses on how our hidden biases affect the justice system. He explains the problems in each part of the legal process and offers possible solutions.

In fact, we are not such cool and deliberate detectives; rather, we are masters at jumping to conclusions based on an extremely limited amount of evidence. The automatic processes in our brain (commonly referred to as System 1) quickly take in the scene and then reach a conclusion about the victim based on what is right in front of us, without considering what we might be missing. Ambiguity and doubt are pushed to the side.

In certain circumstances, our deliberative and effortful mental processes (System 2) can override those initial impressions–and raise the specter of uncertainty–but often, they do not. The less we know, the easier it is for us to produce a coherent story, and it is the consistency of the narrative that predicts how much confidence we will have in our assessment. The unfortunate result is that we may become overconfident precisely when we have limited or weak evidence.

The book opens with an example of medieval justice. Benforado suggests that just as we laugh at the irrationality of our ancestor’s legal methods, our descendants will be shocked at the naiveté behind our modern day legal processes. The author walks the reader through each part of of the legal process, explains the current problems, and suggests solutions. Some of the solutions are surprisingly simple to implement, e.g. data collection on judicial decisions to show hidden biases. The book is extremely well-organized. Here is the table of contents:

Part 1: Investigation
1. The Labels We Live By – The Victim
2. Dangerous Confessions – The Detective
3. The Criminal Mind – The Suspect

Part II: Adjudication
4. Breaking the Rules – The Lawyer
5. The Eye of the Beholder – The Jury
6. The Corruption of Memory – The Eyewitness
7. How to Tell a Lie – The Eyewitness
8. Umpires or Activists? – The Judge

Part III: Punishment
9. An Eye for an Eye – The Public
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Part IV: Reform
11. What We Must Overcome – The Challenge
12. What We Can Do – The Future
Bibliography. Endnotes are available at the author’s website.

The cases and experiments mentioned were fascinating. Some aspects this book reminded me of Predictably Irrational and Freakonomics series, but Unfair is deeper, more focused and more academic. Some of the interesting topics discussed: how disgust makes people’s moral judgments significantly more severe, how women labeled as virgins or married are viewed as more responsible for sexual assault than when labeled as a divorcée, how we are all still closet physiognomists, how the act of holding a gun biases the gun holder’s assessment of threat, how camera position during arrests and interrogations can sway the verdict, the impact of race on the severity of punishment, the impact of facial features on the severity of punishment (“in cases where the victim is white, the more stereotypically black a defendant’s facial features, the more likely he is to receive the death penalty”), how a terrorist attack can impact unrelated cases, how the time of day can affect punishment, how a video of brutality shown in slow-motion can alter juror perception of an event, and how judges aren’t quite as objective as they would like to believe.

Research suggests that once we have summed someone up, we search for data confining that identity and disregard or minimize evidence conflicting with it. Of course, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels as though we are just dispassionately sorting through the details. But really our minds are bending the facts, sawing off inconvenient corners, and tossing away contradictory information so that everything can be fit into our ready-made boxes.

Some of my key takeaways from this book:
(1) We all have hidden biases that we are not consciously aware of; police officers, judges and lawyers are not immune to these hidden biases. Most people aren’t actively trying to be unfair.
(2) It is surprisingly easy to rationalize unethical behavior.
(3) We tend to see our motivations as purer than they actually are (seeking justice vs. seeking vengeance).
(4) Some aspects of punishment are counterintuitive to the results expected, e.g excessively long solitary confinements.

This is not a quick and easy read, but it is really interesting and enlightening. I would recommend this to book to everyone, especially voters in the United States and people who are interested in the intricacies of the human mind and its inherent biases. There is a bit of a liberal bent in parts of the book which might deter some from reading it, but I don’t think you have to be comfortable with 100% of Benforado’s proposed solutions in order to find value in this book. In addition to this book, I would also recommend Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing because of overlapping themes (blind certainty and cognitive dissonance).

Doubt isn’t the enemy of blind justice–blind certainty is.

“Life, like the sea, comes at us hard,” he could hear Old Pa saying. “It’s kindness–simple human kindness—that buffers the blows.”

A family drama set in central Florida, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wes Avery is a successful gas station owner and dutiful family man. His once meticulous wife Sarah is slowly pulling away from the family, as she increasingly retreats to the family bomb shelter. His 17-year-old daughter Charlotte is nervous about the looming threat of nuclear war, but is also preoccupied with high school and upcoming homecoming activities. As the tension builds between Russia and the United States, so does the tension in the Avery household.

Contemplating the global game played out over the past week, Avery had the dizzying realization that they’d reached every chess player’s worst nightmare: zugzwang.

Zugzwang, the endgame perfected by Persian chess masters over a thousand years ago, occurred when every move left is “bad” and whichever player has the next move will, as a result of his move, lose.

In the thermonuclear-charged game between Khrushchev and Kennedy, having reached zugzwang, the only question left to answer was: Whose turn is it? Was it Kennedy’s due to Khrushchev’s downing of the U-2? Or was it Khrushchev’s because of some secret move on Kennedy’s part?

This novel felt like two different books: a family drama and non-fiction novel. The non-fiction sections were actually my favorite parts! At the end of each school year, we would always stall out over World War II and then maybe devote the last couple days to everything that happened more recently. I really only knew the basics about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I learned a lot from this book (Pedro Pans, dog tags, women’s civil defense effort., etc.), especially about the civilian response. The author obviously did a lot of research. The most fascinating part of this book was the setting: Central Florida in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the main character managing a successful gas station and the location set near an army base, the author is able to explore the escalating tension from an interesting, impactful angle. The author did a good job of portraying the fear and uncertainty the families experienced, as well as the innocence off the time, and the subsequent loss of innocence. I liked that the author chose to tell the story from the perspective of those who are helplessly watching the situation unfold through rumor and television report.
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He could see in her eyes the struggle between her need and her reluctance to believe him. In kindergarten, she’d nicknamed him Happy Pappy, discerning even at the age of five, his determined optimism. Her childhood drawings of him were always smiling. But clearly the problems they were facing today were so much larger, and scarier, than he had the power to resolve. That realization–her recognition that all the positive thinking in the world couldn’t mask the fact that he was as powerless as she was– pained him to no end.

I wasn’t too emotionally invested with the Avery family and their domestic situation. The characters never felt like fully formed people and I didn’t really care much about them or their relationships to each other. It seemed as if the author’s voice was speaking through them and the characters were simply vehicles through which to explore this fascinating time period in history. Avery and his gas station employees, Steve and Emilio, were the most interesting characters. Avery’s POV dominated most of the book, so maybe it would helped if there were more chapters from Sarah’s and Charlotte’s point of view. I did not like the way the last chapter was set up. I thought there would be more symmetry with the intro, so [spoiler] the letter to the actual author[/spoiler] threw me off and really took me out of the book.

Whenever Mama did that, she’d quote President Roosevelt: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” …But knots–she sighed deeply, hurting as she thought of it–like families, like dreams, like life, for that matter, can be slippery things, unwilling or unable to hold.

While I felt kind of ‘meh’ about the Avery family, I was very invested in the crisis unfolding around them. That is no small feat, considering I already knew the basics of how that situation ended up! The historical aspects of A Place We Knew Well were really interesting. I will be seeking out more books about this time period.

(Being from Southeast Texas, there was a one sentence reference to Port Arthur in Chapter 8 which was neat to read!)

“This thing’s got disaster written all over it,” Sarah had said. He wished she were here now to see them. Those kids aren’t the disaster, he would’ve told her. We are; every one of us who saw this thing coming and didn’t do everything in our power to stop it.