Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced that they have developed computer software that can predict crime before it happens. While this announcement sounds more like it was taken from a story about a dystopian future, Hitachi plans to field test this system in cities in the United States this fall.
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Can criminals really be convicted of crimes that they ‘might’ commit, but haven’t actually perpetrated? This sounds like a scenario snatched straight from science-fiction; certainly when Philip K. Dick wrote "The Minority Report" back in 1956 the concept seemed fanciful, but advances in technology and data analysis are turning this fictional idea into fact.
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A researcher gave 96 male prisoners fMRI brain scans just before their release (he could have given them a spit test). Their brains were scanned during computer tasks during which they had to make quick decisions and control their impulses.
Four years later, Kent Kiehl found that most of the men who had lower activity in a region in the front of the brain that is involved in motor control and decision making were back in prison.
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It’s sometimes hard to determine the REAL cost of things.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of jail incarceration, perhaps because the private the private prisons springing up across the country provide local jobs. But if the prison population shrank to what it was twenty years ago, we could spend more money PREVENTING crime, rather than guarding convicted criminals.
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