Crime...

Resulting from a discussion with a friend on crimes we had been a victim of, I was asked to consider the general concepts of the film/story Minority Report.  That is: is crime prevention a good crime prediction technique?  Here is my initial response, which I wrote this morning:


Is crime prediction a good crime prevention technique?  If you can predict a person will be a violent offender, what do you do with them?  Like a zoo:  You lock a tiger up not because he has mauled anyone, but because he is so incredibly capable.

First, I want to consider prediction, specifically through social science.  If you come up with a set of criteria that is extremely accurate, "A man born into these circumstances that has these experiences with these genetics will, under these life conditions ________."  A giant statistical program.  If we had the statistics, we could predict the whole of everything:

The e-book of life?

I think that in the strictest sense, it is  possible (though not probable).  People would be so perfectly predictable if we knew what data to gather.  As for the right way to deal with potential, certain violence:  I ask about fairness.  I am making a possibly incorrect association between justice and fairness, but it is the only way I know to go forward, here.  What is most fair?

Fairness means that everyone gets what is best for them, but on a societal level, that breaks down. There are so many variables, and everyone is searching for their own efficient comfort.  My question is flawed.  Crime prediction is no different than crime detection when thinking of crime prevention.  It is the reaction to the crime that is the question.  What do you do with some one who has or is going to commit a violent crime?  My response is the same, but it is not practical:  Education.

What is best for the criminal and for the larger society, what will make fairness instead of search for it, is access to knowledge of how comfort can be most efficiently attained without committing a crime. Crime for comfort is inefficient because it is dangerous, though for some the benefits outweigh the risks.

This is completely confounded by those who commit voilent crime for no overt gain.  I want to know more about these people:  Are they somehow related to those who give all of themselves for the sake of what is good?  They are beyond my theory of efficient comfort because their motives are not for their gain.

Both senseless violence and senseless benevolence are a product of a loss of self, but the vacuum has been filled by different things.