| Calculating the costs of crime SPA’s Forst examines errors of justice BY ADRIENNE FRANK
Photo by Jeff Watts
Brian Forst
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“What’s wrong with this picture?” It’s a question Brian Forst, professor of justice, law and society in the School of Public Affairs, frequently poses to master’s students in his research methods class. It’s Forst’s way of helping students refine their analytical skills by training them to spot manipulated data and ethically questionable methods. It’s Forst’s catchphrase. It’s also the first thing that came to mind four years ago when Forst was delivering a lecture on Type I and Type II errors, and “noticed a few eyelids in the room getting droopy.” Type I errors, or false positives, result when a researcher accepts a hypothesis that’s false, while Type II errors, or false negatives, result when a researcher rejects a hypothesis that’s true. As they’re at the foundation of hypothesis testing and confidence interval estimation, Type I and II errors are “really important stuff”—but not the sort of thing students easily grasp or thoroughly appreciate. “As I was talking, I could see people were struggling, as they usually do at that point in the course,” said Forst, who’s been teaching research methods for more than 13 years at AU, and before that at George Washington University and the University of California at Los Angeles. “If you don’t find statistics a fascinating topic, you’re going to say, ‘This is torture.’” Forst knew he had to “shake the students a little bit” and find a way to relate the material to their personal experiences. “How do you feel when a cop commits a Type I error and pulls you over for something you didn’t do,” Forst recalls asking his students. “How do you feel when a jury commits a Type II error by acquitting a person who is quite obviously the culprit of a serious crime and may be a danger to the community?” And then Forst asked himself: What’s wrong with this picture? “It suddenly occurred to me that we have sophisticated systems for managing errors of statistical inference that we use in health care management and financial portfolio analysis. But, we don’t use these same frameworks for analysis in the criminal justice system, where the errors are arguably more socially costly,” he said. That “Eureka moment” was the impetus for Forst’s book, Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources and Remedies, released in November 2003. “[It] was written directly out of my experience of the classroom as a laboratory for my learning,” said Forst, who was honored last month during the library’s Celebrating Scholarship event, which recognizes published works by faculty members. “We often think of research informing our teaching—and of course it does—but it’s often equally true that what happens in the classroom informs our research.” Defining an error of justice as “any departure from an optimal outcome of justice for a criminal case,” the book explores errors of due process (Type I errors) and errors of impunity (Type II errors) and offers methods for assessing police profiling, courtroom standards of proof, and screening of criminal cases. The most egregious error of justice is the execution of an innocent person, though that hasn’t occurred in the United States in more than 50 years. A more prevalent example is felony victimizations. According to Forst, about 20 million felony victimizations occur each year, but only about 10 percent, or 2 million, result in a conviction. Those that go without a conviction are false negatives, or errors of impunity. “That’s why there’s so much concern about crime and draconian punishments in this country,” he explained. “People are fed up with crime; they’re saying, ‘enough already.’ “But sometimes there’s a knee-jerk reaction on the other side. Those felons we convict, we throw the book at. Many of those 2 million people behind bars have received excessive punishments for things like drug trafficking, and many of them are generally harmless.” In that way, Forst said, there’s too many of both kinds of errors. “That may be due, in part, to the fact that we don’t have any kind of system for consciously managing errors of justice. We have these other rules—proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and rules of policing and prosecution—that are only loosely connected to errors of justice. “And we really need a system for managing errors because, for example, when a wrongful arrest [an error of due process] occurs, it undermines the perceived legitimacy of the police,” he continued. Forst, who’s currently working on a terrorism textbook, hopes Errors of Justice will provide “food for thought” for other scholars and researchers. As the annual cost of crime is estimated at $1 trillion, he said it’s imperative the we better manage errors of justice. “It is my hope that this book will make us more aware of errors and their sources and perhaps eventually help to enhance the legitimacy of the criminal justice system,” said Forst. “If, along the way, we can reduce a few errors of justice, that would be a good thing, too.” |
