Engineering Paradise - Ministry of Justice

Perhaps the ministry that requires the least prejudice of all is the Ministry of Justice.  It takes care of applying the laws created by the Lawmaking Ministry.  In my view, it should have 3 functions, similar to what we have today in most Western countries, but with some changes in their operation:

•         Law enforcement
•         The courts
•       Correctional facilities

I’ll take time to define these below and how they can be optimized with minimized staff using high technology. 

Law enforcement

Many new tools can be used today by police to alleviate some of the dangers policemen face.  Autonomous drones, for example, can be deployed on the ground and in the air, equipped with cameras, image recognition and interactive artificial intelligence to serve as the eyes and ears of the police force.  Drones like these have already been deployed in several cities around the world experimentally.

Aerial drones are terrific tools for unobtrusive mobile observation of areas and people of interest.  These can be deployed very quickly to follow individuals that require security and chase criminals.  In a pinch, these drones can be remote controlled by human officers too.

Street drones can do this job too, but they can also interact with individuals, answer questions, taking reports and record events as they unfold before police officers get to a scene.  Since it is more difficult for ground drones to move around, each drone motility type can have its use in a police force.

Drones can also be used to support civilian first responders when tragedy strikes and on the scenes of accidents as they happen by identifying the accident and dispatching immediate help.  They can deliver first aid kits and even defibrillators to a first responder extremely quickly.

Automated drones can be used in other situations where officers may be put in harm’s way, such as rescues, bomb disposal (remote drones have been in use for this task for years already) and even as an integral element of a SWAT team to enter buildings first, acting as a shield for human officers.

These uses of robots and drones are available today, but ideally, advancements in AI and robotics can increase their presence and replace more human officers.  There is plenty of willingness to improve robot intelligence and flexibility in the field, allowing them to work more and more independently, efficiently and with discernment. 

AI software on its own can be extremely useful to remove much of the administrative burden police officers deal with daily.  It is a well-known fact that officers spend up to half of their day doing administrative duties, from non-incident duties training, handling complaints, paperwork, filings etc.  All repetitive administrative tasks could be offloaded to AI and the roughly 15% of an officer’s time spent on patrol could be relegated to automated drones.[1]  This would free up officer’s time doing community engagement, education for crime prevention and investigating crimes.

Through the judicious development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence technology, we could have a smaller police force that spends all their time dealing with qualified incidents, investigating crimes and teaching safety to the public.  They can also do their job in a safer manner: behind the shield of remote controlled or fully automated robots.

One of the public’s complaint in North America about the police is that they aren’t seen in public enough.  Part of crime prevention as well as giving a sense of security to the public is police presence.  The use of drones and freeing 50% of police officer’s time from administrative duties gives the police force much needed visibility in public.

On a final note, thanks to all the other changes recommended in this book eliminating hunger and despair, the cost of crime can be severely reduced, thus reducing the need for a sizeable police force in the first place.  Dealing with the fundamental reason why individuals end up committing crimes will be of primary importance for our ideal society.

Research done by the University of Chicago shows child poverty costs the United States $500 billion per year.[2]  This includes lost earnings as well as health care and the cost of crime.  In a study organized by Duke University in a Cherokee reserve in the US, where UBI was instituted for a while, it was found that 40% fewer kids whose families received basic income payments had behavioral problems compared to those who didn’t participate in the cash delivery program.  Payments to the poorest Cherokee families reduced by 22% the odds children would commit minor crimes by their late teenage years.[3]  In Namibia, UBI was organized and deployed in an impoverished city for 2 years and reduced crime rates by 42%.[4]

Therefore, to have an efficient, inexpensive and happy police force serving the community, automation is key, but other social changes to reduce social stresses that cause crime and anti-social behavior in the first place.

The courts

After police apprehend offenders and when citizens wish to resolve disputes, cases need to be resolved in court. 

This whole system, must remain completely unbiased, therefore judges and support staff must be selected through an equitable and fair process.  Some modern countries use a voting system.  Others appoint their judges.  In some countries, judges are employees selected based on merit.  It is indeed difficult for human beings to be completely unbiased in the best conditions because we naturally have opinions on just about any topic presented to us.  On the other hand, unbiased AI won’t be sophisticated enough for several years to deal with the nuances confronting judges daily.    AI judges would be ideal one day.

In the meantime, the selection of judges must be done properly.  If a voting system is used, it must be like the system described to select ministry leadership:  experts elect the judges without any campaigning, parties or fundraising.  If judges are appointed, they must be appointed by an elected official that has been voted in by citizen-experts.

Even though judges themselves cannot be easily replaced with AI, today’s AI can be extremely efficient and useful to judges and lawyers alike.  AI is terrific at scouring through large amounts of data.  In this case, they can be used to analyse precedents, keep up to date with changing laws, regulations and opinion changes.  Courts and legal offices are filled with legal assistants whose jobs are almost exclusively to research precedent to build cases.  This is of course a burden on the system that can be alleviated by artificial intelligence.

I believe private lawyers are needed consultants and can help individuals in legal matters.  They can also offload much of the costs of the court system.  Besides, most people will likely want the option to choose who will help them in cases.  However, to have equality, legal counsel should be offered for free by the state as not everyone can afford private sector legal advice.  For the time being, AI is not yet ready to take on that role because it does take some human empathy to be a good lawyer. 

The anticipated reduction in crime thanks to the reduction of social stresses however should help keep the costs of the judicial system to a minimum.  The important point here is to keep it fair.

Correctional facilities

In most countries, individuals that have been found guilty in serious crimes are incarcerated, separated from normal society.  Presumably this is done either to punish criminals or to ensure they cannot offend more people until they are rehabilitated.

The ideology is partially correct.  On the one hand, dangerous individuals, should be separated from others for security reasons.  That is undeniably necessary.  On a case by case basis, they can either be placed in correctional facilities or in mental hospitals.  The difference between the two should be clear:  individuals found in need mental help by professionals, should be treated in a mental institution. Rehabilitation for a mentally ill individual is supervised control of the sickness or a cure. 

Those who are not mentally sick but have anti-social behaviors need to have their behaviors corrected before they are reinstated into society.  Anti-social behavior can be an undiscovered mental problem, best relegated to the mental hospitals for correction, medicine and so forth, or the criminal must be treated in a different way.

One of the biggest issues with rehabilitating criminals using the current correctional facilities is that these institutions tend to promote further anti-social behavior from inmates and more so when sentences are longer.[5]  Isolating individuals with other unbalanced offenders in a less than healthy environment doesn’t frequently lead to producing well-balanced individuals that can lead positive lives outside of the system. 

As far as better correctional facilities, that truly serve to rehabilitate offenders, there are some excellent models in the world.  The country that has the lowest recidivism rate is Norway.  Norway’s incarceration rate is just 75 per 100,000 people compared to the US’s 707 per 100,000.  In Norway, only 20% of offenders are back in the system within the next 5 years, whereas in the US that number is one of the highest in the world at over 75%.[6]  Experts believe the reason behind such great differences in numbers between systems is that the Norwegian system relies on the concept of repairing harm caused by crime instead of punishment.  The system thus focuses on rehabilitating prisoners and treating them as human beings.

Rehabilitating prisoners means creating “normal” environments where prisoners feel like they are just living in a different area for a while, until they are well enough to be reinserted into society.  They are isolated from their loved ones and their lives yes, but in an environment where they can balance their psyche properly and get some personal stability, support and so on.  In Norway, the prisons have no bars on the windows.  There are plenty of sharp objects in the kitchen, where prisoners can cook their own meals, and they don’t fear those objects will be used to harm them, or the very few guards.  Once criminals are rehabilitated, they go back to society more stable than when they went in.  That is the rule.  And in Norway, they go back to a society supported by a well endowed social security system, adding to the insurance that recently released offenders are much less likely to re-offend.   

In an interview with The Guardian, Arne Wilson, a Norwegian clinical psychologist explained: 

“In closed prisons we keep them locked up for some years and then let them back out, not having had any real responsibility for working or cooking. In the law, being sent to prison is nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer. The punishment is that you lose your freedom. If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings.”

Bottom line is if we want to counter crime, we need to treat prisoners like human beings and give them the emotional and physical tools to find balance, purpose, and healthy ways to deal with real life.

Only then will others be safe around convicts when they come out of an institution.  This is how our society will change from being fearful of “ex-cons”, to treating them with respect. 

In my opinion, there should be no punishment for crimes.  Only healing the sick and rehabilitating the unbalanced until and only until the individual is fully rehabilitated.

I therefore recommend no minimum or maximum sentences for incarceration and rehabilitation.  An offender should be institutionalised until expert professionals deem an individual is fully rehabilitated, balanced and the chance for the individual to revert to criminal behavior is a very low probability.

The total economic toll of mass incarceration in the United States exceeds $1 trillion.   That is roughly equivalent to 1/6^th of the American total federal revenues for a year.  Operation costs of all federal and state prisons, plus running local jails costs the US government about $80 billion a year.[7]

If the US, for example, would adopt a correctional system like Norway’s, those costs would be reduced by a factor of 10.

If we want a safe society, run by an unbiased, inexpensive system, first we must focus on treating both the enforcers and the citizens like human beings. Our most basic wish as human beings is to be comfortable and happy.  Police officers want to enjoy protecting others and feel motivated to do just that without putting their lives unduly at risk or doing repetitive tasks.  Citizens don’t want to worry about fairness in the system, their safety or to feel the need to take matters in their own hands because of the absence of fair enforcement, prosecution and surveillance.

We can do better.

Finally, private mental health and rehabilitation facilities can work hand in hand while properly regulated.  They can be organized as not-for-profit organizations with government oversight and regulation or public institutions. 

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[1] Police officers spend nearly half their working day on paperwork and meetings (April 2010).  Daily Mail Reporter.  - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1269405/Police-officers-spend-nearly-half-working-day-paperwork-meetings.html

[2] Jarry J. Holzer et al.  (March 2008) The economic costs of childhood poverty in the United States. Journal of Children and Poverty, Vol. 14, No. 1, 41-61.

[3] John D. Sutter (March 2015)  The argument for a basic income. CNN  - https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sutter-basic-income/index.html

[4] Making the difference.  Basic Income Grant Pilot Project Assessment Report, April 2009 by the Basic Income Grant Coalition.

[5] Paul Gendreau et al.  (March 1999).  The effects of prison sentences on recidivism.  Public works and government services Canada.  - https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ffcts-prsn-sntncs-rcdvsm/ffcts-prsn-sntncs-rcdvsm-eng.pdf

[6] Christina Sterbenz (December 2014)  Why Norway’s prison system is so successful - http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-so-successful-2014-12

[7] Matt Ferner (September 2016).  The full cost of incarceration in the U.S. is over $1 trillion, study finds.  http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/mass-incarceration-cost_us_57d82d99e4b09d7a687fde21

Lawmaking Ministry

Lawmakers have a responsibility to re-evaluate old laws and create new laws that will serve the people.  This ranges from constitutional law all the way to regional laws.  Therefore, it is advantageous for this ministry to have a federal department and several regional departments spread out logically where they are needed down to the municipal level.  I think this could work in a similar way as today’s city or county by-laws.  At the local level, these super-regional by-laws are important to satisfy the needs and desires of residents of very specific areas based on their location, demography, affluence, infrastructure, industry and so on.  Needed regulation can be quite different in a large metropolitan city versus a small farming community.

Of utmost importance to start with, our ideal society needs a modern constitution that ensures the basic needs we’ve identified in the first section of this book are distributed fairly and without bias to all citizens.  This is the primary purpose of the government after all.  Thus, the basic needs should be stated as basic rights under the constitution.  Since these basic needs are biological rights, those should be immutable though they could be amended under special circumstances.  Other less basic additions should be made to this constitution.  I would recommend including an updated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[1] and the right for each citizen to have basic internet access.  Remember, if we’re going to be a technologically advanced civilization with an engaged citizenry, we must ensure every citizen has what is needed to be connected with the rest of the nation and the government as well.  On a higher level, civil and criminal code legislation should be addressed in bigger regions (states, provinces etc.).  On a national level, the legislature should be more constitutional or of national impact such as income tax law, legal agreements between countries, and so forth.

One of the bigger differences we’d see between the ideal system we’re thinking about here and the real world is that there would be no parties involved in the ministry in the same way that there are no parties involved in the selection of ministry leadership.  In the past, parties were born out of the idea of siding with an ideology, thus a group of similarly minded people, for strength of opinion.  Our new electoral system doesn’t need nor require political parties.  It doesn’t mean that people inside a ministry wouldn’t agree and disagree on different topics.  Neither would the engaged population be polarized or get organized in groups at times.  Groupings are inevitable, and people should be free to do so.

It would be the job of this ministry, aided by the AI analysis to determine what event, cause, problem should be prioritized for the people, and to find the optimal legislative solution that would satisfy the people.  Once a solution is presented to the population through the online system, and given time for reflection by the collaboration between the people and ministry staff/AI, the new proposed law, by-law or amendment could be modified, dumped or put to execution by the ministry.

Online consensus would automatically be calculated by the analytics AI in favor of the new bill “as is” or if it needs more work.  This concept replaces and, in many ways, simulates the very valid and tried true adversarial approach to discussions in modern politics.  The arguments are just held with the people and the educated experts participating in governance within.  Contrary to our old system, the people represent themselves and have no need to join groupings like parties to be heard.  Hopefully, this would mean millions of “parties of one” adding their voices to the process and affecting real change one comment at a time.

Other ministries as participants

Since law is central to much of what we do and used as a general guide by individuals and companies alike, other ministries will need to be consulted on different issues to ensure the Lawmaking Ministry has all the facts from the best experts in the world.  So, it is logical, for example, the Health Ministry would be heavily consulted, as well as the health experts within the population through the system (nurses, doctors, health industry entrepreneurs and workers etc.), to ensure a law affecting availability of medicine is properly drafted and worded to benefit everyone’s health.  In this example, since possible health cost increases may be a burden, the Economy & Trade Ministry will need to be involved along with their citizen-experts from the population (economists, merchants, environmentalists, blockchain experts, trade platform providers, ecommerce merchants, economy bloggers, etc.)  Making a new law that will affect a lot of people needs to come from positions of solid fact and in agreement with the majority of knowledgeable population.

Applying a new law/amendment

No matter what a new law is, and the level of government, it needs to be passed along to the other ministries so that they can adapt to new rules and affect changes in their own operations accordingly.  For instance, a new law that restricts who can acquire a weapon at the federal level has to be passed along to the Security Ministry and to the Ministry of Justice.  These ministries can then immediately enforce the law on the streets and in the courts.  This one doesn’t impact the other ministries directly, but they would become aware of it along with the people (we can make communications with the government a choice of medium: e-mail newsletter, tweet, Facebook post, snail mail… why not?).  Whatever the means citizens prefer to stay in touch with their employee’s work, it should be available.

If a law impacts other countries, then the Foreign Affairs Ministry would need to be involved in communications and negotiations. 

If it affects only a small domestic region, then the information would be disseminated through that population only directly yet still be available in the central system for anyone would like to check it out from anywhere in the country.

A population that is well informed about new legislature will help future law-making efforts and the population would be further engaged in new law and amendments.  It is also an encouraging process for businesses who would like to move forward with projects with new laws in full view, and thus avoid issues of crossing lines unintentionally.   On the other hand, innovative businesses with strong support could be active participants in the creation and live testing of new regulations in full view of the whole population. 

Ignorance of the law with this much information and indeed discussion between individuals and the media would even more ridiculous than what it is today and definitely not an excuse for breaking it.

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[1] Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).  United Nations - http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/