Over the last few years, legal scholars, policy-makers, activists and others have generated a vast and rapidly expanding literature concerning the ethical ramifications of using artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and predictive software in criminal justice contexts. These concerns can be clustered under the headings of fairness, accountability and transparency. First, can we trust technology to be fair, especially given that the data on which the technology is based are biased in various ways? Second, whom can we blame if the technology goes wrong, as it inevitably will on occasion? Finally, does it matter if we do not know how an algorithm works or, relatedly, cannot understand how it reached its decision? I argue that, while these are serious concerns, they are not irresolvable. More importantly, the very same concerns of fairness, accountability and transparency apply, with even greater urgency, to existing modes of decisionmaking in criminal justice. The question, hence, is comparative: can algorithmic modes of decision-making improve upon the status quo in criminal justice? There is unlikely to be a categorical answer to this question, although there are some reasons for cautious optimism.Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 44.224.250.200, on 05 Jul 2020 at 23:09:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at 1 Silvestri and Crowther-Dowey (2008) note that '[t]he overriding consensus within criminology remains that while women do commit a broad range of offences, they commit less crime than men and are less dangerous and violent than their male counterparts' (p. 25).

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The talk will begin at 12:30pm in the Ericson Seminar Room (room 265)What the criminal law is for, Chiao suggests, is sustaining social cooperation with public institutions. Consequently, we only have reason to support the use of the criminal law insofar as its use is consistent with our reasons for valuing the social order established by those institutions. By starting with the political morality of public institutions rather than the interpersonal morality of private relationships, this account shows how the criminal law is continuous with the modern administrative and welfare state, and why it is answerable to the same political virtues.If you are a person with a disability and require accommodation, please email crim.events@utoronto.ca and we will do our best to make appropriate arrangements.

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How to cite TSpace itemsAlways cite the published version, so the author(s) will receive recognition through services that track citation counts, e.g. Scopus. If you need to cite the page number of the author manuscript from TSpace because you cannot access the published version, then cite the TSpace version in addition to the published version using the permanent URI (handle) found on the record page.Abstract: An influential strain in the literature on state punishment analyzes the permissibility of punishment in exclusively deontological terms, whether in terms of an individual's rights, the state's obligation to vindicate the law, or both. I argue that we should reject a deontological theory of punishment because it cannot explain what is unjust about mass incarceration, although mass incarceration is widely considered-including by proponents of deontological theories-to be unjust. The failure of deontological theories suggests a minimum criterion of adequacy for a theory of punishment: it must take aggregation seriously such that it returns plausible results when scaled up from individual cases to large public institutions. In this vein, I briefly sketch a prioritarian metric for evaluating the use of custodial sanctions in creating and allocating social advantage.At over 700 people in state custody per 100,000 residents, the United States incarcerates far more people than any other nation. The United States now incarcerates at a rate that is five times higher than a generation ago, and about five to 10 times higher than is the norm in other liberal societies. 2 The United States incarcerates over 20% of the world's inmate population-over two million individuals-despite having less than 5% of the world's population. 3 In recent years, it has become conventional to refer to the anomalously high American incarceration rates as reflecting a policy of "mass incarceration," and law, public policy and criminology journals are filled with discussions of the evils of mass incarceration, its causes and what can be done to eradicate it. 4 Many 1 Earlier versions were presented at a Brooklyn Law School/NYU criminal law colloquium, at the