prison administration more factually important than death penalty

About as many prisoners are killed illegally in U.S. jails and prisons as are executed through judicial sentences.  Data are readily available only for the years 2001-4.  Across these years, on average 72 prisoners were illegally killed per year, while on average 65 were legally executed per year. A much larger number of prisoners commit suicide and have deaths listed under an “other/unspecified” cause.[*]  Total prisoner deaths from non-medical causes (in order of decreasing frequency, deaths from suicide, other/unspecified causes, accidents, and homicides) averaged 877 per year.  That’s more than an order of magnitude greater than the frequency of legal executions.

The death penalty and legal executions get a relatively large amount of public attention.  The death penalty involves direct, deliberate, legal killing.  The action necessary to stop legal executions is obvious and formally feasible.  The death penalty supports well-recognized actors, focal stories, and polarized public arguments.  The death penalty is thus well-suited to public deliberation.

However, measured by death in the criminal justice system, the considerable effort and resources applied in opposition to the death penalty probably have been a relatively poor investment.  Suppressing the death penalty is a very difficult challenge in the U.S.  Legal executions have not occurred only for about fifteen years across all of U.S. history.  On the other hand, reducing non-medical prisoner deaths by 10% would account for a larger reduction in deaths in the U.S. criminal justice system than would eliminating the death penalty. If the material resources and public attention committed to death-penalty debate were directed to prison guards and administrators, a 10% reduction in non-medical prisoner deaths probably would be quite feasible.

Unfortunately, details of prison conditions and operating protocols aren’t well-suited to public deliberation.  Authoritative decisions can’t easily and directly change outcomes.  Prison conditions and operating protocols involve the actions of many persons with no public profiles.  Most persons aren’t interested in narrow issues of prison administration and can’t be easily motivated to learn about them and discuss them.

General public values of bureaucratic professionalism, reasoned action, and humane concern are probably the most quantitatively imporant democratic controls on death in the criminal justice system.

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Statistics:  deaths of prisoners in U.S. prisons and jails (Excel version)

[*] “Other/unspecified” causes don’t include death from medical causes, meaning “natural causes” / illness and deaths from AIDS.

sports rules for reviewing audio-visual evidence

In professional sports, instant replay technology typically must provide “indisputable visual evidence” of a mistaken call in order for officials to overturn the call.  Understanding the “indisputable visual evidence” standard of review for audio-visual replays requires recognizing that:

  • major-league professional sports are primarily entertainment
  • entertainment value (excitement) increases with spectators’ immersion in the stream of on-field events

Officials’ deliberating about what is the correct call isn’t an exiting spectator sport.  Such deliberations should be limited to correcting blunders, meaning calls that are obviously incorrect to most fans in the midst of their real-time experience of the competition.

An interesting recent law article argues against the “indisputable visual evidence” standard of review and in favor of de novo review.  The article emphasizes a competitor’s perspective and just deserts. In the context of primarily considering major-league professional American football, the article states:

the value of error-correction gains strength from views about what those who participate in a rule-governed competition deserve, and about the justice of arranging institutions to yield outcomes that comport with desert.[1]

Major-league professional football players have more interesting work, higher pay, and greater social status than most persons, including persons arguably much more deserving of such rewards.  The factual correctness of officials’ calls in professional football has little significance to all but the narrowest evaluation of justice and desert for professional football players.  Major-league professional sports are a big-money entertainment business.  Considering standards of review for instant replay should begin from that economic reality.

Apart from obvious officiating blunders, erroneous reversal of an official’s initial call reduces the entertainment value of sports significantly more than erroneous affirmation of a mistaken call. The excitement of sports is largely in the moment of the game.  Immersed in the game, fans interpret what they see within the rules of the game.  Officials support that diegetic experience.  Making a call later is a poor substitute for making the call in the stream of the game’s normal competitive activity.  A human psychological tendency toward loss aversion makes regret likely to weigh more heavily than pleasure across two opposing fans after a reversed call.[2]  In addition, reversal of calls undermines the general experience of immersion in the game by raising the salience in consciousness of extra-diegetic activity.  Lessening immersion in the game reduces the entertainment value of sports.

Officiating rules need to be considered in conjunction with game presentation technologies and practices.  More cameras, higher-definition images, and more use of replays in game presentations may not make for more entertaining games.  Game presentation technology that allows fans to judge the game more accurately than officials undermines officials positions as supports for fans’ immersion in the game-world.  Sports officiating technology and standards of review should be chosen to support fans’ immersion in the sports game-world.

Read more:

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Notes:

[1] Berman, Mitchell N., Replay (March 7, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1830403 Quote from p. 37.  Berman is a pathbreaking scholar in the legal analysis of sports.  A least one government bureaucrat has asserted the value of sports officiating in developing regulatory expertise.

[2] Berman (2011) pp. 37-9 considers this effect and argues that its importance increases with the extent that the relevant sport is valued as entertainment.

the United States began as a nation of bloggers

Proto-bloggers founded the United States of America:

Our authors and scholars are generally men of business, and make their literary pursuits subservient to their interests. A lounger in book stores, breakfasting parties for the purpose of literary conversation, and long attic evenings, are as yet little known in this country. Our companies are generally mixed, and conversation in them is a medley of ideas upon all subjects. They begin as in England with the weather — soon run into politics — now and then diverge into literature — and commonly conclude with facts relative to commerce, manufactures and agriculture, and the best means of acquiring and improving an estate. Men, who are philosophers or poets, without other pursuits, had better end their days in an old country.
(Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia, Apr. 16, 1790, in a letter to a Quaker friend in London)

Today, literary persons in an old country write books.

 

COB-59: celebrating bureaucratic snafus

bureaucratic error

Occasionally a form gets lost, a record gets mis-transcribed, and the wrong person is tortured or shot.  Everyone knows that bureaucratic errors occur.  Few realize that they are part of an effective operating plan.  In the most progressive bureaucracies, the error program is so important that it’s mentioned at least in an appendix to one of the chapters of the organization’s mission statement.

An error program helps to develop fault tolerance. As the Netflix tech blog recently explained, “The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.”  Netflix, in a move probably intended to compete with cable and network-television bureaucracies, instituted a formal program of failure:

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS [Amazon Web Services] is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

Well-developed bureaucracies embrace failure as part of their normal operations.  A bureaucracy that fails constantly builds a reputation for consistent service and encourages fault tolerance among its customers.

In other bureaucratic issues this month, Cisco continues its business blunders with an ill-informed management restructuring.  Cisco reduced the number of its management councils from nine to three and its management boards from forty-two to fifteen.  Cisco has thus increased its vulnerability to Horowitz’s Law of Crappy People. One news report insightfully described this management restructuring as “shedding bureaucracy.”  Shedding bureaucracy indicates a failing company.

Without increasing its appreciation for middle management, Google runs the risk of following Cisco. Google lets its engineers spend 20% of their time working on projects not established through Google’s bureaucratic hierarchy.  Back in 2008, Google’s recently deposed CEO Eric Schmidt described this rule as a means to foster innovation:

The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [This is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. … It means the managers can’t screw around with the employees beyond some limit.

Middle management is not a problem; it’s a solution in search of a problem.  Is there any wonder that Eric Schmidt is no longer Google’s CEO?

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.