Restrictions of former felons

There was a really interesting discussion on Bloomberg Law regarding a California Law on Free Speech for sex offenders.  The interviewee was UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who runs the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which is one of my must-reads on the law. 

I am going to generalize the topic a little bit to expand on the principle.  When someone commits a crime, gets fairly convicted, serves their time, and then gets released, should they still be subject to any restrictions?  I can think of two salient examples of when we restrict former-felons and one that is more informal.

Many former felons are prevented from voting.  I have a big problem with this one. Even from jail I think voting is such a fundamental right that they should be allowed to submit absentee ballots.  But at least this restriction is somewhat understandable.  But once they have legally served their time and are released, I don't think there is any justification to withhold this right.  Even a difficult re-application process is too much of an obstacle. Voting rights should be reestablished immediately and former felons should just have register to vote at their outside of prison address.

The second and much larger restriction is on former sex offenders.  I understand the visceral discomfort that many people have just thinking about this kind of offense.  But there are some local restrictions such as prohibiting them from living or even walking within 2000 feet of a school or park.  The problem with these restrictions (or at least one of them) is that there are no places within many cities that are not within 2000 feet of a school or park.  So essentially, they are prohibited from living, working, or traveling into the entire city.  If they have family or friends in these cities, they can't visit.  If they have a job in these cities, they can't work.  If there is a store in these cities, they can't shop.  And when adjacent cities have similar restrictions, they can be kicked out of the an entire county, region, or even state.  This is just too onerous.  Do we deport them altogether?  Just keep them in jail for life?  I have no problem jailing them for their offenses.  But if they get a 10-15 year sentence, that should be the sentence.

I have a particular issue with this last one when it is applied so broadly that it captures a 17-year old who had some kind of consensual relations with a 16-year old long-time boy/girlfriend.  In jurisdictions where this is illegal, the person should be subject to penalties. But a lifelong ban on living, working, or shopping anywhere in a state is a bit much, don't you think?

The Bloomberg Law discussion that prompted my post centers around a California Law that prevents any former sex offender from posting anything online anonymously.  It is a core component of our right to free speech that we have the right NOT to say something, including our names. There are restrictions to this (job applications perhaps).  But we all have the right to post anonymously online. Except former sex offenders in California.  Not for anything.  They can't post to Yelp anonymously.  They can't make political statements online anonymously.  Or religious statements.  I understand that society wants to be able to track whether any sexual invitations on chat rooms come from a sex offender, but this law is way too overbroad and prohibitive.  I was glad to hear that the Appeals Court struck it down.

Deposit Structuring Law

Money laundering is illegal.  To catch money launderers, there is a bank rule that any cash deposit over $10,000 has to be reported to the government for vetting. 

This would be easy to get around if you just deposit $9,000 over and over again.  So there is also a law that if you structure your deposits with the specific purpose to avoid getting reported, this is also illegal. Thanks to Bloomberg Law for the link.

The odd thing about this law is that it doesn’t have to be structured this way because you are money laundering.  If you are intentionally structuring it to avoid reporting because you don’t want the government in your business, that is also illegal, even if the actual money is not. 

Furthering the challenge to regular depositors, the IRS doesn’t have to prove the structuring before confiscating the funds in the account.  So if they see a series of almost-$10,000 deposits, they can take it and force the depositor to sue to get it back.  Since this often costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, which you don’t get back even if you win, it is often not worth the trouble. If the IRS confiscates $30,000 and it would cost $25,000 and 2 years to get it back, it may not be worth it.

This doesn’t seem very fair.

Retaking the political middle

As many of us have railed and ranted against in the past few years, both the Democratic and Republican parties have gone extreme.  The right has gone right and the left has gone left.  The middle is largely absent.  This has really hurt our country’s ability to get anything done.  It seriously risks our prosperity, and moreso the prosperity of the next generations.

I read an article last week with an interesting thought. (For the life of me, I can’t find it.  If anyone saw it, please let me know so I can add the link.).  If things go on the way they are trending, it will get worse before it gets better. The demographic changes – growth of minorities who typically vote Democratic – will keep the Dems in the White House.  Gerrymandering and population density in rural areas and the South will keep the GOP controlling Congress.  So we will have gridlock forever going forward.

The one opportunity is if one of the parties retakes the middle.  This doesn’t mean going after Independents.  Research suggests that most people who register as Independents consistently hold either conservative or liberal opinions, they just don’t want to be affiliated with a party they don’t believe in.  On the other hand, moderates are people of any party who hold middle of the road policy positions.  Research here shows that they come from all parties as well as unaffiliated voters.

The author (of the article I can’t find) thinks that only one party can do this.  Because both parties force themselves to disagree on everything, even when they traditionally agree (e.g. Mitt Romney invented Obamacare), the first one who retakes the middle will force the other party to go more extreme, not less. So the first party to retake the middle could control government decades.

The author thinks that the Dems have a better chance to do this.  Not because they are better, but ironically because they are so dysfunctional.  The left has not been able to scare the bejeezus out of incumbents from being “primaried” like the Tea Party has done to the GOP middle.

For myself, I would vote for whichever party shifts the party platform to the middle.  Especially if it forces the other one to be more extreme. 

A public database of workplace injuries

The U.S. Department of Labor has plans to create a publicly available database of workplace safety incidents for large corporations.  The idea is that adding this kind of public visibility for injuries and illnesses will encourage companies to develop more effective safety programs and will raise the public visibility for the 3 million workers a year who are hurt or sickened.  If companies do a really good job, they can use this as a benefit by promoting their safety record in a more publicly credible way. 

Companies have legitimate concerns because data is often misused by advocates and by people who don’t understand statistical validity and reliability.  They might compare the safety records of companies in different industries, with different workforces, and come to erroneous conclusions. There are a slew of information processing heuristics that I have blogged about at length that would lead company advocates to underappreciate the problems and safety advocates to overappreciate the problems.

The trick then comes down to how the database user interface is designed.  With data from 500,000 companies available, accurate and fair comparisons will be available in most cases.  The interface should be designed to highlight these rather than to allow full flexibility to surf and mine the data to get whatever the user wants.  This is different from the approach taken for many database projects, but may be a better way to go in this case, both politically and in recognition of human nature. 

One way of achieving this would be to use a derived industry-specific metric.  Weighted and adjusted rates are common in public health, economics, and many other domains.  For example, a company with a 1.3 for injuries could indicate that they have 30% more injuries or 0.3 standard deviations more or whatever, compared to a carefully matched set of other companies.  Once the political minefield of developing the weighting and adjusting statistics has been waded through, it might be reasonable to presume that the rates will be used accurately or if not could easily be disputed. 

Of course, organizations will still try to game the system.  That is also human nature.  There will be underreporting incentives targeted directly at employees.  There will be coding schemes that minimize the apparent severity of injuries that are reported.  But if this is done across the board, it could be that the weighting and adjusting process will cancel these all out and we can compare companies within an industry, industries across the economy, and individual companies over time.  This benefit is too much to give up on. 

How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

The problems in the Middle East are not because of colonial border-drawing: How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.

This is one of my societal pet peeves.  It is a practical reality that most of us get our knowledge of the world from the media.   We were not all history majors in college.  We don’t read the original scholarly analyses that research world history.  And we have enough going on in our lives to become experts in various problems around the world, even the important ones.  So when a variety of news media all say the same thing, we tend to believe it.  This makes total sense and is a good thing as long as the media are responsible in wielding this great power. 

But they are not.

For my entire life, I have heard over and over again that one of the leading causes of sectarian violence in the Middle East is because the colonial powers drew these nice straight lines that cut through ethnic regions, putting some Kurds in Turkey, some in Syria, and some in Iraq.  Iraq was part Kurd, part Sunni, and part Shia.  If they had just drawn the borders to put each group into its own country, much of the violence over the past half-century could have been avoided.

But it turns out, this is such as oversimplification as to be virtually false.  Why are the Alawites (of Bashar al Assad) in power in Syria despite being from the minority?  It was a very smart way for the French colonialists to maintain power during the time they wanted to remain colonialists.  If the group you prop up is the smallest, they have a great motivation to keep you as colonial overlords.  If not, they lose all of that great power.  But because they are small, they need to use some harsh and often violent methods to keep order.  This sets the stage for sectarian violence once the colonialists leave.  France leaves the Alawites in power and the majority Sunnis are ready to take back power and in many cases exact revenge for genuine atrocities.  It is not because of the borders.  The same thing happened in Lebanon and elsewhere.  The Soviet Union did this when creating their Central Asian republics.  Africa too.

Second, the borders that the colonial powers drew were not completely arbitrary after all.  Many of them followed borders that had existed for centuries – through the Ottoman Empire and in some cases centuries early.  They didn’t just draw straight lines because they wanted to save ink on the maps.  Another argument is that they should have let the people who lived there set their own borders.  That is what they tried in the Balkans and we know how that turned out. 

Recently, the Atlantic had a good article on this.  I heard a story on NPR recently that made some of the same points.  These are what opened my eyes.  But since most of us get our news from Jon Stewart (who got it wrong), and the broadcast nightly news (who frequently get it wrong), most of us have it wrong too. 

Hacking an election through Twitter

You have probably seen with the new kind of ticker that the cable news networks have become fond of showing on the bottom of the screen.  It used to be news headlines.  Now it is their live Twitter feed.  I wonder what this says about the famous firewall between the content and the business sides of the news media.  The headlines had real value.  The Twitter feeds get better ratings.  They stimulate the social impulses that we all have in the depths of our primitive brains.  On the other hand, the news headlines feed the modern analytical, knowledge-seeking brain – which is quick to fatigue and get bored. Knowledge is hard.  Gossip is juicy. 

This has not only taken over the ticker.  Many news shows now have a segment dedicated to reporting on what is trending on Twitter.  Twitter trends, instead of just quantifying what is being talked about, have become the subject of the discussion itself.

So why am I bringing this up today?  I heard about a very subtle but insidious trick that has been used to rig elections in places such as Russia and Mexico.  These could easily be used here as well. 

Let’s say we are in the run-up to an important election.  At some point, the media is bound to report on which candidate is trending higher on Twitter.  There was even a recent study that found Twitter volume was a better predictor of the winner of elections than the official polls are.  In the cases that were uncovered (and probably many that went uncovered), Twitter bots were programmed to post random (but human-sounding) tweets about one candidate.  This is not too hard.  You could but random constructions together in the form of “I liked what Joe said about taxes/education/guns/healthcare/etc. today/last night/yesterday/etc.”   All kinds of combinations works and when you only have 140 characters you don’t expect much detail anyway.  Thousands of these get sent out from hundreds of fake accounts.  At first, just the people following the candidate’s hashtag see them.   But when the media picks up on it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The media tells the world (or at least the voting region) that Joe is skyrocketing on Twitter.  The subconscious desire to find agreement with our social group makes us all give Joe a second look.  “Hey, maybe he is better than I thought !!”  This isn’t going to get a crazy radical elected, but it could certainly change the election by 5-10%, which is the margin of most contested elections. 

The same tactic has been used to overload a Congressional office.  If your local Representative gets 10,000 tweets/emails/Facebook posts all in favor of one policy or another, he/she is going to think twice about voting against it.  They all seem to be coming from different accounts, even if they are all bots.  If he/she wants to get re-elected, well, you know the rest.  

This doesn’t just bother me in the way that user experience problems do. This scares me.  We already have enough losers in government.  This could make it much worse.