Anne Sofie Tegner Anker and others write,
We find that DNA registration has a deterrent effect on future crime. Reductions in the probability of conviction for violent, property and weapons-related crime drive this overall decline in recidivism. Both offenders who enter the DNA database for their first ever charge and individuals who have been charged before are deterred from committing subsequent crime, but when compared to their baseline recidivism rates DNA registration has the largest effect on first-time offenders.
Pointer from a commenter, who asks for a three-axes interpretation.
From a policy perspective, I think that only conservatives can like it. Libertarians would worry about the way that DNA registration could enhance government power at the expense of individual liberty. Progressives would worry that criminals come from victim classes and are being further oppressed. Conservatives would instead focus on the deterrence of crime and see DNA registration as a tool for the civilized to fend off barbarians.
I could be missing something, but that would be my three-axes interpretation.
I tend to libertarianism and I agree that if the gubmnt has more information, then it also has more control than I want it to have. At the same time, if DNA registration leads to noticeable reductions in recidivism, that seems like a desirable result. That’s a tough trade-off decision.
I agree wholeheartedly, especially if by “tough” trade-off decision you mean non-trivial. The decision could be very easy to make if you had high confidence in the underlying data and trusted that the implementation had good feedback/control mechanisms.
Applying Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model seems to be a good fallback when you don’t have clear evidence of the efficacy of a policy. I will always have a soft spot for greater-good interventions backed by high quality data/processes regardless of the ideological axis.
Since the sample is from people who have already been convicted of a crime, its hard for me to see how there’s much of an invasion of the person’s rights by the government.
I’d use the police mugshot as a point of comparison. Its purpose is to help law enforcement identify criminals. Now consider George Zimmerman and how his mugshot was used/abused in the media coverage surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting. DNA data can be used to determine all kinds of private information such as familial relationships and paternity. Storing this data is not in itself a violation of privacy but it is a potential vector for abuse just like mugshots are.
I think you may have to revisit your reaction function for Conservatives and Progressives to account for a trend in each side’s belief that any form of government intrusion could be tailored to only affect “the other guy”. Progressives will have no problem if the intrusion is targeted at domestic terrorists, gun owners (with or without red flag codes), etc.; and is explicitly banned when shown to have “disparate impact” on (insert list here). Conservatives will have no problem if the intrusion is targeted at foreign terrorists, pedofiles, and maybe undocumented aliens with criminal records. However, my bet is that government intrusion is more likely to be on the ascent among Progressives than Conservatives. Even after an era of “Conservative” legislative prevalence and a hyperactive Trump Administration, Conservatives have had little success in carving out the equivalent of “disparate impact” exclusions aimed at protecting their “preferred identities”, and they have been fighting a losing war on simply protecting constitutional rights from property rights (long gone) to 1st and 2nd Amendment rights. And their growing perception that Bog Tech/Ed/Media may make them think twice about adding more instruments of adverse intrusion. I am sure a future Progressive legislative majority, working with any Progressive President (even Biden, and certainly any one of the other suspects) will embolden Progressives to give these types of practices a chance to “completely transform America”.
Arnold, I think you misunderstand conservatives. Conservatives are libertarians who perceive a broad range of cultures and personalities, including some that are wicked, and these are prevalent enough that they need to be deterred or punished in order to maintain civilization. Your libertarians are the subset of libertarians who think that politics can be boiled down to one dimension, coercion vs non-coercion, and that the generality of people fall in sufficiently narrow range of niceness and reasonableness that a peaceable process can always lead us to non-coercive institutions.
The conservative angle on this is two-fold. On the one hand, insofar as DNA registration deters crime, it is beneficial. On the other hand, insofar as it extends power to do evil to state actors who are wicked (e.g. synthesize DNA sequences based on the DNA registry and plant them in a crime scene to frame someone for a crime), conservatives will fear the law every bit as much as libertarians and leftists, probably more.
Leftists will hate the law as long as they think conservatives will be in power, but will love it as long as they think they and theirs will be in power, since it will enable them to frame their enemies.
Libertarians are likely to get their minds in a knot trying to work out their position and the reasons why they fear laws such as this. Because once they allow that untrustworthy people are likely to rise to the top of the government and that discussion and reason may be unable to remove them from power or stop them from doing their unsavory will, they are in danger of becoming conservatives.
“Because once they allow that untrustworthy people are likely to rise to the top of the government and that discussion and reason may be unable to remove them from power or stop them from doing their unsavory will, they are in danger of becoming conservatives.”
I am fairly certain that the possibility of bad people gaining power is one of the key principles of libertarian’s opposition to government power. Conservatives sometimes share this principle, but they by no means have a monopoly on it. The list of conservatives who has not made the error of supporting government powers while their team is in office is probably a very, very short list. George Will probably… any others?
The oppressor, the interferer with individual liberty, and the barbarian all seem to be the same bad guy, that is, someone with power over us that we don’t like.
And the oppressed (whose agency it is a thought crime to dismiss), the individual with liberty, and the civilized are all just people who don’t like other people with power over them.
Perhaps there are a few who fly the progressive flag that might consider the effect of recidivism on crime victimization of the poor or of particular identify groups; there might be a few who fly the libertarian flag that might concede that reduced recidivism might reduce law enforcement demands for additional resources; and, there might be a few who fly the conservative flag who might accede to regulations and control placed upon law enforcement use of DNA records so as to prevent barbarians inside the apparatus of state from destroying civilization from within.
Maybe there are progressives who value a high trust society, libertarians who are not indifferent to crime, and conservatives who might accept some limit on government power.
And maybe sometimes it seems that the three-axis framework polarizes by creating expectations of policy trade-off preferences.
Stirner says “The best State will clearly be that which has the most loyal citizens, and the more the devoted mind for legality is lost, so much the more will the State, this system of morality, this moral life itself, be diminished in force and quality. With the ‘good citizens’ the good State too perishes and dissolves into anarchy and lawlessness. ‘Respect for the law!’ By this cement the total of the State is held together. ‘The law is sacred, and he who affronts it a criminal’. Without crime no State: the moral world – and this the State is – is crammed full of scamps, cheats, liars, thieves, etc.”
Using DNA pervasively would deter some crime, but the impact would be limited.
Why not take this to its logical conclusion? We are nearing a point where it would be technically possible to enforce tracking and store the path of every person in our society. That would reduce violent crime dramatically. Would that be worth it?
Twenty years on, we could go one step further. Governments could track and store a record of all human actions. Everything we do is captured. All crime is exposed. Is that worth it?
An expanded DNA registry would also help improve conviction rates in addition to the deterrence potential outlined in the Danish that study John Alcorn originally linked to (an unexpected result from my perspective).
Continuous location tracking is a slightly different use case, I think. First, the DNA registry only applies to convicted criminals, not everyone in society. Continuous tracking of some/all convicted criminals is a more fair comparison but I think this more narrow use case is also different. It is similar in that private data of convicted criminals is intrusively collected but it differs in that DNA evidence is crime specific (or should be).
I share your concern for abuse but I don’t think Big Brother is the logical conclusion of an expanded DNA registry.
A general problem with slippery slope arguments: why is this policy the one that ushers in the dystopia? Couldn’t some one have said the same thing about having video cameras in all our stores? Having all new cars be almost entire digital? Needing an ID to get on a plane? Why is this particular surveillance policy a bridge too far as opposed to all the ones now taken for granted, or even considered necessary now?
I don’t think any one policy is the one that ushers in dystopia, although it is the worst example because DNA isn’t just an ID. It probably is the largest and most intrusive single conveyance of data a person can turn over.
I think the answer is to be found in the economic incentives. The value (and vulnerability) in these surveillances gain power as they aggregate and and chain together into more complex capabilities. Most of them are quite benign on their own. There will be an enormous economic momentum in that slope.
Arnold, I think what you are missing is that all axes have a keen interest in making sure that the guilty are charged and punished and the innocent are not.
For conservatives, that is essential to keeping good order. For progressives, it is essential because nothing is more oppressive than being convicted of a crime you didn’t commit or being the victim of a crime that goes unpunished. (Thinking that progressives are more concerned for criminals than their victims quite obviously fails the charitability test.) For libertarians the same concerns apply as for progressives but I do think that libertarians tend to view all forms of government power as more threatening than either conservatives or progressives do and so would be the most alarmed by this.
The three axes-model is useful for many things but I don’t think it’s particularly illuminating when applied to this issue. In this case, as several commenters have already noted, I would be more inclined to simply fall back on that most fundamental of all economic principles: There are always trade offs.
This issue reminds me of the controversy in Major League Baseball about whether or not to use technology to call balls and strikes. There is little question it could greatly improve accuracy and be done without delaying the game but there is something about it that still alarms people.
Also, it could take a couple decades for acceptance here as young people tend to lean into technology more and have grown up that DNA evidence is strong evidence. (One reason why OJ was found not guilty was DNA was too new for the jury to trust as much.) So the analogous digital balls and strikes sounds weird to anybody over 30, the younger generation will grow to appreciate. (Remember when MLB it was religious that Outfielders would make all catches with two hands even when it might cost a half second of throwing a base runner out? The 1970 Outfielders stopped doing this and it creates an error once a year.)
And people like the drop in crime rates A LOT the last several decades and catching criminals is one way to limit crime. And getting DNA evidence is not that hard.
Remember that DNA registration transcends the individual. If my father’s DNA is registered, than any DNA that I leave behind will be fairly easy to identify (my dad’s first order male relatives are me, a brother far away, and a long-dead father). Registering a fairly small percentage of the population effectively registers everyone.
I think of myself as libertarian, but I’m not sure I have any issue with this. I think there is a legitimate role for the state in law enforcement. To the extent this makes law enforcement more effective (better separate the guilty from the innocent), it’s a good thing. To the extent that threat of greater effectiveness deters people from committing crimes in the first place, I don’t see that as coercive.
Of course, I object to a lot of specific laws on libertarian grounds. But I think the answer there is to repeal those laws rather than weaken law enforcement in general. (I also think that DNA registry is likely to have more deterrent effect on, say, violent crime than on braiding hair without a permit.)
I’m not unconcerned about misuse of the information, but I’m not willing to simply assume that’s going to happen. If I were that skeptical, I’d be a full-blown anarcho-capitalist.