Risk assessment tools used in courts are often trained on old data and fail to account for societal shifts in crime and policing, creating "cohort bias." This leads to massive overpredictions of an individual's likelihood to commit a crime, resulting in harsher, unjust sentences.
Sociological research shows the era a person is born into—the "birth lottery of history"—is a more significant predictor of criminality than individual factors like psychology or poverty. Just a few years' difference can double the arrest rate for people from otherwise identical backgrounds.
Parole boards often deny release because it would "deprecate the seriousness of the offense." This is a paradoxical justification because the original offense never becomes less serious. It creates a Catch-22 that effectively ignores any evidence of an individual's rehabilitation or personal change over decades.
Despite having the world's largest prison population, the United States lacks an agreed-upon reason for why it punishes. Prisons are called "correctional facilities" but often cause more crime than they prevent. This foundational confusion leads to arbitrary and ineffective systems that warehouse people.
The idea of a stable "criminal character" is a trap. Societal conditions can completely override individual traits like self-control. A person with high self-control in a high-crime era was just as likely to be arrested as a person with low self-control in a later, lower-crime era.
Most crimes are committed by people under 35, and recidivism rates for those over 50 are near zero. Despite this, the fastest-growing demographic in U.S. prisons is people over 55. This highlights a costly misalignment between sentencing policies and the reality of criminal behavior over a lifespan.