WJI's daily read for Aug. 7, 2021

Slate: A Trump judge just gave Brett Kavanaugh a way to overturn Roe v. Wade without admitting it.

Reason: The pandemic showed that home detention can work.

The preliminary data are quite promising: The overwhelming majority of those released on home detention have not reoffended. Of the 28,881 prisoners allowed on home detention last year, only 151 individuals, less than 1 percent, violated the terms of their confinement. Only one person has committed a new crime. Additionally, research on technical parole and probation violations shows that removing people from community supervision and reincarcerating them when they have not committed an offense increases the likelihood of criminal recidivism and makes future reentry into society more difficult.

In short, home detention seems to be largely successful. Most prisoners under the program have stayed out of trouble and are working to become law-abiding citizens. In doing so, they are saving taxpayers the exorbitant price of incarceration—which, on average, costs over $37,500 per year versus $13,000 per year for home confinement and monitoring.

The Brookings Institution: Why President Biden should ban affective computing in law enforcement.

Available evidence suggests that affective computing is not effective enough to be used in law enforcement. In an evaluation by the Canada Border Services Agency, an experimental automated interviewing system called AVATAR performed dismally as a lie detector. Despite taking over one million measurements in each interview—including eye tracking, facial movements, and vocal features—AVATAR was unable to reliably identify deceit. This evaluation even gave the affecting computing system an absurd handicap by using the same data for both model development and evaluation, which typically leads to overly optimistic results. Psychologists are quick to note that there is no scientific basis to indicate body language, facial expressions, and vocal pitch are even indicative of deception. Journalistic explorations of similar commercial interviewing software found them to be confused by interviewees wearing glasses or by adding bookshelves in the background. Another commercial system failed to recognize the interviewee was not speaking English when attempting to rate their English competency.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Republican lawmaker seeks to seize voting machines and ballots from Milwaukee and Brown counties.