Disadvantages of Technology in Criminal Justice: Challenges and Solutions

In this essay, I will talk about how modern technology will change our criminal justice system. First, I will talk about modern technologies that have been used by the criminal justice system over the years and whether their use has made the criminal justice system more efficient or transparent. I also focus on the disadvantages and challenges of using the technology, as well as on possible solutions.

With technology advancing at a fast pace, it was only a matter of time until the criminal justice system started to integrated technology in the means to aide their battle on preventing crime and ensuring the courts are fully equipped to prosecute criminal effective and cost-effectively.

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Virtual Courtrooms and Video Links

With the use of technology being integrated more into the courtrooms, standard court proceeding has changed over time, where now video conferencing and links have turned the standard courtrooms into virtual ones. The general concept of a judge sitting physically in a courtroom and handling cases has changed. With technology being used more judges no longer need to be physically present in court as the use of cameras, microphones and a monitoring screen have allowed them to appear in court virtually. In theory, this concept seems to be very time efficient and effective but a few issues have been raised which may out way the benefits of this change. Such as the court room’s staff unable to effectively operate the technology needed to operate the virtual courtroom. This may be due to lack of training and support in maintaining and managing the hardware needed to keep the technology fully operational. These issues can easily be solved with proper training and support of court staff members so they can fully operate and manage the system effectively. These aren’t the only issues that could arise as issues such as bad connection, cost of maintenance could prove to be a problem for the courts.

Another new concept like this one was tested by the courts called a virtual courtroom pilot. The virtual court process was an initiative that was designed to deliver speed and efficiency improvements to the criminal justice system. In the ‘traditional’ process, a defendant would be expected to appear in person at a magistrate’ court for their first hearing after being charged with an offence. In the virtual court pilot, a defendant would appear in a magistrates’ court for their first hearing by means of a secure video link while remaining physically located in the police station where they were charged. Defense representation was either provided at the police station or in court. Other courtroom practitioners remained located in court. New electronic systems facilitated hearing bookings and the confidential transfer of case files between criminal justice agencies. It was said in the published article that “the pilot was successful in significantly reducing the average time from charge to first hearing, in particular through the use of electronic file sharing and the removal of the need for defendants to travel to court”. This then reduced prisoner transportation costs resulting from defendants remanded in police custody not having to be taken to court for their first hearing. It also reduced Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) costs resulting from the electronic transfer of case files between agencies, rather than the use of couriers.

Even though the virtual pilot benefited the courts with cost and time reduction it still had a few issues. The virtual court pilot added cost to the delivery of criminal justice compared to the traditional court process even though it still reduced some costs as well as other issues such as technical problems with the video links as the problems weren’t complexed to fix but the frequency of the problems occurring was the issue it was reported an average 45 incidents in between April and May of technical issues.

Real-Time Transcriptions

Real-time transcription is a newly developed system which allows court transcription to be monitored in the courtroom in real time. The transcription can then be displayed on monitors to be used by the judge and lawyers, in some cases, the monitor can be displayed to the jury or even witness this may be useful in marking testimony on which cross-examination or follow-up may be desired. The advantages of using this technology are that it allows objectionable witness testimony and statements placed on the record to be reviewed in real time and instantly. Also, when judges have real-time displays at the bench, they have more time to focus on the case rather than focusing on making note. Some issues that have risen from the use of real-time transcription is that when the transcription is displayed on a witness’s monitor during cross-examination. Although this access to the transcript can be helpful when the witness is an expert, and extensive hypotheticals are involved, it can also disrupt “the classic cross-examination dynamic between lawyer and witness”. This technology can make the criminal justice system more transparent and clearer as it can reduce the courts time as well as some costs but at the same time, it can be seen as not very efficient in the courtroom since it disrupts the cross-examination between lawyer and witness.

DNA

Since the 90s the development of the national DNA banks has been increasing in the UK establishing the UK governments policy investments in integrating technology for furthering its purpose in preventing crime. DNA also is known as deoxyribonucleic acid is the basic generic coding in all living things, every individual has a unique DNA. The use of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system has been regarded by scholars as “probably the greatest forensic advancement since the advent of fingerprinting”. DNA analysis is a powerful tool because each person’s DNA unique. Every cell in the human body contains DNA. 99% of human DNA is the same in everyone; it is only that 1% that makes one individual’s DNA different from the DNA of other individuals. Most notably it was praised for its use in the case of Keith Samuels, who was resident of Northampton who raped 7 different women from 1984 to 1990. He was apprehended in a cheque fraud case in 1998 when his DNA was then sampled by the police. On loading his profile to the NDNAD, a match was found between his reference sample and the crime scene profiles from the rapes stored on the database. This led to his subsequent conviction and nine life sentences in 1999. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the use of this technology in the criminal justice system to make it more effective and transparent. Even with the benefits of using DNA technology there are still chances of it being unreliable as there are possible chances of mismatches as the DNA database is so large as it is filled with the DNA of both innocent and criminal parties that it is mathematically predicted an innocent party has a chance of their DNA being mismatched , this will then result in their DNA being matched to a crime they did not commit as currently DNA technology is not 100% accurate and there are high possibilities of innocent parties DNA being matched to those from a crime scene resulting in innocent parties being prosecuted. This demonstrates that DNA technology is not as reliable as it is shown as there is room for errors and mistakes made as it is not transparent as once though and it is not 100% accurate and reliable, as it is shown meaning that it possible would transform the criminal justice system or make it more effective if the courts can’t use it as dependable evidence.

CCTV and the Use of Facial Recognition Technology

CCTV also known as Closed Circuit Television is an investment in ‘situational’ crime–prevention; it is designed to change the environment within which crime occurs, rather than trying to change the attitudes and capacities of offenders by Collecting evidence, forming some sort of response and it is used as a means to identify perpetrators and offenders committing crimes. With technology improving at such a rate, CCTV technology is continuously improving and advancing as it has already established itself as being a vital tool to the police and many government bodies. An effective CCTV system contributes to the detection and prevention of crime, as well as protecting towns, cities and transport networks from the threat of crimes and terrorism.

The problems that have been pointed out by scholars and researchers from the use of CCTV is that evidence recorded from the CCTV cameras for the purposes of prevention of crime can also be seen as being an invasion of privacy for those who are in the area that is being surveillance. As privacy advocates feel nervous about the idea of someone watching them every time they are out in public.

Also, the UK government has started to integrate facial recognition technology alongside with the current use of its CCTV to further aid the prevention of crime. It thought that this new technology is more advanced and better than the existing one in place. The use of automated facial recognition technology has allowed police forces to easily identify and track criminals as well as wanted men. The technology maps faces in a crowd and then compares them with a watch list of images, which can include suspects, missing people and persons of interest to the police. The cameras scan faces in large crowds in public places such as streets, shopping centers, football crowds and music events such as the Notting Hill Carnival.

Facial recognition technology has had a number of success stories which have made international news, for example the most notable headlines article published was about a Chinese fugitive who was identified out of a group of 60000 concertgoers and was later detained by police in relation to a crime committed. This just shows how effective and useful this technology is of preventing crime and catching wanted criminals. Furthermore, facial recognition technology can not only catch wanted but also aid the battle of crime prevention and it can also help police when it comes to finding missing individuals, most recently in 2018 its use made headline news in India where the new deli police were able to locate 2930 missing children in only a matter of days when they started to integrate the use of facial recognition technology. This demonstrates that this technology is useful to police forces as it has the capability of preventing crime and catching wanted criminals but it can only do so if it can cross match with an online database which lists the images and information of wanted criminals.

Even with all the success with its use, there have been a few issues arising from its use. One of the issues with its use is that the system in place is not 100% and it gives mismatches, which result in innocent individuals getting detained and arrested. FoI requests found that within the first year of South Wales Police’s use of live facial recognition, ‘true matches’ were made with less than 9% accuracy – 91% of ‘matches’ were misidentifications of other members of the public.

This just shows that there is a possibility with the use of this technology for the purpose of crime prevention measures, innocent individuals may be falsely identified by the database and they may be stopped by the police. This means that the use of facial recognition may make the criminal justice system more transparent with its successful uses but to talk about how effective it is at preventing crime at the same time shows me that the technology has a long way to go and still needed to be improved before it can be effective to use in the criminal justice system. This was argued by a representative of the police force said the process also included human interaction. He said: “It is up to the operator to decide whether the person is a match or not. You then have the intervention”. “It’s not that the operator makes their own assessment, the officer on the ground looking at the individual will make their own assessment and will decide whether or not to intervene and speak to the individual”.

Body Worn Video

One technology that is used by the police force is Body Worn Video. BWV is a small camera which police officers have equipped on themselves when they are on duty. BWV is used by the police to record evidence and to demonstrate transparency in the police officers’ actions at the scene of the incident or crime scene. It was found in a recent study published that the use of BWV reduced the number of allegations against officers, particularly of oppressive behavior. Complaints related to interactions with the public also reduced and, although it did not reach statistical significance, the trend in overall complaints was consistent with these findings. Which benefited the criminal justice system as it stopped false allegation of abuse by the police as well it makes the criminal justice system more effective in the terms of efficiency and transparency. BWV can also be used by the police to gather and collect vital evidence when at the scene of the crime or incident as well as it can collaborate with officers statements as well as witness statement at what happened at the scene of the crime or incident, removing any possibility of a biased statement and thus reduce the overall amount of time required for officers to complete paperwork for case files, corroborate evidence presented by prosecutors, and lead to higher numbers of guilty pleas in court proceedings. Making the use of BWV very efficient as well as cost effective. A 2014 review showed that early guilty pleas were obtained in 91% of cases where the camera footage formed part of the evidence. This demonstrates how effective BWV are when used as evidence in court.

The only issues which have arisen with BWV are the technical issues, with all technological use, there are bound to be a few problems. It was reported that at times officers would struggle to download the video evidence on to a computer as well as log in and out of the BWV. This would mean that at times they would struggle to turn on the BWV at the scene of the crime or incident. These issues can be fixed, if the officers who use the cameras get more training so they can operate the BWV very effectively and they know how to fully use the cameras as well as further developing and testing the BWV so when they are used by the officer, they are fully operational and have no technical issues.

Use of Algorithms and AI

The use of algorithms and AL could make the criminal justice system more transparent and effective. Algorithms are used by the police and courts to determine whether a defendant is a flight risk or is still a danger to the public. This can be seen as upgrading judges with machine learning. This system works by looking into the criminal records and court records of criminals and it determines whether they will re-offend. These predictions include looking into the individual demographic factors such as sex, age, race, social security, area they live in and the reason for their prior arrests. When tested on over a hundred thousand more cases that it hadn’t seen before, the algorithm proved better at predicting what defendants will do after releasing than predictions made by the judges. In theory, this concept could help the courts cut crime by defendants awaiting trial by as much as 25% without changing the numbers of people waiting in jail. Alternatively, it could be used to reduce the jail population awaiting trial by more than 40%, while leaving the crime rate by defendants unchanged. This then allows the criminal justice system to become more transparent and effective as it saves the court time and costs, possibly preventing future crimes with rational decision making by the system.

A few issues have been raised by researchers from the use of this technology. The issues that were raised were about the possibility that the use of algorithms could discriminate and stereotype against certain age groups and individuals some have argued that inputting historically biased data into these models contributes to a perpetuation of 'bad data', because the algorithm uses each new case as a reference for the next. The idea that algorithms could substitute for probation officers or the traditional human intelligence of police officers is absurd and wrong. Of course, such human judgments are fallible and sometimes biased. But training an algorithm on the results of previous mistakes merely means they can be made without human intervention in the future. An example of this is the strongest single predictor of whether a young man will end up in jail is whether his father did so. People live down to society’s expectations, and we all lose as a result. Berk says that more research is needed into how to ensure that criminal justice algorithms don’t lead to unfair outcomes. Last year an investigation by ProPublica found that commercial software developed to help determine which convicts should receive probation was more likely to incorrectly label black people than white people as ‘high risk’.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is almost certain that with the development of technology going at a fast speed, modern technologies have influenced the criminal justice system in the way it operates as it can be seen as becoming more transparent to a certain point. Just because technology is advancing does not mean we should be quick to replace the traditional standards of practice, for example with the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. I feel to fully benefit from this technological use, it should be used alongside judges instead of replacing them, as it will ensure there is no room for any error or mistakes as the human interaction is there to prevent this, it should be seen as a guideline for the judges to use rather to just depend on. Meaning that modern technology has transformed the criminal justice system to become more transparent and effective, but at the cost of some disadvanatges and problems, this can easily be resolved with the continued development of technology meaning these problems could be fixed in the future.

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