A Minority Report and Clockwork Orange

I recently borrowed the movie "A Clockwork Orange" from my brother-in-law and watched it over the Thanksgiving break. I also recently rented the movie "Minority Report" at Blockbuster and was watching that movie the other night. Both of these movies got me to thinking. If we were actually able to develop and combine the futuristic criminal justice "tools" created in these two movies, wouldn't we have an absolutely perfect criminal justice system and a crime rate near zero? Maybe or maybe not.

The PA Department of Corrections (where I currently work) uses a three-pronged approach for maximizing our correctional resources in order to prepare offenders for successful return to the community: (1) assessment, (2) treatment, and (3) reentry. With a "precrime" unit like in Minority Report, we would have a perfect risk assessment tool with an error rate of zero. Our risk assessment process would leave nothing to chance. We would have no false positives or false negatives. We would know exactly who would and would not re-offend after serving their term in prison. So you might say at that point, "well then there's no need to go any further since we can perfectly predict who will re-offend and can just lock those offenders up permenantly". No need for our second our third prong (i.e., treatment or reentry), right? But wait, what if we had a "rehabilitation program" like in Clockwork Orange. This program would be perfectly successful and would have a recidivism rate of 0%. All participants in this program would be reformed. So now we're in even better shape because we have both a perfect assessment system and a perfect treatment system. At that point I can offer you a criminal justice system that will virtually eliminate crime and come at a bargain price to the taxpayers.

Here's how it works. Arrest rates go way down since all crimes are "foreseen" by the precrime unit and are thus quickly prevented. The need for an extensive police force goes way down since investigation is no longer a needed police tool. Some criminals will still get away with their crime though, since the police may simply not get there in time to prevent it (after all, the police are still human). Those who actually pull one off will get arrested and will go straight to prison to serve their sentence. "Wait", you say, "don't they have to go to court first"? Nope, we already know with 100% certainty that they did it. So criminal courts get eliminated. The only criteria necessary for determining guilt has already been foreseen by the precrime unit. So once they get to prison they receive another "precog assessment" from the precrime unit to determine if they will commit other crimes in the future after prison. If not, they get to serve out their time in a cheap, low-security community corrections center. We gotta punish them still (retribution won't go away), but no need for fancy security options since we know they're no risk of going anywhere or hurting anyone. For those who are going to re-offend, they spend their prison term in a Clockwork Orange-style "Ludovico Technique" treatment program. At the end of the program they're cured. In addition to their time served in prison for the treatment program, we tack on some additional retributive sentence for them to serve and then let them out of prison too. The average length of stay in prison goes way down and a large percentage of our would-be prison population are now in community correction centers, so we need a lot less prisons. We achieve a 0% recidivism rate so there's no need for a parole board or a community supervision period after prison. Just imagine the cost savings. One big state like Pennsylvania alone could save billions of dollars each year, all the while reducing crime at an exponential rate.

Is this system perfect though? Remember that both Minority Report and A Clockwork Orange ended on a sour note. In Minority Report, the pre-crime unit is corrupted by such an exceeding power. Tom Cruise's character is predicted to commit a crime, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, with the prediction actually driving his act. The movie ends with the pre-crime unit being permenantly shut down. In Clockwork Orange, the movie ends with the main character so beaten down by his unsuccessful return to the community that he begins to fantasize of returning to crime (ah ha, so that third prong of reentry may still matter in the equation). The Anthony Burgess book (from which the Clockwork Orange movie is based on) actually goes into more detail about the main character's return to his life of crime. As an aside, interestingly enough near the end of the book the main character Alex runs into an old criminal friend Pete who is now a reformed married man. Maybe marriage is a better formula for success than the aversion therapy Ludovico Technique (criminologists Robert Sampson and John Laub would certainly agree with this).

So we should be careful what we wish for. Several criminologists have already written about the ethical dangers of criminal prediction (see Bernard Harcourt's work for example). And I believe that one of the things that the whole reentry literature implicitly points out is that we may be successful to a certain degree at rehabilitating individual offenders but have little power to control or change the community and inter-personal dynamics for which individual offenders return to after prison. Humans are social creatures who don't act in a vacuum.

It is an interesting thought experiment to take to its logical conclusion what would happen if the goals we work towards every day in the criminal justice system were actually realized. I could obviously spend a lot longer expounding on the themes of these two movies and envisioning that utopian criminal justice system, but I'm interested in others' thoughts. Or, just share your favorite scenes/lines from these two great movies. If you haven't seen them, go see them. I'm waiting to see the journal article entitled "A Minority Report, A Clockwork Orange, and the Ethics of Utopia in Criminology".