AI instruments for risk of recidivism prediction and the possibility of criminal adjudication deprived of personal moral recognition standards: sparse notes from a Layman

In what follows lies a recount of a concerned criminal lawyer, a layman, as he observes the change foreshadowed by AI in the field of individual risk recidivism assessment for the purposes of criminal penalty imposition on convicted felons. The text will therefore reflect upon the nature of that assessment when promoted by new AI programs based on actuarial-meaning statistically derived-information. It then proceeds to compare that risk recidivism assessment with the one undertaken within the current traditional human paradigm. Identifying the ensuing challenges set by the technological alternatives on the very survival of criminal law’s principiological mainstays. A final note will be drawn on what is lacking in the technological proposal, for all its technical upsides and perceived advantages. The approach here changes. From literature one will bring to the fore the very human account that lies at the center of anything resembling judgment. Both the judgment of the individual being assessed and the one of the court doing the assessment. Human as they both are, one heeds the kind of humanity an entire science—that of law—and its specific approach must acknowledge. Exactly that humanity that seems to be lacking in the technological AI proposals.