The future of crime and criminal justice

Work with Offenders looks at an interesting prediction of future crime trends

An interesting new paper from the Deloitte Centre for Government Insights looks at the future challenges facing criminal justice systems across the world. The authors’ basic premise is that the global pandemic has accelerated the pace of technological and other systemic change which will demand increasingly swift responses from our criminal justice systems.

It is clear that COVID-19 will leave a long legacy for justice systems. Despite decreases in many types of crime and the rapid shift to remote court hearings and probation meetings, court backlogs have increased across the world. Community sentences have not yet been served. Many countries have pursued significant early prison release programs, creating a natural experiment regarding the impact of prison sentence lengths on crime. And while some technology projects have been accelerated to ensure continuity in services, many others have been delayed.

The economic and social impacts of the epidemic are still unknown but are almost certain to be profound. Deloitte provides a brief but, frankly, terrifying overview of the likely impact on global finances including the International Monetary Fund prediction that the global economy will shrink five percent in 2020. Obviously, less growth has meant lower tax revenues. And attempts to minimize the impact of the virus have meant increased government spending. Government debt is rising. And in many countries, governments are now running long-term deficits which will be worsened by the continued pressures to increase health system funding and to support those who have lost jobs. All of which makes me worried about how much money will be available to invest in our ailing prison and probation services.

One of the areas of focus in the report is the consequences of technological acceleration. New technologies not only bring new ways of delivering services but they also can bring new forms of crime as well. As an example, Deloitte sets out the potential criminal exploitation of Artificial Intelligence for:

Identity Forgery: AI methods can generate speech in a target’s voice given a sample and couple it with synthesized video of them speaking. Criminals have already used this technology to impersonate a senior executive’s voice, bilking a UK-based energy company of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

AI Snooping: Phones, PCs, TVs and Home Hubs provide the sensors for audio snooping inside homes, while drones provide video surveillance opportunities in public spaces. Speech Recognition can sift the resulting data for exploitable fragments (e.g. passwords or bank details, affairs being admitted to).

Hacked Vehicles: Hacking to crash a driverless truck may not be a likely crime for most cyber criminals since there is no money in it, but even though rare, this type of crime could be attractive to terrorists seeking no other benefit than to kill or maim.

The central theme of the report is that technology, like all areas of human development, can be used for good and evil. The development of advanced surveillance and tracking technologies offers significant crime prevention and efficiency benefits. At the same time it raises questions for civil liberties and criminal justice system legitimacy. There are already examples of high-profile unintended consequences from new technologies (for example, racial bias in early predictive policing and facial recognition technology) which have raised the importance of engaging in ethical debates and safeguarding rights.

Of course, some criminal justice challenges have never gone away. Since the Second World War, British criminologists can enumerate a long list of moral panics and large-scale public disorders. Our regular recessions are linked to different forms of criminal behaviour. Ever since panda cars replaced the majority of “Bobbies on the beat” in the 1960s, we have had a constant debate about the primary purposes of policing and whether we should be investing more in technology or people.

Of course, none of these questions have straightforward answers but if you are interested in following the debate, this paper is just one of a series that Deloitte has published under the banner “The future of criminal justice” which you can find by clicking on this link.