December 15, 2016

Future criminals revealed?

I was going to write about the Herald’s headlineFuture criminals revealed at 3, says study“, but Toby Manhire has a good interview with someone from the study, explaining that no, it doesn’t.

Richie Poulton: No. It’s a headline that doesn’t reflect what’s in the paper accurately. There were unfortunate headlines.

What then are the major findings of this study?

The idea, which is intuitively appealing, is that there is a small group that account for a lot of service use…

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Jim Rose

    Majority of population law abiding is alternative headline

    7 years ago

  • avatar
    Peter Davis

    But doesn’t this amount to the same thing? “Service use” is a euphemism, and does cover crime. So, what Richie is claiming is that his study can determine from a brain health screen the future heavy service users – including criminals. Then what do you do with those screen results? If it is hard-wired, then all you can do is a form of harm reduction as you protect society from this group. I find this result worrisome. Can someone tell me I am wrong?! peter

    7 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      You’re wrong ;-)

      Seriously, though, there’s a reasonable hope that selectively putting extra resources in early would save money and improve people’s lives in the long run. Being predictable doesn’t mean being unavoidable. The advantage of a reasonable degree of predictability is that you potentially have a lot more money *per person* to spend on helping.

      7 years ago

      • avatar
        Peter Davis

        But those interventions are never identified. I mean, if it is brain health, then the interventions are suggestive of brain ill-health, rather than later interventions. And will these people wander around with a medallion around their neck waiting for an pre-emptive intervention? And then all the big factors like inequality, opportunities for crime, hardship etc. are factored out of this model, at least as a “sociologist” rather than psychologist/therapist might see it!.

        7 years ago

        • avatar
          Thomas Lumley

          No, I think you’d want exactly the sort of interventions that target social risk factors, it’s just that the payoff from these interventions should be greater.

          I’m not saying we know that’s true, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope that it is. And it’s a familiar idea in progressive politics that some people are more vulnerable than others to reductions in social support — and so could reasonably benefit from increases in social support.

          7 years ago

  • avatar
    steve curtis

    I suppose we can draw the opposite conclusions, that state aid for the elite private schools is a complete waste of money, ‘if you were trying to improve outcomes’

    7 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      I don’t think I’ve seen anyone defend it on those grounds, no.

      There’s a the political-science argument in the other direction that means/need-testing *everything* undermines support for taxation and benefits. And the question of how to taper the benefits so you don’t get ridiculous effective marginal tax rates at the boundary. But I’m not going to argue that government support for my high school in Australia was a good use of public funds.

      7 years ago