On September 4, 2023, Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics, Morgan Williams, assistant professor of economics, and their colleague Brendan (Dan) O’Flaherty, professor of economics at Columbia University, published new research in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, titled “The nature, detection, and avoidance of harmful discrimination in criminal justice.”
The article examines discrimination by criminal justice agents and argues for a taxonomy of harms that differs from conventional motive-based approaches. Discrimination, the authors explain, is self-defeating if it harms the targets of discrimination while serving no legitimate purpose for the discriminating party. Even if a legitimate purpose is served, discrimination can be deliberative or demeaning, resulting in damages that need to be accounted for. Deliberative and demeaning discrimination can also end up being self-defeating through effects on witness cooperation, clearance rates, and preemptive and retaliatory violence. The authors consider how harmful discrimination can be detected and avoided, as well as changes in our understanding of discrimination resulting from the proliferation of predictive algorithms.