Florida teams up with IBM to predict young offenders' behaviour

IBM sold the state of Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice on new predictive analysis software that will determine different courses of action for different young offenders. The goal is supposedly to better target juvenile criminals with suitable programs that will lower the chance that they will re-offend. 

Instead of paying for staff to work directly with the youths to ascertain their potential needs, the data analysis program from IBM will crunch a bunch of numbers. Factors such as past record, who your social affiliations are, and what neighborhood you come from will all be crunch by IBM's software. So, for example, if you come from a particular low-income neighborhood where the crime rates are high, you would probably be subject to more thorough state rehabilitation than if you were from a wealthy neighborhood with lower crime rates, and had committed the same crime.

An IBM employee said: "Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens."

This method of predicting crime is somewhat reminiscent to noted science fiction author Philip K. Dick's story "Minority Report", where the government uses psychics to determine who will commit crimes, and arrests them before they do. 

Due to state budget cuts, which will close some facilities that deal with juvenile delinquents (source), it appears Florida replace some of its rehabilitation services with IBM's software that will instead tell them which young offenders are more likely to offend again, through only sacrificing their individual rights and privacy.

With a little bit of luck the databases of information recorded on these juvenile offenders will never be subject to abuse by the government agencies who have access to it.