%0 Journal Article
%T The criminal justice system as a problem in binary classification
%A William Cullerne Bown
%J The International Journal of Evidence & Proof
%@ 1740-5572
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1365712718795548
%X Attempts to establish a quantitative framework for thinking about the criminal justice system have been made at least since Kaplan¡¯s influential 1968 article. Here I avoid the probabilistic approaches that Kaplan inspired and instead characterise the law¡¯s underlying problem as one of measurement. I then exploit statistical techniques developed in recent years in other disciplines to evaluate systems that also face the challenge of ¡®binary classification¡¯ to solve it. This approach entails the mathematisation of the criminal justice system¡¯s core epistemic concern of distinguishing the guilty from the innocent with Van Rijsbergen¡¯s F-measure and empirical measurements of effectiveness. Once one adopts the perspective of a sovereign, it yields a meta-meta-epistemology that allows traditional arguments like those that refer to Blackstone¡¯s ratio to be made rigorous. This provides a clearer relationship between values and policies and, in a narrowly epistemic sense, a complete answer to questions of evidence and procedure
%K Blackstone¡¯s ratio
%K standard of proof
%K meta-epistemology
%K F-measure
%K empiricism
%K rape
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1365712718795548