Should Our Brains Count as Courtroom Evidence?

I didn't know the recidivism rate was that high! 77 percent is unbelievable. Even higher in younger populations... I wonder how much of this is based on the system being rigged against parolees, but looking at the stats, while a significant number were drug offenses, for example, which might go undetected for a non-felon, about 1/3rd were property and 1/3rd violent.

The skeptic in me thinks, almost like something about the experience of going to prison makes one more likely to be a criminal. The optimist in me thinks we should be focusing less on predicting recidivism and more time trying to prevent it. There's a huge economic incentive to rehabilitation, but of course the system can't get out of its own way and treat prisoners like reformable human beings that we actually want contributing positively to society sometime in the near future. The unfortunate reality is some of these felons really are scum of the earth and can never safely be released.

It would be pretty interesting to find better ways of 'binning' felons to try to provide a more reformative atmosphere for the ones that could actually make it out the other side and back into productive society. Brain scan could be the least biased way to do it if we can get the science down. The whole things sounds terribly problematic though.

No.

Or at least, not in a manner that prejudices defendants.

This might be acceptable if the scan was entirely voluntary and optional, and the results could not be used to increase punishment (reduction is OK.)

pseudoscience.

one step removed from phrenology.

we do not have a comprehesive theory of the brain yet and so we are using a libary of fairly unreliable pattern matching to make conclusions.