Please join the Department of Humanities’ Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture (RTC) graduate program for the first Brown Bag of the semester with Professor Charles Wallace (CS). The Brown Bag will take place on Sept. 13 at noon in the Petersen Library in Walker 318.
Wallace’s presentation is titled “Black Box or Sandbox: Computational Approaches to Interpreting Michigan’s Clean Slate Law.”
Wallace’s collaborators include Joshua Alele-Beals (CS), Ali Ebnenasir (CS), Susanna Peters (SS) and Kamau Sandiford of the nonprofit organization Safe & Just Michigan.
From the abstract:
Michigan’s Clean Slate statute, defining conditions under which prior convictions can be removed from an individual’s public record, has allowed thousands of people to lead freer and more productive lives. In compliance with the statute, the Michigan State Police have implemented and deployed a “Rules Engine” that automatically detects some expungeable convictions and removes them from individuals’ records. The Rules Engine has greatly increased the throughput of set-aside cases and scaled up the benefits of Clean Slate. Yet there are confounding aspects to the law: its complex and evolving nature has led to confusion and disagreement even among legal professionals, and the Rules Engine in its current form is a “black box” with a fixed, idiosyncratic interpretation of the law and minimal explanation for the general public. There is a risk that this approach will ultimately diminish individuals’ sense of agency and engender a passive attitude toward their criminal records.
In this talk, I articulate some of the confusion and disagreement over the interpretation of the Clean Slate statute, as gleaned from interviews with legal professionals. Second, I explain the operation of the Rules Engine, following the relatively sparse explanation available, and I discuss the consequences of this effective but inscrutable tool. Finally, I present my team’s initial work on an alternative computational approach: a digital “sandbox” in which legislators, lawyers, judges, and citizens can explore the consequences of legislation. The sandbox environment will allow differing interpretations of statutory law, or various revisions to existing law, to be expressed formally and compared through automated analysis. We see opportunities for computation not only to expand the benefits of criminal justice reform but also to enhance individuals’ understanding and agency with regard to the law.