Recall, Precision, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

The El Salvador Prison Issue and Our American Honor

The more I hear about the El Salvadoran prison fiasco and what is continuing to transpire, the more sickened I am by it. I haven’t felt this way about a similar topic since the 2000s, with the Guantanamo Bay legal black hole prison and eventually the absolute horrors unearthed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

When analyzing certain things, it’s helpful to understand the concepts of recall and precision. These have been around for a long time but as data science and more analytics gets absorbed into the everyday culture, they’re becoming more and more ubiquitous in describing certain things. They’re helpful to put into context errors and the gravity of them.¹

Recall is the percentage of a given set that you captured. So if you have a deck of cards, you want all the Black Cards and captured only the Clubs, your recall is 50% (13/26). It’s a measure of completeness and comprehensiveness. In a public policy perspective, it’s a benchmark in a way. So let’s say there are 1500 schools, and your goal is to improve the grades from a C average to a B average.² If you increased the grades in all 1500 schools that way, your recall is 100%. But let’s say you improved grades in only 1000 of them, well, 1000/1500= 66.66% recall. Generally, the higher the recall, the better you are achieving your goal. If you want to make a policy sound effective, quote a very high recall percentage.

Now, in some contexts, it’s easy to achieve 100% recall by casting a much wider net. If there are 100 open cases in a random city, and you want to make sure you capture all the criminals, an easy way to solve that is to just arrest everyone, whether they did it or not. This is how Trump is currently applying his illegal alien renditions. He’s just finding as many people who fit the bill of an illegal alien and sending them on their way. So when people claim he’s doing a great job on immigration, because of how many illegal aliens he’s removed, keep in mind a large part of it is because he’s been overinclusive as to whom he considers an illegal alien. This requires discussion about the other side of the analysis, precision.

Precision is the percentage of items captured, that are indeed what you are looking for. Using the deck of cards analogy, if I have a full deck and want only Clubs, my precision is only 25% (13/52). Every card that is not a club is therefore, a “false positive.” To increase precision, your goal should be to minimize as many false positives as possible. When it comes to crime, we often look at any precision less than 100% as a travesty. We don’t want to lock up people who did not in fact commit the crime. For those reasons, we’ve put in place a bevy of safeguards to minimize this happens: due process, right to an attorney, right to appeal, and so forth. Whenever DNA exhonorates a convicted person, we’re happy that it was sorted out but we also collectively cringe that they had been incarcerated and that we had gotten it so wrong. Some errors are to be expected, no system is perfect; however, the goal and intent should ALWAYS be to be precise, and that means working hard to get it right the first time and rectifying errors as soon as they happen.

Trump is looking at his precision, seeing middling numbers, not even saying “oops” and is instead crowing about what great recall he has in exporting illegal immigrants out of the country. He doesn’t care how many false positives his plan includes. He didn’t in the ‘80s either when he took out a full page ad on the Central Park Five, all of whom were found to be innocent.

When we remove those safeguards, such as due proces and the right to an attorney, the odds become much greater that false positives occur, decreasing precision. It becomes something much, much worse when we subject people (especially without due process, attorneys, access to courts, access to appeals, etc.) to such conditions that are in and of themselves criminal. When it does occur, there is an easy solution that governments employ to minimize the damage; keep tight messaging controls on the situation and cover it up to the best you can.

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

During the 2000s, after 9/11, there was a concerted effort to arrest terrorists that wanted to do us harm and lock them all up (or kill them on a battlefield). At first, the US was fine with using foreign jails and CIA black sites around the globe to contain these people. One reason we did NOT bring them to the US was because they would then be afforded certain rights by the US judicial system. So almost from the start, it was determined to create a legal black hole site at the US Military installation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This would prevent detainees any real rights to due process. So when a suspected terrorist was arrested overseas, we’d lock them up at Gitmo.

To be sure, some of the worst of the worst terrorists went through Gitmo. Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed and Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) are only two of them as examples. However, there were also numerous people who had been picked up in military sweeps sent there that had nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11. In a few instances, the military dragged its heels and eventually rectified the errors, but on others, they stonewalled and held on to some prisoners for years, without ever allowing them a day in court. When the Guantanamo cases finally made it to the Supreme Court in 2005, the Court said they had to offer some semblance of due process for most of the prisoners and prisoners had the right to challenge their detentions. That didn’t stop the military from making it exceptionally hard for detainees to actually do so. At it’s peak Gitmo housed 780 detainees from 48 different countries. Today, only 15 remain.³

Abu Ghraib, on the other hand demonstrates what can happen when you don’t care about the rights of the prisoners at all. Abu Ghraib was a notorious prison run by Saddam Hussein and the Baathists in Iraq. When we occupied Iraq with the invasion in 2003, we inherited it to maintain. Saddam was well known to lock up innocent political prisoners there, so there was already a precision problem (intentionally). It grew notably after we started using it to lock up many others upset about the United States being there (added precision problem). Most detainees there were civilians, with no ties to militant groups.

In June of 2003, only 3 months after the US invasion, grumblings started among Amnesty International and other Human Rights groups that the conditions in Abu Ghraib were horrendous and torture was common. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques had been approved by the Bush Administration against foreign detainees suspected of terrorist ties, and that just amounted to another name for torture. In April 2004, 60 Minutes broadcast a story about the abuse, complete with pictures that were taken by guards there. There were hundreds of pictures documenting horrific abuse of the prisoners. Because these prisoners were seen as having no recourse, no appeal or due process rights, it was that easy for the American military guards to carry out torture in a systemic manner.

These pictures not only depict the possibility of innocent people being subjected to tremendous horrors, they exemplify the depravity of what can happen when there is no due process, or protections to prevent wrongfully imprisoned people from contesting their detentions.

The El Salvador Prison

Make no mistake, the El Salvadoran prison President Trump is exporting suspected aliens to is intended to be another legal black hole. Under the guise of an immigration policy intended to get high recall (broad, overinclusive sweeps), Trump has okayed the sweeps of individuals suspected of being illegal aliens, put them on a plane without any due process and sent them to the small Central American country to be thrown into a prison there with gang members and drug cartels. The courts stepped in and said they couldn’t do it, but the administration continued with the flight anyways. We already have identified one person who doesn’t belong there, and there are likely others. Because it is on foreign soil, it is outside of the jurisdiction of the Court system, but what has transpired here amounts to an outright evil. The policy itself was imprecise, but subjecting people who have committed no crime to a gladiator academy prison in another country as a result is downright atrocious. That Trump has been confronted with these facts and shows no inclination whatsoever to rectify them demonstrates not only that he is not worthy of such a position of power, but that he is cementing his place as one of the worst and most immoral leaders in the world.

This is why America right now stands at a precarious part in it’s history. The very values that made it that “shining city on a hill” have been neglected and outright discarded and now night is coming. God save us.

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

A good movie about the lack of Due Process at Guantanamo Bay is the Oscar nominated “The Mauritanian” starring Jodie Foster.

Another great film, by Oscar winning Documentary Filmmaker Errol Morris, covers the Abu Ghraib scandal in detail. It contains interviews of many of the individuals who were in those horrific pictures at the prison.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Burn this image into your mind.

This is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the prison.

They’re actually proud of what they are doing.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. I am an attorney who uses these concepts regularly. I use them so regularly in fact that I am writing a piece regarding El Salvadoran prisons utilizing them.

2. Yes, I know there are ways to “fix” the system to do just that. This is just an example so bear with me.

3. 756 people were released from Guantanamo Bay, and 9 died there.