The Return of Lombroso? Ethical Aspects of (Visions of) Preventive Forensic Screening

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

A generic concern of all detection methods is their ability to identify adequately and exactly the individuals to be targeted by a programme. Describing variations regarding this usually employs the concepts of true/false positives/negatives and the more overarching concept of positive predictive value (PPV). Any method pertaining to measure some F in relation to some sort of cut-off point between, say, high and low risk, will have to do a trade-off between how well it manages to include all those meant to be included and exclude all those meant to be excluded by the method. The better a method correctly identifies high-risk Is as high risk, the worse it will be at correctly abstaining from identifying low-risk Is as high risk (what is called a false positive), and the better it identifies low-risk Is as low risk, the worse it will be at abstaining from identifying high-risk Is as low risk. Both false negatives and false positives are usually associated with downsides, which need to be considered (Cf. Juth and Munthe, 2012: 63-66) .