The technology that unfairly influences judicial hearings and criminal sentences may be less sophisticated than you think.
by Jack Kile, 2021
Risk assessment technologies are algorithmic tools that attempt to predict a defendant’s potential risk for future crimes. There are two main technologies within the risk assessment technology field. Those technologies are the Public Safety Assessments (PSA) and the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS). The PSA and COMPAS tools compare and contrast in many ways. For example, PSA focuses on age, criminal history, and other factors to determine three scores. Those scores are the risk of committing new crime, new violent crime, and not appearing in court. These scores can help incarcerate individuals before their trial, which is as unconstitutional as it sounds.
So, we know how the PSA tool works, but how about the COMPAS tool? To our knowledge no one knows besides Northpointe, the creators of COMPAS. The defendant takes a questionnaire, and they get a risk score somewhere between 1-10. The severity of the scores are as follows: 1-4 being low risk, 5-7 being medium risk, and 8-10 being high risk. These scores are influencing court cases across the country, including cases in Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington, New York, Florida, California, and Wisconsin. COMPAS has incorrectly labeled black defendants as twice as likely to recommit crimes than white defendants. Northpointe argued that the algorithim was working as intended and that black citizens have a higher baseline risk of committing future crimes. For a system that determines people's future, we know an awfully small amount of information on it. We also know that the creators at Northpointe seem to have clear racial biases. This is all we know on how the COMPAS system works, and we hope to find out more soon.
Sources
-Park, A. L., About the Author 2019 UCLA School of Law JD Candidate, Thomas, R. "N. Y., Sok, P., & Reece, L. (2019, September 21). Injustice ex machina: Predictive algorithms in criminal sentencing. UCLA Law Review. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.uclalawreview.org/injustice-ex-machina-predictive-algorithms-in-criminal-sentencing/#_ftn3.
- Northpointe. (2012, August 17). Practitioners Guide to COMPAS. Northpointe Inc. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from http://www.northpointeinc.com/files/technical_documents/FieldGuide2_081412.pdf.
-Chohlas-Wood, A. (2021, May 6). Understanding risk assessment instruments in criminal justice. Brookings. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-risk-assessment-instruments-in-criminal-justice/.
-Bess, M. (2017, May 31). Are risk assessment algorithms fair, or racist? . Youtube. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4YeRqfb24.
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