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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the does-not-add-up dept.

The BBC is reporting on the Compas assessment, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions. This tool is used by a number of agencies to assess if someone is likely to commit additional crimes and the resulting score is used in determining bail, sentencing, or determining parole. The article points out that while the questions on the assessment do not include race the resulting score may be correlated with race but this is disputed by the software's creators. The assessment scores someone on a 10 point scale but the algorithm used to determine someone's score is kept secret. Because of this defendants are unable to effectively dispute that the score is incorrect.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:10PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:10PM (#415768) Homepage

    As the submitter the original article focused on the "hidden racism" of the system almost exclusively and discussed it at length which is why I included that part in the summary so it was a fair summary of the original article. It only briefly touches on the pre-crime like aspects of the system and fact that it is a trade secret an not open to examination in open court. Much like the source code for breathalyzers [schneier.com] from several years back where it was shown that they have a metric shit ton of problems but the court just accepts them. I would also lump police dog alerts [washingtonpost.com] into the same category of BS that the courts just take for granted even if they are fraught with problems.

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