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The Mathematics of the American Justice System

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

Kromagv0 writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Sigh---more secret law (Score: 3, Insightful) by Max Hyre on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:29PM

  by Max Hyre (3427) <{maxhyre} {at} {yahoo.com}> on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:29PM (#415887)

  Added to the FISA [wikipedia.org] secret court, the No-Fly list [wikipedia.org] (which adds people for secret reasons, and is almost immune to appeal), secret subpoenas [wikipedia.org], and the claim by the Dept. of ``Justice'' (sorry, that's the only way I can write it with a straight face) that revealing how the law is interpreted [documentcloud.org] can be kept secret, things are getting really scary around here.

  Starting Score:	1		point
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