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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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The Mathematics of the American Justice System
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:09PM
I think it works for traffic court, though it does open traffic court up for potential abuse - one of the options is 2 nights (8 hours total) of traffic school and no points on your license, so you can basically get unlimited traffic tickets and never lose your license, whereas without traffic school, 3 citations for 15mph over the speed limit within 12 months would lead to a license suspension, and without court, you can only take traffic school to erase points once per 12 months.
One would hope that the system would eventually bounce you out to a real judge if you had too many repeat offences - I don't know anybody who went in more than maybe 6 times, so I guess none of us were serious enough repeat offenders to merit a "real judge"'s attention.
So, I know virtually nothing about what really goes on in criminal court, but if they have a massive case load of relatively minor offences that judges basically deal with by algorithm anyway, I could see this working to handle the front-lines and free up judges to handle the less mundane stuff. But, I would never think this is appropriate for situations that result in serious jail time.
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