SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
n February 2013, Eric Loomis was found driving a car that had been used in a shooting. He was arrested, and pleaded guilty to eluding an officer. In determining his sentence, a judge looked not just to his criminal record, but also to a score assigned by a tool called COMPAS.
Developed by a private company called Equivant (formerly Northpointe), COMPAS—or the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions—purports to predict a defendant's risk of committing another crime. It works through a proprietary algorithm that considers some of the answers to a 137-item questionnaire.
COMPAS is one of several such risk-assessment algorithms being used around the country to predict hot spots of violent crime, determine the types of supervision that inmates might need, or—as in Loomis's case—provide information that might be useful in sentencing. COMPAS classified him as high-risk of re-offending, and Loomis was sentenced to six years.
He appealed the ruling on the grounds that the judge, in considering the outcome of an algorithm whose inner workings were secretive and could not be examined, violated due process. The appeal went up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who ruled against Loomis, noting that the sentence would have been the same had COMPAS never been consulted. Their ruling, however, urged caution and skepticism in the algorithm's use.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:13PM (2 children)
Actually, the questionaire is in sections. The first couple sections are for cops, or corrections officials, it seems, then the other sections are for the defendant. Wonder why there isn't a section for significant people as well - wife, mother, siblings, ex-wife, etc. Everybody gets a say, and sentencing will be democratic? Sounds fun, doesn't it?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:52PM (1 child)
Much fun. If the esteemed Mr. Eric Loomis was to stand the truly democratic trial by the whole population, he'd be sentenced to hanging. The supply of thieves would be exhausted in no time. If someone believes that it's too harsh, the alternative could be 500 years in uranium mines on Charon.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 22 2018, @09:16AM
And there would be a huge supply of punished innocent people because the general public is generally quite fast in forming their opinion, typically without taking all (or often, any) facts into account.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.