News » Software Used For Sentencing Not Very Good

Software Used For Sentencing Not Very Good

February 1, 2018

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The software called COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is heavily relied upon in the judicial process and is often influential in determining to sentence, based on the theory that people who are likely to commit additional crimes should be incarcerated longer. In 2016, ProPublica evaluated COMPAS and showed that it produced different results when evaluating black people and Caucasians. Now two Dartmouth College researchers have evaluated the software for general performance and found that it can be matched by recruiting people from a crowdsourcing internet site and asking them to guess the probability that individuals would commit another crime within the next two years. Based on that result, they theorized that the software may not be very good. Further testing revealed that they could match COMPAS’s performance using just two variable for analysis, age and prior convictions, instead of the software’s 137 variables.

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