Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't an "algorithm" the way people here are thinking. It is a risk formula. The thing it does is standardize which risk factors have been shown to be important. The inputs are:

  Age at current arrest 
  Current violent offense  
  Current violent offense & 20 years old or younger 
  Pending charge at the time of the offense 
  Prior misdemeanor conviction 
  Prior felony conviction 
  Prior conviction (misdemeanor or felony) 
  Prior violent conviction 
  Prior failure to appear in the past two years 
  Prior failure to appear older than two years 
  Prior sentence to incarceration

Each input is given a simple 0-2 integer importance weighting. Scores are summed, then rescaled by a translation table.

Outputs are a 1-6 "fail to appear" risk score, a 1-6 "new criminal activity" risk score, and a yes/no "new violent criminal activity" risk flag.

What to do with the scores (and any other factors to consider) is still left up to the judge. The advantage is in translating "does this defendent have a record?" into a numerical risk score in an evidence-based way.

[1] http://www.arnoldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/PSA-Risk-...

Thanks for the clarification. I wish journalists wrote like this :)

Whether or not we want to call this an “algorithm,” it is a step en route to a probability based decision making machine. Not a bad example to frame discussions around.

The obvious plus-side is that if it works (sounds pretty plausible), this scoring system could help optimise jail time and its costs against the societal costs of re-offense. If it takes pressure of the justice system and reduces wait times, it could improve suspects’ civil and republican rights. The right to a timely trial, habeas corpus..

The downsides are a little foggier, and depend more on where this goes and what kinds of patterns emerge. In this simple scenario, there’s not a lot of data here and few obvious opportunities for bias or some other injustice. Doesn’t sound too bad.

..except age. If people your age reoffend more often, it doesn’t seem fair or just that you are effectively implicated for their wrongdoing. Does it?

As this system gets bigger it will want more data, for improved accuracy. Race, gender & political affiliation are obvious nonos. We can’t discriminate on those grounds. How about arrest location, home address, income in the previous year, marital status and level of education? Rent or own? Have a dog? File tax? This starts sounding like an insurance quote.

If we go down a more google/facebook/ML route, we can probably eliminate any data points that raise specific objections. With enough data, we can find proxies for anything. More specifically, our black boxes will find proxies for anything.

From a blind justice perspective, I think it’s all the same problem regardless. We are being implicated by affiliation, a statistical affiliation. That’s not blind.

I think there you have the core issue. It’s present in a pen-and-paper scoring system. It’ll be present in a Google CrimeRank algorithm.

We’ve gotten very used to talking about bias in nonspecific terms, with a lot of emphasis on chauvinist bias. But, we’re bias machines. That’s what judges are, to a large extent. Not all bias is irrational, bigoted or chauvinist. Do we really want to eliminate only rational bias, or is bias a problem for reasons other than that?

All of which are strongly correlated with factors open to bias.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/07/politics/blacks-wrongful-convi...

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...

While people complain about the racial bias in the courtroom, the sex bias is substantially larger.

Heck, the Supreme Court of Canada recently gave a woman a complete pass for trying to have her husband killed. Because after she was charged with attempted murder, she conveniently remembered that she was the victim of domestic violence.

Despite her claims being provably false.

i.e. claimed incidents occurred when they lived hundreds of miles apart. There's no record of her ever calling the police, despite her claims of multiple police visits, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq2WWsY8Rmc

As was noted in other comments here, such a "data driven" approach just continues existing prejudices.

That may be so, but none of these links are about bias in setting bail.

The comment I responded to discussed how bail was set based on prior events. My comment showed how those prior events were substantially biased.

Therefore, by a simple and clear chain of logic, setting bail based on prior events is also biased.

An alternate answer would be: do you really think that there is bias everywhere ELSE in the system, but not in bail?

Of course not.

And, if you look, you find papers like this:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02885913

We found that judges take gender, but not race, into account in determining the amount of bail for certain types of cases; more specifically, Black females faced lower bail than Black males in less serious cases. In contrast, we found that both race and gender affected the likelihood of pretrial release. White defendants were more likely than black defendants to be released pending trial and females were more likely than males to be released prior to trial. In fact, white females, white males, and black females all were more likely than black males to be released.

Okay, I think I see what you mean now. It's a bit hard to see since you're so focused on gender bias.

I think you're right that these factors, while answering fairly objective questions, reinforce bias due to things like prior convictions. Once someone starts down this path, they get treated worse by the system based on history. Even though they did their time, they aren't starting fresh.

Still, I think it's an improvement (to a very flawed system) because it's not adding new bias. It also doesn't seem practical to reexamine previous convictions to see if they were fair when setting bail.

> Okay, I think I see what you mean now. It's a bit hard to see

I must admit to not understanding how it's difficult to see the correlation. If bail is set on factors X, Y, and Z, AND those factors are shown to be biased, then by definition, bail is also biased.

> since you're so focused on gender bias.

That's just a weird statement to make. The research shows bias and I quoted the research... how does that make me "so focused" on gender bias?

> it's not adding new bias.

That is a good point, but continuing existing bias is a serious problem.

The logic behind this is that any bias resulting in unjust convictions will later also cause bias when setting bail. It seems like making sure unjust convictions don't happen is probably the more important of the two? And fixing unjust convictions would also fix the issue with setting bail.

I cannot read the paper there - How is "judges take gender, but not race, into account in determining the amount of bail" determined? Purely from correlation between bail amounts and above factors?

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