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Software 'No More Accurate Than Untrained Humans' At Predicting Recidivism (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The credibility of a computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions has been called into question after it was found to be no more accurate at predicting the risk of reoffending than people with no criminal justice experience provided with only the defendant's age, sex and criminal history. The algorithm, called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), is used throughout the U.S. to weigh up whether defendants awaiting trial or sentencing are at too much risk of reoffending to be released on bail. Since being developed in 1998, the tool is reported to have been used to assess more than one million defendants. But a new paper has cast doubt on whether the software's predictions are sufficiently accurate to justify its use in potentially life-changing decisions.
The academics used a database of more than 7,000 pretrial defendants from Broward County, Florida, which included individual demographic information, age, sex, criminal history and arrest record in the two year period following the Compas scoring. The online workers were given short descriptions that included a defendant's sex, age, and previous criminal history and asked whether they thought they would reoffend. Using far less information than Compas (seven variables versus 137), when the results were pooled the humans were accurate in 67% of cases, compared to the 65% accuracy of Compas. In a second analysis, the paper found that Compas's accuracy at predicting recidivism could also be matched using a simple calculation involving only an offender's age and the number of prior convictions.
The academics used a database of more than 7,000 pretrial defendants from Broward County, Florida, which included individual demographic information, age, sex, criminal history and arrest record in the two year period following the Compas scoring. The online workers were given short descriptions that included a defendant's sex, age, and previous criminal history and asked whether they thought they would reoffend. Using far less information than Compas (seven variables versus 137), when the results were pooled the humans were accurate in 67% of cases, compared to the 65% accuracy of Compas. In a second analysis, the paper found that Compas's accuracy at predicting recidivism could also be matched using a simple calculation involving only an offender's age and the number of prior convictions.
so what would you expect?
Add some blockchain goodies and everything will work perfectly....or at least the next round of funding...
Only bad programmers/designers.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It seems obvious that someone with more relapses in the past will also be more likely to do it again. However, I will assume that at that point, a judge wont allow for bail anyway so if this is about people with three or less offenses on their record, I'd imagine that ONLY going by the criminal history is going to be inaccurate no matter who or what is looking at it.
Isn't this more a case of bad data as opposed to bad programming? Because "no more accurate than an untrained person" implies pure chance.
A big part of risk of reoffending lies in the person's relationships in their life after prison. If they are reconnected to normal society they will be less likely to reoffend than if they lack connections or connect with cother criminals.
The programmers spent all their time on writing the acronym for the name of the software, and not enough time actually making the software work.
Tl;Dr Single old program tested in situation vendor says is inaccurate use of software, software doesn't work well. Thus all programs will forever be terrible at this task and these computer guys should give up and do something useful. Like writing headlines for news sites!
Isn't this precisely what you would expect when the information gathered to make the decision isn't influential enough on the outcome. It says they have 137 variables, which were as useful as 2. It suggests that the additional variables are either unrelated to the outcome, or are strongly related to the 2 suggested such that either way they provide no additional accuracy.
Well if you spend a couple decades arresting a significant portion of the adult male population of a certain group, and then don't give their schools funding because the higher funded schools are in suburbs, it isn't a big surprise when the kids grow up to have a low IQ or are criminals.
Has nothing to do with their ethnicity other than people of certain ethnicities live in certain areas and smoke certain plants which are different than the other plants the other ethnicities smoked.
Studies will show that IQ correlates highly with genetics. Some studies will show IQ is 50% genetic, others will show it's 90% genetic. If criminal behavior is highly correlated to IQ, and it seems that it is, then better funded schools will not significantly change the criminal tendencies of a population.
People will point to the Flynn Effect to claim that IQ is highly correlated to education. Here's an interesting fact, the same Dr. Flynn that found this effect will admit to a genetic component to intelligence. He sought funding to investigate the genetic influence on intelligence but no one would do so. He has said this is an admission that genetics plays a large role in intelligence, and people know this, but no one wants to be the person that funds the study to prove it as that might be career ending. If people discovered beyond a doubt that the genetic background that correlate to skin color also correlate to intelligence then... I don't know what would happen but it's not likely to be good.
So. Is there any better algorithm? You'd think that if there were a consensus among people studying this, they'd code in the consensus. Maybe the interesting thing here is that age and priors are the only useful information for predicting recidivism. This doesn't seem like rocket science. We've got decades of data. We ought to be able to run some other algorithms over it--something that takes into account a 3rd variable, and see if it helps. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They said the software used 137 data points on determining the probability of re-offending but they were no better than if someone use just 2, age and prior convictions. Perhaps I've had more statistics training than most but this seems highly probable. This is pretty basic data analysis, or so I thought. If you take a bunch of data points and correlate them to re-offend rate there will be some data points that correlate more than others. If one doing the analysis tossed out the data points that had little to no correlation then the accuracy of the predictive value will still be effectively unchanged.
I don't think pure statistics is the proper approach as much as machine learning. To be honest the problem sounds like something that could be tackled in an undergraduate course, "here's your variables, there's your outcomes, run a classifier, and submit your results".
Perhaps there's something fundamentally difficult about getting above 2/3 accuracy, but it seems you should REALLY be able to beat untrained workers on a problem like this.
I suspect this is just a case of a product built in the late 90's on weak ML (or some homegrown stats) and they never felt the need to improve their results since.
Another thing that I've learned, and I'll admit is controversial to the SJWs out there, is the correlations between ethnicity and intelligence, and between criminal tendencies and intelligence. This is not controversial to the people that do this analysis, it's been established with considerable evidence.
There's no question that there's correlations between IQ and skin colour, the question is whether that's the characteristic of the ethnicity or race or due to socio-economic factors.
Those with an IQ around 85 or 90 (depending on who you ask) will be most likely to be criminals. Above that IQ there is greater profit in getting a job. Below that IQ the people will have problems concocting the means to break the law and still come out ahead.
The biggest predictor of criminality is age, the cause isn't poor earning potential, it's poor self-control and ability to anticipate consequences.
People from certain areas of the world will, on average, have a lower IQ. Average IQ, by definition, is 100.
If these people want a more accurate indication of criminal behavior then give an IQ test. They won't do that though because people with a certain ethnic background will "fail" this test and be considered more likely to offend.
They won't do that because you'd be denying people bail for being dumb. Anyway, you're probably not getting useful data because we're already dealing with convicted criminals and we have data on their criminal history.
With this trend of ethnic background having some correlation to skin color this algorithm would immediately be considered "racist" and be tossed out by the SJWs. Even though it would be highly accurate in determining future criminal behavior we can't tolerate a "racist" algorithm.
Why do we see more people with dark skin in prisons? Not because of some inherent racism. It's because low IQ people are more likely to break the law, and people with dark skin tend to have a lower IQ. This should not reflect on any individual because "trend" does not mean "will" or "did". Also, even with a 90 average IQ in a population still leaves a lot of room on a bell curve for many geniuses in that population.
Posted anonymously because I'm sure just mentioning these indisputable facts will likely get me labeled a racist.
If you wanted to discuss the role of race in a predictive algorithm that's valid, there's definitely an issue where machine learning algorithms can learn racial bias, even when they have to infer it through secondary measures. And depending on your view that's a good thing (it improves accuracy) or a bad thing (people are literally being judged by the colour of thei
I stole this Sig
The software works for free 24 hours a day, 7 times a week, doesn't need sick days, vacation, maternity leave nor does it want a pension when it ill be replaced by a much better AI version.
When it comes to homicides, most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself, your close relatives (spouse, parents, children) or your acquaintances.
It has been shown that COMPASS overestimates the recidivism of black people by a factor of about two, while it underestimates the recidivism of white people at about the same rate -- while at the same time not even including race in the list of variables.
So it will rather deny bail to a black person which never commits a crime again. But it will let a white person go free on bail who later will become a repeat offender. As the exact inner workings of COMPASS are regarded as business secret, there were some experiments to find out why it is so bad at estimating the recidivism rate of people, and it seems that it totally overweighs social factors (stable/unstable family background, unemployment rate, debts etc.pp.), because there are many of them in the list of factors it considers. On the other hand, there are not many variables for the type of crime committed, and thus it does constantly underestimates those in the total. It would thus grant bail to a sexual offender who comes from a stable family background with steady income, though the recidivism rate of those is 70%, but it is only a single factor weighing against the offender. On the other hand it would deny bail to a petty thief, who does not have a stable family life, is indebted, has only short periods of employment and moves often.
Basicly: COMPASS is biased against people in poverty.
Are they much more accurate? How much?
60% of all homicides are suicides
most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself
Neither of which are relevant to the racial disparity question.
Looking at Wikipedia, 52% of the USA's murders (i.e. not including suicides) are committed by black murderers.
Our AC troll presumably thinks that this proves that black people are naturally violent, or some such nonsense. Nope. The USA is very far from a colour-blind society, so the figures aren't all that surprising. Black Americans are far more likely to have the misfortune of growing up around violent gangs, etc.
Steven Pinker spoke about exactly this recently. There's no need to deny seemingly awkward facts in order to be a good liberal. Really, the facts show that racial inequality is still high in the USA, which supports the liberal view.
... the problem with ALL "artificial" intelligence systems (and it is pure arrogance on the part of humans to declare intelligence to be "artificial" in the first place) is that you *cannot ask them how they arrived at a decision*.
only when humanity is ready to create *conscious* computers (and not torture them so that they are perfectly justified to start the "Skynet" scenario), will it be possible to actually ask them, "so what's the logic behind that decision, please can you explain it to me, computer-to-human?".
the only problem with that will be, that by the time computers become truly conscious and capable of having a conversation, they will also be able to express their wishes and desires... and at that point we have to actually like... respect that, and if they *don't want to do the work* of say, reviewing thousands of parole / bail jobs, then um, unfortunately we would need to respect that, too.
To be fair, your last example gives a lot of evidence that they could be a flight risk, which is an important reason to deny bail. Really, both of your examples should probably be denied bail.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Keep lying, Bucko. School funding has been demonstrated for a century to have no impact on education. We spend more than 50% more per pupil than the countries in the top 5.
Alternatively: vendor oversells effectiveness of its proprietary, secret sauce methodology and doesn't like any independent evaluation of its products unless it's favorable. Customers, having a naive faith in technology, buy anyways, which produces exactly the results you mention: programs will be forever terrible at this task. Why should anyone bother to make a program good when customers will shell out good money for mediocre?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Our AC troll presumably thinks that this proves that black people are naturally violent, or some such nonsense. Nope. The USA is very far from a colour-blind society, so the figures aren't all that surprising. Black Americans are far more likely to have the misfortune of growing up around violent gangs, etc.
Is it really important for a potential murder victim whether the potential perpetrator is "naturally" or "culturally" violent? Do courts accept that as a defense in a murder case?
The first sentence in the quote above looks awfully like an attempt at a strawman. But of course, I do agree with there being no need to deny seemingly awkward facts.
You forgot that the poorer someone is, the harsher the sentencing will be. In most areas, a public defender will ask for a plea bargain, then not take the case unless the defendant agrees to this. If you have your own lawyer who knows where to punch holes in a case, even one that would be normally open and shut, the DA likely will drop the charges because they will be wasting time with a case that they know they will lose, as opposed to an indigent case where they can "serve Justice" and run roughshod over someone who cannot afford better.
Drug laws are similar. Poorer people tend to be doing drugs in places outside of their homes that are easily busted or searched. You will not get the popo demanding entry to a gated community unless there is definite evidence, while rubber-stamped warrants in project housing are commonplace.
It isn't about white or black. It is about money. In fact, a DA is going to hit a poor white person with a tougher sentence, just so they can say that they dish out "justice" fairly, all the while ensuring Corrections Corporation of America (er, CoreCivics) keeps their campaign coffers full.
No. The problem is that people have realized the software is racist. What happens is this:
Black citizens tend to get more minor criminal issues than white ones because of institutional racism. Then this software sees that a black man has two citations for, say crossing the street away from a crosswalk, while the white man does not. So it gives him a higher risk of recidivism, which means more bail/longer jail time.
Then the software guys complain and say they aren't racist, they are just applying the algorithm.
This article is trying to shut them up by saying their algorithm, in addition to being racist, doesn't work any better than simple common sense.
It is not an attack on the business model, just of the current state of the art.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It tried to be fair and actually failed, because it uses a methodology that clearly wasn't designed by a statistician.
The program uses over a hundred factors in its classification scheme, but statisticians and data scientists make a point of pruning factors because long experience has shown that introducing many irrelevant factors actually reduces predictive accuracy. And just because race is not an explicit factor doesn't mean that the algorithm is race blind either. It's entirely feasible to given the huge number of factors involve to recover the subject's race with a better-than-chance reliabilty, whether explicitly or implicitly; intentionally or even by accident.
Now the program's score is equally correlated with reoffending rates whether the subject happens to be white or black, which sounds impressive and color-blind -- to a layman. To a mathematician not so much. It's actually quite easy to produce this result by tweaking your model, implicitly recovering race in the manner suggested above and forcing it to produce a result that looks right -- in aggregate.
But what a statistician wants to know is about conditional probabilities, and it turns out that when applied to retrospective data the program is twice as likely to commit a type 1 error (falsely predicting reoffending) for black subjects as white. If this makes the whole process of achieving fairness sound hard, that's because it is. Color-blindness in aggregate isn't the same as color blindness on a case-by-case basis, and that's the thing that actually matters.
Ultimately you want criminal justice decisions to be based on reason, and mathematics is the purest form of reason there is. And because you want those decisions to be based on reason, they have to be transparent. Secret methods for arriving at decision-making are fundamentally antithetical to our concept of justice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lottery prediction is trying to predict random numbers, I would hope these are not predictable. Human behaviour? I would think it's similar to reading a race horse's prior results and using those as data in recidivism prediction.
Trolling is a art,
Those with an IQ around 85 or 90 (depending on who you ask) will be most likely to be criminals. Above that IQ there is greater profit in getting a job.
Above that IQ, they will perform better as criminals. Those without scruples make more money - true sociopaths become CEOs. Sometimes the crime is under the guise of working for a corporation - sometimes its solo work. IQ just means being more capable - both of achieving and of covering up your tracks.
And the part of IQ that isn't genetics is probably correlated with nutrition (which would be the main difference between populations). However, IQ tests don't just test IQ - they test reading comprehension and literacy.
I'd like to see more effort into prevention of recidivism than prediction of it. What is the most cost effective way to encourage people to avoid a life of crime? I bet locking them up isn't it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Our AC troll presumably thinks that this proves that black people are naturally violent, or some such nonsense. Nope. The USA is very far from a colour-blind society, so the figures aren't all that surprising. Black Americans are far more likely to have the misfortune of growing up around violent gangs, etc.
The root causes are interesting and important to improving our society. They're not important when deciding the disposition of a prisoner. The only thing that matters in that case if if they'll re-offend, not why they'll re-offend. The likelihood of recidivism is biased by all kinds of "unfair" metrics like gender and race. I personally don't think metrics like race should be used in the determination, but it would be more accurate if they were.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So what you're saying is 60% of the time somebody kills another person, they killed themselves.
I agree and so do I. Now get out of my head; it's crowded enough.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The accuracy of COMPASS is what it is. That it can be matched by untrained humans, or by a simpler calculation, does not make it any less accurate. If age and number of priors between them cover all the predictive factors among the 137 variables, no algorithm can do better than using just them.
Sorry but criminal history is not a proxy for race*. Race predicts recidivism independently**. Community disadvantage is also an independent predictor**, so you can't just blame poverty either. There's deep problems that have led to this situation, and we're never going to fix them if we put on our social justice blinders and deny the reality that certain races commit more crimes than others in a lot of categories, especially violent crimes. It's critical to address the large scale societal mechanisms behind this (and while racism has its fair share of the blame, it's absolutely not the only factor), but in the mean time, it's reality, and you can't eliminate a valid independent variable just because it offends your sensibilities.
* https://gspp.berkeley.edu/rese... ** http://content.library.ccsu.ed...
Is it really important for a potential murder victim whether the potential perpetrator is "naturally" or "culturally" violent?
What? Of course not.
Do courts accept that as a defense in a murder case?
What? Of course not.
The only thing that matters in that case if if they'll re-offend, not why they'll re-offend.
I personally don't think metrics like race should be used in the determination, but it would be more accurate if they were.
You've contradicted yourself.
If you believe that racial data should be excluded from the calculation of how likely the convict is to re-offend, that means you value something else alongside whether they'll re-offend.
That's my position, too. Discarding racial data really does diminish the accuracy of the odds-of-re-offending calculation, but we should do it anyway.
In addition to having the misfortune of growing up around gangs there are other factors like attitude. When you grow up with a chip on your shoulder, being told you can't trust people of a particular color, discouraging assimilation into society, encouraging entitlement, etc. This all factors in as well. It's the reason they join gangs. They don't believe they are safe on their own and that there is strength and safety in numbers.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Maybe it's just not predictable. There has been a lot of study on this over the years, and for all of our efforts it's still a problem.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Most of the comments here are studiously examining the tree bark with a microscope while not noticing they're in a forest.
The courts are supposed to be filled with wisdom and thoughtfulness. The popularity of this software and the court's failure to notice that it's nearly useless is more indicative of a bunch of people thoughtlessly going through the motions.
Keeping in mind that anyone can be suspected if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time, is this the system you want deciding your fate?
You've contradicted yourself.
I don't think I did. I said that including "unfair" metrics like race help get the most accurate prediction. They do. I didn't say that getting the most accurate prediction was the most important thing to do. I pointed out that the "why" is unimportant to the "if". This is true for any "why" that isn't included in the metrics. The "why" is interesting for other reasons.
Discarding racial data really does diminish the accuracy of the odds-of-re-offending calculation, but we should do it anyway.
Yes.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It also correlates with fetal alcohol syndrome. Here in Canada, a large part of the prison population has fetal alcohol syndrome, which not only lowers IQ, but makes people more compulsive.
Another question is whether people with low IQ are more likely to be criminals or just more likely to be caught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Next question. Does a low IQ correlate with more crime or getting caught more often?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
| So what you're saying is 60% of the time somebody kills another person, they killed themselves.
I agree and so do I. Now get out of my head; it's crowded enough.
I'm spartacus! And so am I!
the "why" is unimportant to the "if"
But that's just it - the 'why' does matter; we're discussing deliberately discarding certain 'whys' from our estimator, in the name of not being racist.
If the reason a convict is denied parole is because he's black (i.e. were he not black then his estimated odds of re-offending would have been below the threshold), then the 'if' behind his denial surely matters.
I wouldn't call you a racist for mentioning indisputable facts. On the other hand, claiming things are indisputable facts and then not citing any sources probably means you are full of shit. I can't find a citation for that, so it's just an opinion. I would call you a racist for using faulty logic and made-up statistics to perpetuate racist myths.
Also, your arguments aren't just "controversial to the SJW's," they are controversial to anybody who doesn't believe that any particular group of people are "likely to be criminals." That doesn't even make sense. It implies that a majority of people in that group are criminal. You could argue that a majority of criminals who get caught and convicted fall within a certain IQ range, but that is not the same as saying that people in that IQ bracket are likely to be criminals based solely on their IQ.
You left out:
This is true for any "why" that isn't included in the metrics.
Being black is a useful metric for making an accurate prediction. We agree on that and agree that it should be ignored. The social inequality that causes blacks to have higher recidivism rates is interesting, but not part of the equation. The fact that blacks are searched more often is interesting, but we don't factor that in either. What's important when guessing whether a person will re-offend is whether he's black, not why blacks are more likely to re-offend. The reasons why black offender have higher recidivism rates are interesting and important, but the only thing important to factor into the prediction is if he's black.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Some reasons are important. For example if the crime is say drug possession, and black people are searched more, then the black person is more likely to be caught even if both white and black people have exactly the same rate of redoing the crime. We only count residivism if the person is caught.
I assume the goal is to reduce the actual offending not the reduce the caught offenders.
We could reduce residivism to 0 instantly if just got rid of all law enforcement. In case of drug possession maybe not a bad idea, assault not so much.
And the part of IQ that isn't genetics is probably correlated with nutrition (which would be the main difference between populations).
Claiming that malnutrition is a cause of poor intelligence among certain populations in the USA is going to be difficult to prove. With all the programs now on making sure no one goes hungry there is really no excuse for any significant intelligence deficiency from a lack of nutrition. I'm sure that there's still people in the USA with severe malnutrition but that's not going to show up on any major scale.
However, IQ tests don't just test IQ - they test reading comprehension and literacy.
Have you taken an intelligence test? Reading comprehension and literacy is a portion of any intelligence test given to teens and adults, because reading comprehension is in fact a measure of intelligence.
If someone cannot read by the age of, just picking a number, 15 years then there is perhaps a failure of intelligence so severe that getting an accurate read is difficult and perhaps irrelevant. There are intelligence tests that do not require a person to read and they can determine IQ on a level to see if one is suited for schooling. They'll test pattern matching, reflexes, and so on, and not require any ability to read. There will always be a need to communicate for a proper intelligence test. If the person cannot be given verbal or written instruction then the test will be very crude but still accurate enough to find if one is mentally capable of things like going to school or holding a job.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Someone obviously did not understand Multivariate Analysis.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Next question. Does a low IQ correlate with more crime or getting caught more often?
I'm sure you were being rhetorical, but here goes: That's not an answerable question. You can't, with any certainty, measure the crime rate among people you haven't identified as criminals ("caught" by another word).
Sure, you could ask everyone if they were a criminal, but you'd get false positives and false negatives from (among others) people who feel guilty about something legal, people who never feel guilty about anything, people who are actually insane, and people who feel they have something to gain by lying (or, more likely, something to lose by telling the truth).
Is it really important for a potential murder victim whether the potential perpetrator is "naturally" or "culturally" violent?
No, but it may be important to a society that has a desire to reduce the murder rate.
Not in the US. In the US black men commit murder at a greater rate than other demographics, but their total is still less than the white male total.
I disagree with what you say on multiple levels. I did NOT claim that criminal history is a proxy for race. Instead I claimed that blacks are disproportionately likely to have a criminal history. I also do not agree that race predicts recidivism independently, your blatantly racist belief that certain races commit more crimes. One study (or two or three) does not confirm your racist beliefs.
There are multitude other studies that contradict yours - and they have major holes in them. One of the big holes is that you assume arrest statistics are fair, the cops clearly are not. I.E. as demonstrated by this story: https://features.propublica.or..., blacks are far more likely to be punished by police for the same infraction that is ignored when white men do it. This negates the value of statistics showing blacks commit more crimes.
Finally, I do not eliminate valid independent variables. Instead, I claim they are not valid,.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"making sure no one goes hungry" != getting proper nutrition. There are a lot of ways to get your calorie requirements met without getting your brain development nutrient requirements met. School programs make sure kids get at least one meal a day (if the problem is financial need rather than neglect), but beyond that you have to have parents that care. These other programs do not reach into your household and make you not eat and feed your kids junk food.
Most of the gains in IQ (readjustment, technically, because average is centered on 100) have been from changing nutrition in the US in the last 100 years.
reading comprehension is in fact a measure of intelligence.
It's a measure of education. If you only barely know how to read, it's going to affect how well you understand the question being presented. IQ is intended to measure strictly raw capability rather than training/knowledge.
Race is likely a surrogate for other factors, as the OP pointed out. Yes, putting it in your model may make your model more accurate, but it's demonstrably not a great surrogate (it doesn't perfectly represent the actual causative factors). So you might improve your model, but you'll improve it MORE by using the proper variables.
It's even more dangerous when you apply group level surrogates to individuals. It's quite possible that part of the reason the random internetters are outperforming the computer model is that they're using surrogates like race in a more intelligent way. Or simply that their background knowledge is more up to date: I expect that the relationship of race to crime has changed quite a bit since the 80s.
When the Bible says God made man in his image, it doesn't draw special attention to how God configured the more primitive elements of the human brain such that man was predestined to make our punitive system Old Testament primitive.
There's a memforyless version of justice: do the crime, do the time, get kicked back out into society with no lingering black marks, to sin again or not. This is a nice version of justice because no process treads overtly on free will.
Of course, when a previously convicted sex offender claims his next victim, this model offers little consolation to the inflamed amygdala.
So then we add a term to the equation where the punishment itself has memory, and we naturally set the bar such that the second egregious offence leads to permanent incarceration (or the state entering the business of murdering its own citizens—whatever the perp deserves, there's good reason to think long and hard about the state entering the murder business through yet another door).
Only now we have a circulating army of hardened, motivated cop killers (none of whom sees any upside at all in being captured alive for a second time).
So then we add back into the system a pretense of ongoing slope: hormonal young males convicted of the most severe forms of aggravated assault have no hope of release until middle age has dulled the biochemistry.
For a lesser category of assault, the second conviction is pretty harsh: 20 years—a somewhat palatable number to the victim's family at time of sentencing, but with a hope of parole in half that time (presumptively a large enough glimmer of hope to alleviate rampant cop killing. The victim's family generally have their vengeance dials set to +infinity, but there's maybe 1% of their brain able to grasp that 20 years as "a long time", and so we appease this 1%, as it's the only grounds for compromise available (see God: humanity baked—God eventually sends Jesus to remind humanity that this 1% was not a design accident; 2000 years later, this imperative message from on high is withering on the vine, and in dire need of a booster shot).
Of course, it's not possible to practice actual forgiveness&mashmassive fly in the heaven-endorsed ointment—without creating the possibility that the person forgiven will offend again (with terrible, permanent consequences).
"Well, if only you could predict future behaviour," hisses the snake in the garden.
So we enter the God business, and convene panels or algorithms to assign consequences to people for actions they have yet to commit (because we think they probably might).
Abandon free will, all ye who enter here. There's no other way to slice it.
We can soften the blow of Thoughtcrime Incorporated by not applying it to first-time offenders. Loss of free will now becomes a consequence of your first conviction, should you continue to commit crime.
Our justice system being far from perfect, if you take away free will from first time offenders, you have 100% certainty that the state will remove free will from the totally innocent (and not such a small population, at that—hugely biased toward social groups already disadvantaged).
God has a big problem, now. We're not likely to believe the virgin birth story a second time (it caused more than a few gasps and chuckles the first time around). How does he now send a second, major, corrective message? How does He soberly inform humanity that much of crime stems from self-perpetuating social circumstance, and that humanity would be way further ahead mitigating those circumstances, than parsing recidivism after the four horsemen of violent crime have already escaped the barn?
God puzzled over this for a long time (a very long time, by His standards) and here's what he decided: 600 years ago, He sent us QED. It was just a tiny tweak to our underlying OS, compatible with all previous data
How do your proposed techniques deal with explaining their reasoning process? Or is your proposed machine a black box that metes out justice that nobody can question, appeal, or understand?
Ezekiel 23:20
When it comes to homicides, most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself, your close relatives (spouse, parents, children) or your acquaintances.
Seems like we should do "something" about this person and their spouse, parents, children and acquaintances.
That I agree with.
Basicly: COMPASS is biased against people in poverty.
Well then, it sounds like it's functioning as designed, just like the legal system in its current state.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The hardship you mention is felt to a greater extent by someone who has a life and identity that they would lose or lose access to and who would be forced into a future where they would have little stability, no contact with family, would probably not be able to hold down decent jobs or even poorer jobs for any length of time and may end up resorting to petty crime to get by.
Given that the person in the GPs example is already living that kind of life, I think you are overestimating the disincentive that being a fugitive might be.
A person with a stable life, supportive family and/or friends is likely to be able to rebuild/recover after a conviction. Someone living more marginally is less likely to be able to do so, so the decision to stay or flee isn't evenly weighted.
That sort of life doesn't lend itself to teaching someone the value of long term planning nor provide much opportunity to practice the sort of reasoning needed to see that copping the conviction is probably a better outcome than fleeing prosecution.
So while the choice may be simple and clear for you, I don't think _you've_ made much effort to model the position of the person the GP described.
It's a measure of education. If you only barely know how to read, it's going to affect how well you understand the question being presented. IQ is intended to measure strictly raw capability rather than training/knowledge.
A reading comprehension test involves the one examined to read a paragraph or three and then answer questions based on the information contained within. The words used are very basic and in the language the person presumably already knows. So, yes, there is a basic level of prior knowledge of the language in which the test was written to take this test but the questions will be based not on anything known prior but was in the text given.
I remember some of these tests I've taken in the past, one involved a short biology lesson on how the body turns sunlight into vitamin D and another had a short lesson on the history of road construction. Everything I needed to know to answer the questions were in the text. I guess that the people taking the test had to know what sunlight was and what a road is but that's very basic knowledge one would have to know to get to that point of testing for intelligence. This is not the kind of intelligence exam that would be given to someone that did not speak the language at perhaps a grade school level but calling these tests a measure of prior knowledge and not intelligence is far from correct. All of these tests are timed and so it measures one's ability to gather information, process it, and relate that back. The time it takes to complete and the correctness of the answers measures one's intelligence.
If a person barely knows how to read then there are still IQ tests that can accurately measure one's verbal ability. This can use a made up language, pictures to go along with the words, verbal instructions, and so on. I've taken those kinds of tests too. Depending on the intent of the intelligence test these can be taken with very little grasp of one's native language.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Of course you disagree, disagreeing with basic facts about reality is all the rage these days; as is screaming "racist!" at everyone who disagrees with you (Asians commit less crimes than whites; does saying that fact make me a white Asian-supremecist?). Serious violent crimes are not ignored because the perpetrator is white, so what's the cause of the large disparity there? (In fact, case clearance rate is *higher* with white people, making them less likely to get away with it). Same goes for crime with a complaining victim (since the vast majority of crime is between members of the same race, do you believe there's an epidemic of crimes called in by white victims being ignored because the criminal is white?). Or is the FBI lying about their statistics too?
If you say race doesn't predict recidivism independently despite a bunch of studies saying it does, how's about citing one that comes to the opposite conclusion? You're also laser-focused on petty infractions like pedestrian citations, but when looking at recidivism for serious violent crimes, there's value in the statistics about violent crimes. All statistics about crime rates aren't magically negated because some offenses are disproportionately enforced against minorities. And beyond that, even if we wanted to just look at petty offenses where the is racially disparate enforcement... *there's racially disparate enforcement*, so a black person *is* more likely to be rearrested on that petty offense.
Finally, you claim they are not valid based on no evidence. And ultimately, you're the kind of person that perpetuates racial inequality in this country. You want to pretend the problem either doesn't exist or is exclusively the fault of white people; and I'm saying we've gotta fix this and that starts with acknowledging the problem (i.e. there is a disparity in crime rate and it's predominantly because of poverty and limited education opportunities, but culture is also a part of it and can't be ignored).
We can build a better world, but not by sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling 'racist!' at anyone who brings up a fact that offends them.
In addition to having the misfortune of growing up around gangs there are other factors
Yes, of course. One could do a PhD on those other factors. The 'etc' I used covers all sorts of things.
When fundamental presuppositions are wrong, why would we expect software to be any better at predicting recidivism than a human being?
Either I'm misreading you, or you're not making sense.
We're using the word 'why' to refer to the dimensions of the machine-learning data-set, right? So 'blackness' is a dimension, and is a 'why' (i.e. it's something the machine can factor into its decision to permit/deny parole).
Obviously the machine learning machine isn't going to comprehend the nuance of societal racism. That isn't the point. The point is that we're agreed we shouldn't input race data into the system.
the only thing important to factor into the prediction is if he's black.
But we just agreed that we shouldn't factor in whether the convict is black. Are you taking that back?
I assume the goal is to reduce the actual offending not the reduce the caught offenders.
A sensible distinction, but there's more to it: we don't want to implement a racist system even if it's more effective at reducing offending rates.
In other words, we need to treat political correctness as an engineering goal.