In 2013, police officers in Wisconsin arrested a man driving a car that had been used in a recent shooting. The man, Eric Loomis, pleaded guilty to attempting to flee an officer, and no contest to operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Neither of his crimes mandates prison time.
At Mr. Loomis’s sentencing, the judge cited, among other factors, Mr. Loomis’s high risk of recidivism as predicted by a computer program called COMPAS, a risk assessment algorithm used by the state of Wisconsin. The judge denied probation and prescribed an 11-year sentence: six years in prison, plus five years of extended supervision.
No one knows exactly how COMPAS works; its manufacturer refuses to disclose the proprietary algorithm. We only know the final risk assessment score it spits out, which judges may consider at sentencing.
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Editor's note: For more on the topic of bias in algorithms see the work of data scientist and author Cathy O'Neil at https://mathbabe.org/. Her book, Weapons of Math Destruction is an example-rich, accessible examination of bias being 'baked into' code.
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