September 9, 2019
Briefly
- An actual evaluation: ‘Kentucky lawmakers thought requiring that judges consult an algorithm when deciding whether to hold a defendant in jail before trial would make the state’s justice system cheaper and fairer by setting more people free. That’s not how it turned out.’ Ars Technica
- From the CEO of Palantir, in the Washington Post “Companies and innovators in Silicon Valley have immense, almost monopolistic power. Many have lucrative contracts with the government. But under scrutiny from employees and activists, they are being pressured to avoid controversy by picking and choosing which contracts to accept and which to abandon. “ He thinks that’s a bad thing.
- The winners of MonoCarto 2019 (formerly known as the Monochrome Mapping Competition)
- We’re about to have another bit of democracy. To prepare, places.figure.nz gives you information about your local government areas. The Spinoff’s “Policy Local” is asking all local government candidates a set of questions and putting the answers in an app
- Those Hurricane Maps Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean. Albert Cairo in the NYT.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The Bail algorithm story actually says more people were set free ( the primary aim-“Kentucky’s lawmakers intended HB 463 to reduce incarceration rates, a common motivation for using risk scores) but then the issue was more white people benefited than black people- previously it was 50:50.
The story then gets complicated and contradictory. “After the law took effect, they overruled the system’s recommendation more than two-thirds of the time”
So exactly what are they measuring if thats the case.
5 years ago
“More people got sent home, but the increase was small…Over time, judges reverted to their prior ways. Within a couple of years, a smaller proportion of defendants was being released than before the bill came into force.”
5 years ago
I looked back at the original paper and
” The low increase in releases is partly because judges took advantage of the discretion allowed to them by law and ignored the presumptive default of
non-monetary release in more than two-thirds of cases”
Maybe thats more relevant than the algorithm scoring. Judges dont like them or more likely dont understand statistics
However when they looked at the rates separately for low , medium and high risk the outcome was :
‘There was a 63% increase in the
rate at which judges granted non-monetary release for low-risk defendants” , but the net increase was small.
5 years ago