Across the nation, judges, probation and parole officers are increasingly using algorithms to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of becoming a recidivist – a term used to describe criminals who ...

It turns out that a trusted crime-fighting algorithm used to predict if criminals will re-offend might not be any better at its job than a random untrained human. The technology has already been ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Researchers at Dartmouth College have found that a computer program widely used by ...

In courtrooms across the United States, it has become commonplace for judges to be provided with “risk assessment” reports—algorithmically-generated scores assigned to criminals meant to gauge the ...

Recidivism is the likelihood of a person convicted of a crime to offend again. Currently, this rate is determined by predictive algorithms. The outcome can affect everything from sentencing decisions ...

How We Acquired the Data We chose to examine the COMPAS algorithm because it is one of the most popular scores used nationwide and is increasingly being used in pretrial and sentencing, the so-called ...