12 ms·

Algorithm Helps New York Decide Who Goes Free Before Trial

71 points by jkuria 6y ago

neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/81N8I https://archive.is/81N8I
google234123 6y ago
Reducing accuracy to try and improve fairness is definitely the politically correct thing to do. There was a good paper on this topic about how trying to make a model more fair can result in worst outcomes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 If some group does happen to have a higher recidivism risk, pretending this isn't true and just correcting against that fact will just result in more crime.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  It seems to me that boosting accuracy is the only fair thing to do. What was actually being compared in putting the models together was projection of accuracy, which as an estimate should not be confused with actual results... as the article eventually got around to pointing out. When weighing guesswork against fairness, I agree with the decision to favor fairness, especially considering that the decision to grant bail has nothing whatsoever to do with a person's actual guilt or innocence- they have been charged, but not yet tried.
- compycom 6y ago
  Fairness is a legitimate end unto itself, an essential part of what makes a justice system 'just'. If reducing crime is our only objective, we can do so trivially by indefinitely detaining anyone who ever does something suspicious. I think most people would find this system to be deeply unjust, even if it eliminated crime. As a society, we have some tolerance for crime, preferring to err on the side of personal liberty against totalitarianism. Asking for fairness in this recidivism model isn't a case of political correctness run amok, it's a reasonable request from stakeholders in the system it affects: Why should an individual be punished for the actions of others who happen to have similar identity markers? You can say that a biased system will be "more efficient", but efficient to what end? A system that is unfair may reduce crime but it won't achieve "justice".
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I largely agree with what you're saying. But the challenge is that, while people are willing to tolerate some crime, they're generally not willing to tolerate more crime. Very few voters will bite the bullet and say realizing suchandsuch principle of fairness is worth 10 more murders each year, so any reform which can't convincingly explain how crime will stay down is dead in the water. (New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.)
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >(New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.) The only part of your statement that's factual is that there were premature complaints that it increased crime. That has yet to be validated. As for the rest, cash bail was not completely eliminated. Rather it was eliminated for most non-violent and some violent offenses. The changes made by the NYS legislature made more (not all) violent crimes eligible for bail, and gave judges more discretion as to whether to set bail or not[0]. As such, in New York State most offenses are not bailable. Which is a huge improvement over the prior regimen. Many people would languish in jail for months or years, while they lost their jobs and their homes. Even more cruelly, prosecutors would use this to essentially force people to accept plea bargains which required them to plead guilty to crimes they may not have committed, just to get out of jail and try to salvage some semblance of their lives. That just creates a group of people who are now homeless, jobless and have a criminal conviction -- just because they couldn't afford to pay for bail. That's a great way to create more folks who have no means, a big red 'X' anytime they apply for a job and little respect for the law -- given how the "justice" system destroyed their lives with cash bail. You might think "Well, they were put in jail for a reason." But this wasn't a sentence after conviction, it was criminalizing poverty. And that's just wrong. I think cash bail is horrible. If you are so dangerous that you need to be kept away from the general public before trial, then you shouldn't have the option of bail at all. And that should be proven via actual evidence before a judge, not any sort of ML model. Many here seem to see this as a technical issue to be solved, with better training data, more refined models and clearer definitions of the problem/search space. It's not. People's lives are often ruined by cash bail. Prosecutors should be required to prove, with actual evidence that each defendant is a real flight risk, or is likely to harm others before being remanded to custody without bail. Everyone else should be required to respond appropriately to court orders WRT contact with prosecutors, appearance at hearings/trials, etc. but should not be required to post bail. [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-yorks-latest-bail-law-changes-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-...
- hnracer 6y ago
  "fairness" is just Orwellian double speak that really means unfair. That is, introducing literal bias (in the ML sense) to cancel out the subjective bias of woke activists.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  What's the point of your post? Are you really citing an ML paper as supporting the idea that the US justice system should not seek fairness? That's some weak FUD if you ask me.
cmehdy 6y ago
I wonder to what extent this creates a feedback loop that isn't fully acknowledged/understood. As long as the prediction is only one element of decision and not the decision itself, it can probably be useful for judges. If it becomes "the algorithm says", then the feedback loop could have unpredictable consequences. By nature of a world with finite resources, I also wonder whether the 2.7 million USD could have made a better impact on likelihood to show up if they had been used to put in place or extend existing support structures for the majority of the crimes those courts see. It's still worth it to research how technology can help of course, but it's also hard to put in any kind of comparative study when only doing one thing at a time.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  In a city of 8 million people, it is not likely that $2.7 million would substantially shift underlying social issues to reduce crime or failure to appear for court dates. In the example case given, prosecutors appeared to have no evidence whatsoever that the defendant would skip court; the defense presented the algorithm and explained why he likely got the score he did. I imagine judges may come to heavily weigh the score, but cannot imagine any would ever give such an algorithm a blank check to decide for them.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    I might be misunderstanding the cost there but isn't it more the amount of people who were going through that system that matters, and not the city size? By that I mean that we could also look at what 2.7 million dollars (or even that flat cost + operating costs evened out over the period of time of the study) would do, were it put towards every one of those defendants in dire conditions. To ensure for example that they have at least a temporary place to stay, social programs in place, someone to follow their case and offer a reinforced legal counsel (which is available to everyone for free for sure, but I hope nobody kids themselves about how overworked those people are - I could bet everything I have that anyone with a good income would always pick a private lawyer over duty counsel). As for your last point: it certainly doesn't seem to be the case right now but I can very well see that entering the realm of possibilities. You can't imagine that a system that performs on paper really well and is thrown into a field where people are incredibly over-worked would end up being relied on a little bit too much? I mean, we see that sort of thing in place for way less reliable things with people who actually know better (i.e. how many scripts and old bits of code hold together much of the world). And in the medical field the development and usage of AI is on a steady rise ("chatbots" in psychology, predictive modeling for decision making and disease diagnosis, "telehealth" assessments using data from IoT devices). If AI gave people more work rather than less, it would be of no use after all.
tialaramex 6y ago
It's completely crazy that most of the US uses paid bail. That can't be a good idea. On the other hand, it is true that when bailed some fraction of defendants won't show up. I live in an English city and once in a while (when there was not a pandemic) I would walk into the city centre and attend some trials in one of our courts. The last session in Magistrate's court most weeks is people who were supposed to be there for an earlier session and didn't show. So how are they there now? Well when they don't show the court orders police to arrest them, they get arrested and then to guarantee they appear they're sent to the cells until their case is called. Most of them look pretty sheepish. We are not talking about criminal masterminds here. You have a 10am court appearance, Police knock on the door at 2pm, your mum lets them in, they arrest you. Oh, shit, that was today? Oh, your phone has fifty messages from your lawyer asking where the fuck you are. Oops. So this makes me think the most valuable tool for this problem would be a way to get defendants to actually do the introspection when a court asks them: Can we trust you to show up on this date and this time? Can they? Or are you just hopeless and it would actually be better to just imprison you a day or two before so that you're available?
- unishark 6y ago
  Not everyone gets bail. Releasing defendants without bail is called release on "own recognizance". It depends on how severe the crime and how likely they think you are to run. Keep in mind criminal law is handled at the state level, so historically it was really hard to catch people who just moved to another state. Bail pays for people like "bounty hunters" to go find you.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_bondsman?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_bondsman?wprov=sfti1
- shifty1 6y ago
  I recommend reading stories of the law. It’ll tell you a plethora of reasons why people fail to turn up for court. Often as a result of an overstretched and massively underfunded CPS. Well worth a read - https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/The-Secret-Barrister/The-Secret-Barrister--Stories-of-the-Law-and-How-Its-Broken/22703133 https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/The-Secret-Barrister/The-Secr...
blendergeek 6y ago
Why not scale cash bail to match income/wealth? Then people of all economic levels will be affected by it more or less equally and none of us will have our fate in the hands of an opaque proprietary algorithm.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The challenge with scaling it is that many criminal defendants have no regular income and extremely little wealth, so any nonzero amount of bail is impossible for them to pay on their own.
- irrational 6y ago
  I was wondering recently why fines are not scaled to income. A $200 fine is no big deal for a wealthy person, but devastating for a poor person. Why shouldn’t the wealthy persons fine be equally devastating? $2000, $20000, $200000, maybe $200,000,000 for Jeff Bezos.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    You're saying that in cases where the penalty is monetary, the punishment should fit the criminal rather than fitting the crime. I think you should consider some of the ethical implications of imposing vastly different punishments for the same behavior.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      I think a question is: is the same dollar amount the same punishment? Jeff Bezos doesn’t need to think twice about a $10k fine but there are plenty of people for whom that would be ruinous. Arguably, the “sameness” has to do with the impact of the fine, not the amount.
    - creata 6y ago
      Well no, the punishment should fit the crime. It's just that punishing a poor person by taking $1000 could kill them, and punishing a rich person by taking $1000 is barely even a punishment.
valleyer 6y ago
A system like this is on the ballot in California this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_25 A "yes" vote would replace all cash bail with a ruling from the risk-assessment system.
- boulos 6y ago
  To be clear, without this proposition the cash bail in California was going away. So this is a “do over” attempt by cash bail proponents via the proposition system. There’s only been one poll so far (39% to uphold the new law, thus ending cash bail, 32% repeal, 29% undecided): https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_Cash_Bail_with_Risk_Assessments_Referendum_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_C...
darawk 6y ago
I know a lot of people here object to systems like these, but I think they're really great, at least in principle. It's certainly true that early iterations will have problem of bias, and that's bad. But ultimately having an explicit model allows us to actually interrogate and correct those biases in a permanent way. You can't do that with a subjective system. Having an actual model, even if it starts out biased, that we can actually iterate on and tweak empirically seems like an invaluable step towards solving systemic racial and other forms of inequality in our justice system.
- mola 6y ago
  I think you are wrong. 1. From a technical point of view, The mere fact of a single model responsible for all decisions is bad. The inherent variance of judges opinions in concrete cases is the best way to fight bias. Bias by definition means less variance. Consolidating all decision making will tremendously worsen the bias. 2. From a moral point of view, law is made by people for people. It is a convention and ritual which gets it's moral validity from it's connection with tradition. We can hardly quantify these things let alone incorporate them to an ML algorithm. We ensure these by having people study for years, take bar exams, and through apprentenship programs. Do you really believe the state of the art in ML can come close to this? As a practitioner of ML, I know we can at most replace human activities that usually don't require any training, and are done by a human in a few seconds. 3. ML is really crappy. But is hyped as fact based and scientific. This is dangerous, a judge seeing a prediction by an algo is forced to comply with the algo, otherwise he'll be scrutinized for dismissing objective facts.
  - darawk 6y ago
    > 1. From a technical point of view, The mere fact of a single model responsible for all decisions is bad. The inherent variance of judges opinions in concrete cases is the best way to fight bias. Bias by definition means less variance. Consolidating all decision making will tremendously worsen the bia Who said there has to be one model? Bias also definitely does not mean less variance. If I were to try to flesh out the argument I think you're trying to make, it'd go something like this: Judges have uncorrelated biases, and that low correlation between their biases ultimately results in a lower bias than a unified model. However, whether or not that's actually true in practice hinges on two important things: How uncorrelated those biases actually are, and their relative magnitudes to those of the unified model. > 2. From a moral point of view, law is made by people for people. It is a convention and ritual which gets it's moral validity from it's connection with tradition. We can hardly quantify these things let alone incorporate them to an ML algorithm. We ensure these by having people study for years, take bar exams, and through apprentenship programs. Do you really believe the state of the art in ML can come close to this? As a practitioner of ML, I know we can at most replace human activities that usually don't require any training, and are done by a human in a few seconds. I don't believe that ML is at the point where it should be the sole arbiter of these things, no. But I do believe that a properly calibrated model can be a very useful guide to these sorts of decisions. > 3. ML is really crappy. But is hyped as fact based and scientific. This is dangerous, a judge seeing a prediction by an algo is forced to comply with the algo, otherwise he'll be scrutinized for dismissing objective facts. This is just an education problem though.
Oricle 6y ago
Jews go free first. Look at the head fundraiser of black lives matter for example :- https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/06/susan-rosenberg-terrorist-black-lives-matter/ https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/06/susan-rosenberg-terroris... Susan rosenburg responsible for 3 bombings of gentile buildings released by Bill Clinton on his last day on office (all presidents do this on their last day). A jew who hates all gentiles. Black, Asian, Eastern or white lol. Antifa anyone? Take your pick with them sickncunts as well! https://www.patrioticalternative.org.uk/news https://www.patrioticalternative.org.uk/news https://national-justice.com/ https://national-justice.com/ Who you think pushes pedophilia? Degeneracy? Who you think George lucas was talking about when he said he sold star wars to the white slavers? Who you think is pushing transgender ism at school and everywhere, especially on autistic children? Who controls all resources of the world and is in every so called 'developed' country? More like indoctrinated! Your all doing what your told like good goyhim over a bullshit lie about a virus that is nothing more than cold and flu lol. Fucking idiot sheeple. You moan about been called it but its exactly what most have become, because their selfish and ignorant! Fucking deserve what's coming to you, allowed foreigners in all your countries and white man will be extinct within the next 80 years! All your ancestors turning in their graves. Sad and perfetic!
ReptileMan 6y ago
We need new theory and social contract about how to reconcile individual agency and statistical markers. Until it is in place all algorithms will be unfair and whatever the worst ism of the day on social media is. Unfortunately thinking on the subject usually leads to despair and pouring a quadruple bourbon
mindslight 6y ago
There is no inherent problem with using an algorithm for these decisions. The growing problem seems to be the lack of algorithms! If the specific rules for a decision are not understandable by humans, then we're not talking about an "algorithm" but rather an opaque model. An algorithm would be something like: Defendant gave address and phone number (1 point), Defendant has no prior convictions within past 3 years (3 points), and so on. With rules ultimately understandable by humans, who can debate and modify specific rules such as ones based on race, or ones that would have disparate impact like zip code. This is 1970's tech, not 2020's. I don't know about NYC's system, and it's hard to tell specifics from the article which only makes references to a few input datums but never says how the inputs effect the output. If there are specific scoring rules that can be individually debated, then the article is trying to drum up worry by leaving them out. If NYC's system is based on inputting data to a proprietary tool that only outputs a score and citizens are unable to know how it works, then the article needs to drive home the black box unaccountability aspect of this (and stop using the word "algorithm"), rather than focusing on the imposition of requiring a phone number.
freen 6y ago
Failure to appear rates are consistently under 5% in NYC. The cost of incarceration is approximately $500/night. The most common reason cited for missing court, approximately 70%, is childcare/elder care. Failure to make bail more often results in job loss, homelessness, etc. The very simple economics of bail, beyond the obvious injustice of incarceration before judgement only for the poor, is a complete and utter failure. The only justification for the current system is cruelty. The singular position of conservatives is, simply put, is that there must be out-groups for whom the law binds, but does not protect, and in-groups for who. The law protects, but does not bind.
m0zg 6y ago
Oregon has the improved version of the algorithm: if perp_is_left_wing: release() drop_charges() It's been running for 120 days and counting, in a fiery, but mostly peaceful manner, per CNN reports. Only a few people have been murdered. Federal authorities have submitted a patch the other day to deputize officers as federal marshals so that you never end up in this branch. We'll see if that helps.

71 points by jkuria 6y ago

https://archive.is/81N8I https://archive.is/81N8I

Reducing accuracy to try and improve fairness is definitely the politically correct thing to do. There was a good paper on this topic about how trying to make a model more fair can result in worst outcomes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 If some group does happen to have a higher recidivism risk, pretending this isn't true and just correcting against that fact will just result in more crime.

zdragnar 6y ago
It seems to me that boosting accuracy is the only fair thing to do. What was actually being compared in putting the models together was projection of accuracy, which as an estimate should not be confused with actual results... as the article eventually got around to pointing out. When weighing guesswork against fairness, I agree with the decision to favor fairness, especially considering that the decision to grant bail has nothing whatsoever to do with a person's actual guilt or innocence- they have been charged, but not yet tried.
compycom 6y ago
Fairness is a legitimate end unto itself, an essential part of what makes a justice system 'just'. If reducing crime is our only objective, we can do so trivially by indefinitely detaining anyone who ever does something suspicious. I think most people would find this system to be deeply unjust, even if it eliminated crime. As a society, we have some tolerance for crime, preferring to err on the side of personal liberty against totalitarianism. Asking for fairness in this recidivism model isn't a case of political correctness run amok, it's a reasonable request from stakeholders in the system it affects: Why should an individual be punished for the actions of others who happen to have similar identity markers? You can say that a biased system will be "more efficient", but efficient to what end? A system that is unfair may reduce crime but it won't achieve "justice".
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I largely agree with what you're saying. But the challenge is that, while people are willing to tolerate some crime, they're generally not willing to tolerate more crime. Very few voters will bite the bullet and say realizing suchandsuch principle of fairness is worth 10 more murders each year, so any reform which can't convincingly explain how crime will stay down is dead in the water. (New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.)
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >(New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.) The only part of your statement that's factual is that there were premature complaints that it increased crime. That has yet to be validated. As for the rest, cash bail was not completely eliminated. Rather it was eliminated for most non-violent and some violent offenses. The changes made by the NYS legislature made more (not all) violent crimes eligible for bail, and gave judges more discretion as to whether to set bail or not[0]. As such, in New York State most offenses are not bailable. Which is a huge improvement over the prior regimen. Many people would languish in jail for months or years, while they lost their jobs and their homes. Even more cruelly, prosecutors would use this to essentially force people to accept plea bargains which required them to plead guilty to crimes they may not have committed, just to get out of jail and try to salvage some semblance of their lives. That just creates a group of people who are now homeless, jobless and have a criminal conviction -- just because they couldn't afford to pay for bail. That's a great way to create more folks who have no means, a big red 'X' anytime they apply for a job and little respect for the law -- given how the "justice" system destroyed their lives with cash bail. You might think "Well, they were put in jail for a reason." But this wasn't a sentence after conviction, it was criminalizing poverty. And that's just wrong. I think cash bail is horrible. If you are so dangerous that you need to be kept away from the general public before trial, then you shouldn't have the option of bail at all. And that should be proven via actual evidence before a judge, not any sort of ML model. Many here seem to see this as a technical issue to be solved, with better training data, more refined models and clearer definitions of the problem/search space. It's not. People's lives are often ruined by cash bail. Prosecutors should be required to prove, with actual evidence that each defendant is a real flight risk, or is likely to harm others before being remanded to custody without bail. Everyone else should be required to respond appropriately to court orders WRT contact with prosecutors, appearance at hearings/trials, etc. but should not be required to post bail. [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-yorks-latest-bail-law-changes-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-...
hnracer 6y ago
"fairness" is just Orwellian double speak that really means unfair. That is, introducing literal bias (in the ML sense) to cancel out the subjective bias of woke activists.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
What's the point of your post? Are you really citing an ML paper as supporting the idea that the US justice system should not seek fairness? That's some weak FUD if you ask me.

cmehdy 6y ago

I wonder to what extent this creates a feedback loop that isn't fully acknowledged/understood. As long as the prediction is only one element of decision and not the decision itself, it can probably be useful for judges. If it becomes "the algorithm says", then the feedback loop could have unpredictable consequences. By nature of a world with finite resources, I also wonder whether the 2.7 million USD could have made a better impact on likelihood to show up if they had been used to put in place or extend existing support structures for the majority of the crimes those courts see. It's still worth it to research how technology can help of course, but it's also hard to put in any kind of comparative study when only doing one thing at a time.

zdragnar 6y ago
In a city of 8 million people, it is not likely that $2.7 million would substantially shift underlying social issues to reduce crime or failure to appear for court dates. In the example case given, prosecutors appeared to have no evidence whatsoever that the defendant would skip court; the defense presented the algorithm and explained why he likely got the score he did. I imagine judges may come to heavily weigh the score, but cannot imagine any would ever give such an algorithm a blank check to decide for them.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  I might be misunderstanding the cost there but isn't it more the amount of people who were going through that system that matters, and not the city size? By that I mean that we could also look at what 2.7 million dollars (or even that flat cost + operating costs evened out over the period of time of the study) would do, were it put towards every one of those defendants in dire conditions. To ensure for example that they have at least a temporary place to stay, social programs in place, someone to follow their case and offer a reinforced legal counsel (which is available to everyone for free for sure, but I hope nobody kids themselves about how overworked those people are - I could bet everything I have that anyone with a good income would always pick a private lawyer over duty counsel). As for your last point: it certainly doesn't seem to be the case right now but I can very well see that entering the realm of possibilities. You can't imagine that a system that performs on paper really well and is thrown into a field where people are incredibly over-worked would end up being relied on a little bit too much? I mean, we see that sort of thing in place for way less reliable things with people who actually know better (i.e. how many scripts and old bits of code hold together much of the world). And in the medical field the development and usage of AI is on a steady rise ("chatbots" in psychology, predictive modeling for decision making and disease diagnosis, "telehealth" assessments using data from IoT devices). If AI gave people more work rather than less, it would be of no use after all.

tialaramex 6y ago

It's completely crazy that most of the US uses paid bail. That can't be a good idea. On the other hand, it is true that when bailed some fraction of defendants won't show up. I live in an English city and once in a while (when there was not a pandemic) I would walk into the city centre and attend some trials in one of our courts. The last session in Magistrate's court most weeks is people who were supposed to be there for an earlier session and didn't show. So how are they there now? Well when they don't show the court orders police to arrest them, they get arrested and then to guarantee they appear they're sent to the cells until their case is called. Most of them look pretty sheepish. We are not talking about criminal masterminds here. You have a 10am court appearance, Police knock on the door at 2pm, your mum lets them in, they arrest you. Oh, shit, that was today? Oh, your phone has fifty messages from your lawyer asking where the fuck you are. Oops. So this makes me think the most valuable tool for this problem would be a way to get defendants to actually do the introspection when a court asks them: Can we trust you to show up on this date and this time? Can they? Or are you just hopeless and it would actually be better to just imprison you a day or two before so that you're available?

unishark 6y ago
Not everyone gets bail. Releasing defendants without bail is called release on "own recognizance". It depends on how severe the crime and how likely they think you are to run. Keep in mind criminal law is handled at the state level, so historically it was really hard to catch people who just moved to another state. Bail pays for people like "bounty hunters" to go find you.
- judge2020 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_bondsman?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_bondsman?wprov=sfti1
shifty1 6y ago
I recommend reading stories of the law. It’ll tell you a plethora of reasons why people fail to turn up for court. Often as a result of an overstretched and massively underfunded CPS. Well worth a read - https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/The-Secret-Barrister/The-Secret-Barrister--Stories-of-the-Law-and-How-Its-Broken/22703133 https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/The-Secret-Barrister/The-Secr...

blendergeek 6y ago

Why not scale cash bail to match income/wealth? Then people of all economic levels will be affected by it more or less equally and none of us will have our fate in the hands of an opaque proprietary algorithm.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The challenge with scaling it is that many criminal defendants have no regular income and extremely little wealth, so any nonzero amount of bail is impossible for them to pay on their own.
irrational 6y ago
I was wondering recently why fines are not scaled to income. A $200 fine is no big deal for a wealthy person, but devastating for a poor person. Why shouldn’t the wealthy persons fine be equally devastating? $2000, $20000, $200000, maybe $200,000,000 for Jeff Bezos.
- totalZero 6y ago
  You're saying that in cases where the penalty is monetary, the punishment should fit the criminal rather than fitting the crime. I think you should consider some of the ethical implications of imposing vastly different punishments for the same behavior.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I think a question is: is the same dollar amount the same punishment? Jeff Bezos doesn’t need to think twice about a $10k fine but there are plenty of people for whom that would be ruinous. Arguably, the “sameness” has to do with the impact of the fine, not the amount.
  - creata 6y ago
    Well no, the punishment should fit the crime. It's just that punishing a poor person by taking $1000 could kill them, and punishing a rich person by taking $1000 is barely even a punishment.

valleyer 6y ago

A system like this is on the ballot in California this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_25 A "yes" vote would replace all cash bail with a ruling from the risk-assessment system.

boulos 6y ago
To be clear, without this proposition the cash bail in California was going away. So this is a “do over” attempt by cash bail proponents via the proposition system. There’s only been one poll so far (39% to uphold the new law, thus ending cash bail, 32% repeal, 29% undecided): https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_Cash_Bail_with_Risk_Assessments_Referendum_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_C...

darawk 6y ago

I know a lot of people here object to systems like these, but I think they're really great, at least in principle. It's certainly true that early iterations will have problem of bias, and that's bad. But ultimately having an explicit model allows us to actually interrogate and correct those biases in a permanent way. You can't do that with a subjective system. Having an actual model, even if it starts out biased, that we can actually iterate on and tweak empirically seems like an invaluable step towards solving systemic racial and other forms of inequality in our justice system.

mola 6y ago
I think you are wrong. 1. From a technical point of view, The mere fact of a single model responsible for all decisions is bad. The inherent variance of judges opinions in concrete cases is the best way to fight bias. Bias by definition means less variance. Consolidating all decision making will tremendously worsen the bias. 2. From a moral point of view, law is made by people for people. It is a convention and ritual which gets it's moral validity from it's connection with tradition. We can hardly quantify these things let alone incorporate them to an ML algorithm. We ensure these by having people study for years, take bar exams, and through apprentenship programs. Do you really believe the state of the art in ML can come close to this? As a practitioner of ML, I know we can at most replace human activities that usually don't require any training, and are done by a human in a few seconds. 3. ML is really crappy. But is hyped as fact based and scientific. This is dangerous, a judge seeing a prediction by an algo is forced to comply with the algo, otherwise he'll be scrutinized for dismissing objective facts.
- darawk 6y ago
  > 1. From a technical point of view, The mere fact of a single model responsible for all decisions is bad. The inherent variance of judges opinions in concrete cases is the best way to fight bias. Bias by definition means less variance. Consolidating all decision making will tremendously worsen the bia Who said there has to be one model? Bias also definitely does not mean less variance. If I were to try to flesh out the argument I think you're trying to make, it'd go something like this: Judges have uncorrelated biases, and that low correlation between their biases ultimately results in a lower bias than a unified model. However, whether or not that's actually true in practice hinges on two important things: How uncorrelated those biases actually are, and their relative magnitudes to those of the unified model. > 2. From a moral point of view, law is made by people for people. It is a convention and ritual which gets it's moral validity from it's connection with tradition. We can hardly quantify these things let alone incorporate them to an ML algorithm. We ensure these by having people study for years, take bar exams, and through apprentenship programs. Do you really believe the state of the art in ML can come close to this? As a practitioner of ML, I know we can at most replace human activities that usually don't require any training, and are done by a human in a few seconds. I don't believe that ML is at the point where it should be the sole arbiter of these things, no. But I do believe that a properly calibrated model can be a very useful guide to these sorts of decisions. > 3. ML is really crappy. But is hyped as fact based and scientific. This is dangerous, a judge seeing a prediction by an algo is forced to comply with the algo, otherwise he'll be scrutinized for dismissing objective facts. This is just an education problem though.

Oricle 6y ago

Jews go free first. Look at the head fundraiser of black lives matter for example :- https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/06/susan-rosenberg-terrorist-black-lives-matter/ https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/06/susan-rosenberg-terroris... Susan rosenburg responsible for 3 bombings of gentile buildings released by Bill Clinton on his last day on office (all presidents do this on their last day). A jew who hates all gentiles. Black, Asian, Eastern or white lol. Antifa anyone? Take your pick with them sickncunts as well! https://www.patrioticalternative.org.uk/news https://www.patrioticalternative.org.uk/news https://national-justice.com/ https://national-justice.com/ Who you think pushes pedophilia? Degeneracy? Who you think George lucas was talking about when he said he sold star wars to the white slavers? Who you think is pushing transgender ism at school and everywhere, especially on autistic children? Who controls all resources of the world and is in every so called 'developed' country? More like indoctrinated! Your all doing what your told like good goyhim over a bullshit lie about a virus that is nothing more than cold and flu lol. Fucking idiot sheeple. You moan about been called it but its exactly what most have become, because their selfish and ignorant! Fucking deserve what's coming to you, allowed foreigners in all your countries and white man will be extinct within the next 80 years! All your ancestors turning in their graves. Sad and perfetic!

ReptileMan 6y ago

We need new theory and social contract about how to reconcile individual agency and statistical markers. Until it is in place all algorithms will be unfair and whatever the worst ism of the day on social media is. Unfortunately thinking on the subject usually leads to despair and pouring a quadruple bourbon

mindslight 6y ago

There is no inherent problem with using an algorithm for these decisions. The growing problem seems to be the lack of algorithms! If the specific rules for a decision are not understandable by humans, then we're not talking about an "algorithm" but rather an opaque model. An algorithm would be something like: Defendant gave address and phone number (1 point), Defendant has no prior convictions within past 3 years (3 points), and so on. With rules ultimately understandable by humans, who can debate and modify specific rules such as ones based on race, or ones that would have disparate impact like zip code. This is 1970's tech, not 2020's. I don't know about NYC's system, and it's hard to tell specifics from the article which only makes references to a few input datums but never says how the inputs effect the output. If there are specific scoring rules that can be individually debated, then the article is trying to drum up worry by leaving them out. If NYC's system is based on inputting data to a proprietary tool that only outputs a score and citizens are unable to know how it works, then the article needs to drive home the black box unaccountability aspect of this (and stop using the word "algorithm"), rather than focusing on the imposition of requiring a phone number.

freen 6y ago

Failure to appear rates are consistently under 5% in NYC. The cost of incarceration is approximately $500/night. The most common reason cited for missing court, approximately 70%, is childcare/elder care. Failure to make bail more often results in job loss, homelessness, etc. The very simple economics of bail, beyond the obvious injustice of incarceration before judgement only for the poor, is a complete and utter failure. The only justification for the current system is cruelty. The singular position of conservatives is, simply put, is that there must be out-groups for whom the law binds, but does not protect, and in-groups for who. The law protects, but does not bind.

m0zg 6y ago

Oregon has the improved version of the algorithm: if perp_is_left_wing: release() drop_charges() It's been running for 120 days and counting, in a fiery, but mostly peaceful manner, per CNN reports. Only a few people have been murdered. Federal authorities have submitted a patch the other day to deputize officers as federal marshals so that you never end up in this branch. We'll see if that helps.