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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Many people are nervous about the prospect of using algorithms to predict crime, and a legal battle in Wisconsin is illustrating why. The state's Supreme Court is close to ruling on an appeal from ...

A new study suggests that a commercial software widely used to predict which criminals will commit crimes again is no more accurate than untrained people, at foreseeing recidivism. Previous research ...

IN AMERICA, computers have been used to assist bail and sentencing decisions for many years. Their proponents argue that the rigorous logic of an algorithm, trained with a vast amount of data, can ...

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 ...