The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/risk-assessment/)
The spreading use of algorithms to determine whether to detain individuals before trial has increasingly come under fire from civil rights advocates. A paper commissioned by the Safety and Justice Challenge offers an alternative vision designed to measure individuals’ chances of success in staying out of trouble rather than their risk of failure.
Risk assessments “can increase consistency, transparency and accuracy” of judicial decisions, said Jennifer Skeem, associate dean of research at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2014, North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County defied skeptics by adopting a pretrial risk assessment tool aimed at reducing the number of people in jail awaiting trial because they could not afford money bail. Other states should take note, write two reform advocates.
Pennsylvania’s Commission on Sentencing is weighing whether to use an offender’s age in determining the likelihood of committing a new crime, for a risk assessment tool due this summer. That flies in the face of recent juvenile justice reforms, such as Supreme Court rulings accepting that adolescents have diminished responsibility, warns a Pennsylvania attorney.
Tools used by courts to judge whether an individual will re-offend rarely address the specific interaction of race and criminogenic risk, writes a University of Cincinnati researcher. She found that young African Americans have been especially shortchanged.
One of the popular software applications widely used by correctional institutions to predict an inmate’s likelihood of re-offending tends to exaggerate the risks for Hispanics, says a forthcoming study in the American Criminal Law Review.
New research into how the brain works is contributing to innovative strategies for reducing recidivism and developing alternatives to incarceration.
More than 100 civil rights, “digital justice” and community groups issued a statement expressing concerns about the expanding use of risk assessment instruments as a substitute for basing bail releases on money. The groups said risk assessment tools may not only exacerbate racial bias but “allow further incarceration.”
A risk assessment tool used for two decades to assess sex offenders’ likelihood of committing a future offense has been repeatedly exposed as “pseudo-scientific humbug.” So why do New York State courts continue to use it?
A Washington State parole board rejected our columnist’s appeal for release from prison for a crime committed when he was a juvenile on the grounds that he had a “moderate to high” likelihood of re-offending. But they appear to have based the decision on a psychological risk assessment tool used to measure adult offenders.