Racist Algorithms, Crime, And The Ethical Use Of Data Prediction In The Criminal Justice System
http://skepchick.org/2016/05/racist-algorithms-crime-and-the-ethical-use-of-data-prediction/
"ProPublica came out with an excellent piece this week by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kircher looking at the algorithms used by the US justice system to predict the recidivism rate of people at different stages within the justice system. These predictive scores, called risk assessment scores, are then used to determine things like sentencing and bail amounts, with those who have a high probability of committing future crimes getting higher sentences than those with lower scores. Low and behold, these scores are also correlated with race, so if a black man and white man commit the same crime, the black man is more likely to have a higher risk assessment score which could result in a tougher prison sentence or a higher bail.
As someone who builds predictive models for a living, I am dismayed at the misuse of predictive algorithms for the purposes of discrimination, though I don’t think it’s the algorithm itself that is the problem, or at least not for the reasons that others seem to think.
Why do some predictive models give racist results?
In 2016 in the United States we are living under a white supremacist society where black men and women face institutionalized racism that leads to less opportunities for jobs and credit and greater risk of arrest and violence. Because of institutionalized racism, there are many undesirable things that correlate with being black, such as lower income, likelihood of participating in certain types of crimes, increased likelihood of being arrested for said crimes, and increased recidivism rates for those who have served their term and are released from jail. This is a classic case of causation does not equal correlation. Being black is correlated with these things not because there is something innate about black people that causes them to commit crimes but because we live in a society where external hardships are imposed on black people because they are black and those hardships themselves are correlated with crime.
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The problem with the actual risk assessment model that ProPublica looked into, created by the company Northpointe, isn’t just that it gives higher scores to people who are black. In fact, the model overestimates the recidivism rate of black individuals and underestimates it for white individuals. The model results don’t match reality in ways that really are racist against black people.
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