| Across the nation, judges, probation and parole officers are increasingly using algorithms to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood to re-offend. There are dozens of these risk assessment algorithms in use, including two leading nationwide tools offered by commercial vendors.
Our story, "Machine Bias," set out to assess one of the commercial tools, called COMPAS (which stands for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), made by Northpointe, Inc. to discover the underlying accuracy of their recidivism algorithm and to test whether the algorithm was biased against certain groups.
The linked data includes: a database containing the criminal history, jail and prison time, demographics and COMPAS risk scores for defendants from Broward County from 2013 and 2014; code in R and Python; a Jupyter notebook; and other files needed for the analysis. |
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