No Company Should Be Able to Keep You from Checking Your Government's Math

by Brian A. Jackson

As part of efforts to make government smarter, data and computer models are becoming more and more important for making policy decisions. For example, in the criminal justice system, computer models and analytic methods are being used to inform decisions from how police officers patrol to judgments about whether individual defendants are kept in jail and for how long.

Predictive policing tools use data about past crime and other factors, in some cases identifying individual city blocks for enhanced police patrol because the model predicts that crime is more likely to happen there.

In the courts and corrections system, risk and needs assessment (PDF) tools use variables about defendants like their connections in the community, past interactions with the police or courts, and other data to inform judgments about their bail amounts, what sentence is imposed after conviction, how they are held in prison, and about their release into the community after they have served their time.

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Continua qui: http://www.rand.org/blog/2017/01/no-company-should-be-able-to-keep-you-from-checking.html