Data doesn’t lie. But sometimes, you have to ask it better questions to get anywhere meaningful. In making criminal justice decisions, courts and prosecutors have tried to use data and algorithms to determine things like the risks to society a particular accused may pose. The concept is simple: look at the data and determine who is likely to commit another crime or flee before disposition. From this analysis, the theory goes, you can then determine if a particular accused is similar to the individuals the data says are likely to pose those risks. The problem, of course, is that this usually means black Americans and people of color are deemed to be of higher risk. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, black Americans typically receive sentences some 19.1 times longer than whites, for example. So the use of data in the criminal justice system is fundamentally flawed. Right? Well, not necessarily: the data isn’t flawed, but how the criminal justice system uses it may be. The ACLU, Carnegie Mellon, and Penn recently undertook a Study to see what would happen if we asked a different question. Instead of asking what risk a person poses to society and the justice system, ask what risk the justice system poses to the individual accused. Can we determine if a given accused falls into a group that typically receives a disproportionate sentence,
Data Analytics: It’s All About The Question You Ask
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