White House asks AI experts to help with America's prison overcrowding problem

America has a prison problem. Although the United States accounts for just 4.4 percent of the world's population, we account for 22 percent of the world's overall prisoner population. All this attempted correction comes at both social and financial expense. America spent around 80 billion on prisons, jails, probation, and parole in 2010, according to a report by The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair, and too costly – in every sense of the word – and we need to start to change it," heralded the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann on Tuesday in Washington, DC.