White House Challenges Artificial Intelligence Experts to Reduce Incarceration Rates

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "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," Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount of incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.