Software Used to Make "Life-Altering" Decisions Is No Better Than Random People at Predicting Recidivism

Researchers at Dartmouth College have found that a computer program widely used by courts to predict an offenders' risk of reoffending is no more fair or accurate than a bunch of random non-experts who were given the same data and asked to make predictions. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, is used in several states to inform pretrial, parole, and sentencing decisions. And while it may sound sophisticated--COMPAS has 137 variables and a proprietary algorithm--the software performs no better than a simple linear predictor using just two variables. "Claims that secretive and seemingly sophisticated data tools are more accurate and fair than humans are simply not supported by our research findings," said co-author Julia Dressel, an undergraduate who performed the research with Dartmouth computer scientist Hany Farid. For their peer-reviewed study, published Wednesday in Science Advances (Science magazine's open-access "offspring"), Dressel and Farid commissioned human participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program.