A Popular Crime-Predicting Algorithms Performed Worse Than Mechanical Turks in One Study

The American criminal justice system couldn't get much less fair. Across the country, some 1.5 million people are locked up in state and federal prisons. More than 600,000 people, the vast majority of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime, sit behind bars in local jails. Black people make up 40 percent of those incarcerated, despite accounting for just 13 percent of the US population. With the size and cost of jails and prisons rising--not to mention the inherent injustice of the system--cities and states across the country have been lured by tech tools that promise to predict whether someone might commit a crime.