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.

Taxpayers spend 39 billion a year on jailing 2.3 million people, making the U.S. the country with the highest incarceration rates in the world. And while technology is radically reshaping every aspect of our economy and society, none of our advances in computing and data are helping to stem the tide of mass incarceration. At a workshop in the capital last Tuesday, White House senior adviser Lynn Overmann of the Office of Science and Technology Policy called on the technologists of the country to figure out how to use data and technology to end widespread incarceration, according to Government Technology. Overmann wants artificial intelligence and machine learning programs that improve screening processes, scan body camera footage for police misconduct and make sentencing more fair. "I represented a client who was looking at spending 40 years of his life in prison because he stole a lawnmower and a weed-eater from a shed in a backyard," she said.

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.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to help reform policing and criminal justice practices nationwide, experts say. However, one challenge to deploying widespread artificial intelligence is refining the data to avoid reinforcing historic biases. The White House and the University of Chicago have teamed up with police departments across America to "start fixing" biases with the data collected over the years by the criminal justice system by building new ways of looking at the data, said director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Riyad Ghani. "We think that AI and machine learning… combined with all the data that exists can help solve these problems," Ghani said. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning can create predictive modeling and find patterns in behaviors of the officers and those being arrested, explained Ghani.

Those artificial intelligence programs being created by Google and other brain trusts are getting more clever by the day. When they're not beating game masters in a Go tournament they're composing new, original music. But leave it to the government to try to make the best use of new technology. We can't be satisfied with simply replacing our chess grand masters and Beyonce' with a snazzy new algorithm, so at least one expert in the Obama administration is pondering a new idea. Maybe they could replace judges in the courtroom. Artificial intelligence might soon become a standard part of criminal justice proceedings.

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 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.

Artificial intelligence might soon become a standard part of criminal justice proceedings. If used carefully, the technology might make fairer decisions about the length of prison sentences, determine which police officers to deploy and could also churn through body-worn camera footage, a senior White House adviser said Tuesday. Lynn Overmann, senior adviser within the Office of Science and Technology and co-leader of the White House Police Data Initiative, described the potential role of, and challenges associated with, artificial intelligence in the criminal justice system. She spoke at the second of four workshops co-hosted by the White House about the technology's ability to help the public and the government. The 2.2 million people incarcerated today overrepresent minorities, those with mental health issues and those with substance abuse problems, Overmann said. Data analytics and artificial intelligence could help reduce biases in the criminal justice system, but only if they account for biases in the data they incorporate.