Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the questions—“How many prior convictions have you had?”—is highly relevant to the risk of recidivism. Others are also clearly related: “What part did others play in the offense? What part did drugs and alcohol play?”
    But as the questions continue, delving deeper into the person’s life, it’s easy to imagine how inmates from a privileged background would answer one way and those from tough inner-city streets another. Ask a criminal who grew up in comfortable suburbs about “the first time you were ever involved with the police,” and he might not have a single incident to report other than the one that brought him to prison. Young black males, by contrast, are likely to have been stopped by police dozens of times, even when they’ve done nothing wrong. A 2013 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that while black and Latino males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four made up only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 40.6 percent of the stop-and-frisk checks by police. More than 90 percent of those stopped were innocent. Some of the others might have been drinking underageor carrying a joint. And unlike most rich kids, they got in trouble for it. So if early “involvement” with the police signals recidivism, poor people and racial minorities look far riskier.
    The questions hardly stop there. Prisoners are also asked about whether their friends and relatives have criminal records. Again, ask that question to a convicted criminal raised in a middle-class neighborhood, and the chances are much greater that the answer will be no. The questionnaire does avoid asking about race, which is illegal. But with the wealth of detail each prisoner provides, that single illegal question is almost superfluous.
    The LSI–R questionnaire has been given to thousands of inmates since its invention in 1995. Statisticians have used those results to devise a system in which answers highly correlated to recidivism weigh more heavily and count for more points. After answering the questionnaire, convicts are categorized as high, medium, and low risk on the basis of the number of points they accumulate. In some states,such as Rhode Island, these tests are used only to target those with high-risk scores for antirecidivism programs while incarcerated. But in others,including Idahoand Colorado, judges use the scores to guide their sentencing.
    This is unjust. The questionnaire includes circumstances of a criminal’s birth and upbringing, including his or her family, neighborhood, and friends. These details should not be relevant to a criminal case or to the sentencing. Indeed, if a prosecutor attempted to tar a defendant by mentioning his brother’s criminal record or the high crime rate in his neighborhood, a decent defense attorney would roar, “Objection, Your Honor!” And a serious judge would sustain it. This is the basis of our legal system. We are judged by what we do, not by who we are. And although we don’t know the exact weights that are attached to these parts of the test, any weight above zero is unreasonable.
    Many would point out that statistical systems like the LSI–Rare effective in gauging recidivism risk—or at least more accurate than a judge’s random guess. But even if we put aside, ever so briefly, the crucial issue of fairness, we find ourselves descending into a pernicious WMD feedback loop. A person who scores as “high risk” is likely to be unemployed and to come from a neighborhood where many of his friends and family have had run-ins with the law. Thanks in part to the resulting high score on the evaluation, he gets a longer sentence, locking him away for more years in a prison where he’s surrounded by fellow criminals—which raises the likelihood that he’ll return to prison. He is finally released into the same poor neighborhood, this time with a criminal record, which makes it that much harder to find a job. If he commits another crime, the