The mission
In the United States, for the last two decades, private companies and non-profits have been developing criminal risk assessment tools, most of which employ statistical models. As many states can no longer afford their large prison populations, these methods have increased in popularity, guiding judges and parole boards through every step of the prison system. However, they often do more than guide a decision. They make them for justice system decision-makers because they assume it is correct. Worse of all, they don't exactly know how an assessment was made. The risk is usually calculated with a white-box model, but, in practice, a black-box model is used because it is proprietary. Predictive performance is also relatively low, with median AUC scores for nine tools ranging between 0.57 and 0.74. Still, validity and biases are rarely examined, especially by the criminal justice institutions that purchase them.
Even though traditional statistical methods are still...
