Incident 154: Justice Department’s Recidivism Risk Algorithm PATTERN Allegedly Caused Persistent Disparities Along Racial Lines
Description: Department of Justice’s inmate-recidivism risk assessment tool was reported to have produced racially uneven results, misclassifying risk levels for inmates of color.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: US Department of Justice developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed inmates of color.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
154
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2022-01-26
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
GMF Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsKnown AI Goal
An AI Goal which is almost certainly pursued by the AI system referenced in the incident.
Recidivism Prediction
Potential AI Technology
An AI Method / Technology which probably is a part of the implementation of the AI system referenced in the incident.
Diverse Data, Distributional Learning
Known AI Technical Failure
An AI Technical Failure which almost certainly contributes to the AI system failure referenced in the incident.
Lack of Transparency, Misconfigured Threshold
Potential AI Technical Failure
An AI Technical Failure which probably contributes to the AI system failure referenced in the incident.
Incomplete Data Attribute Capture, Distributional Bias
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
npr.org · 2022
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Thousands of people are leaving federal prison this month thanks to a law called the First Step Act, which allowed them to win early release by participating in programs aimed at easing their return to society.
But thousands of others may s…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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