The Odds of Justice: Code of Silence: How private companies hide flaws in the software that governments use to decide who goes to prison and who gets out

By Rebecca Wexler. 2018

15 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One day in early January, a letter appeared on my desk marked DIN92A5501— an inmate ’s ident i f icat ion number from the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The author, Glenn Rodríguez, had drafted it in upright, even letters, perfectly aligned. Here, in broad strokes, is the story he told: Rodríguez was just 16 at the time of his arrest, and was convicted of second-degree murder for his role in an armed robbery of a car dealership that left an employee dead. Now, 26 years later, he was a model of rehabilitation. He had requested a transfer to Eastern, a maximum-security prison, to take college classes. He had spent four and a half years training service dogs for wounded veterans and 11 volunteering for a youth program. A job and a place to stay were waiting for him outside. And he had not had a single disciplinary infraction for the past decade. Yet, last July, the parole board hit him with a denial. It might have turned out differently but, the board explained, a computer system called COMPAS had ranked Code of Silence How private companies hide flaws in the software that governments use to decide who goes to prison and who gets out

Subfields: Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Globally-Consistent Rule-Based Summary-Explanations for Machine Learning Models: Application to Credit-Risk Evaluation (2019, unknown): “In the justice system, mistakes in data entry within predictive models have caused people to be denied parole (Citron 2016, Wexler 2017), or to be released when they are actually dangerous, leading to increased crime (Ho 2017).”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “With algorithmic control, however, there is frequently no procedure in place for workers to get access to, contest, or challenge algorithmic decisions (Wexler, 2018).”