Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Atlantic

    A Popular Algorithm Is No Better at Predicting Crimes Than Random People

    The COMPAS tool is widely used to assess a defendant’s risk of committing more crimes, but a new study puts its usefulness into perspective.
    by Ed Yong Jan 17, 2018 4 minutes
    Source: Arijit Mondal / Getty

    In February 2013, Eric Loomis was found driving a car that had been used in a shooting. He was arrested, and pleaded guilty to eluding an officer. In determining his sentence, a judge looked not just to his criminal record, but also to a score assigned by a tool called COMPAS.

    Developed by a private company called Equivant (formerly Northpointe), COMPAS—or the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions—purports to predict a defendant’s risk of committing another crime. It works through a proprietary algorithm that considers some of the answers to a 137-item questionnaire.

    COMPAS is one of several such being used around the country to predict hot spots of violent crime, determine the types of supervision that inmates

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Atlantic

    The Atlantic4 min read
    Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
    Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
    The Atlantic4 min read
    When Private Equity Comes for a Public Good
    This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In some states, public funds are being poured into t
    The Atlantic4 min readAmerican Government
    How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t
    Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking

    Related Books & Audiobooks