An investigation by ProPublica reveals that proprietary algorithms used across the U.S. criminal justice system to predict recidivism are highly unreliable and racially biased. Specifically, the widely used COMPAS software by Northpointe was found to falsely flag Black defendants as high-risk at nearly twice the rate of white defendants, while mislabeling white defendants as low-risk more often. This systemic disparity highlights how algorithmic decision-making can exacerbate racial inequalities under the guise of objective, data-driven reform.
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### **THE MECHANICAL SWAMI THAT LIES!**
#### **Secret "Robot" Oracle Brands Innocent Gals as Desperadoes While Seasoned Yeggs Walk Free!**
#### **COPS AND JUDGES BOW TO CROOKED MATHEMATICAL HOCUS-POCUS IN THE COURTS!**
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**FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.** — A sinister specter is haunting the halls of American justice, and its name is the Automatic Adding-Engine of Doom!
Your correspondent has uncovered a shocking yarn of scientific flim-flam operating behind closed doors in our courts. From the palm-lined avenues of Broward County to the snow-swept plains of Wisconsin, judges are discarding their own God-given wits to take counsel from a mechanical swami—a proprietary mathematical formula that purports to look into a man’s soul and predict his next crime.
But hold on to your straw boaters, readers, because this mechanical brain is getting it dead wrong—and the deck is stacked against the colored man!
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### **A TALE OF TWO THIEVES**
Consider the plight of young Miss Brisha Borden, eighteen years of age. On a balmy spring afternoon in 2014, the young miss was in a terrible rush to fetch her god-sister from the schoolhouse. Spotting an unlocked blue Huffy velocipede and a silver foot-scooter sitting idle on a Coral Springs curb, she and a chum grabbed the toys and attempted a getaway.
Alas, they were far too big for the tiny contraptions, which belonged to a six-year-old tot! A neighborhood dame gave chase, shouting, “That’s my kid’s stuff!”
The girls immediately dropped the goods and beat a retreat, but a watchful neighbor had already blown the whistle to the flatfoots. Miss Borden was pinched and booked for burglary and petty theft of goods valued at eighty clams.
Now contrast her caper with that of Vernon Prater, a forty-one-year-old hardened fellow of the streets. The previous summer, Prater was nabbed for shoplifting eighty-six dollars’ worth of tools from a local hardware emporium.
Prater was no amateur. His rap sheet boasted two armed heists and an attempted armed robbery, for which he had already cooled his heels in the state pen for five long years. Young Miss Borden had nothing on her sheet but juvenile misdemeanors.
Yet, when the jailhouse gates swung shut, the mechanical oracle spat out its verdict:
* **Brisha Borden (Negro):** Deemed a "High-Class Menace" (Score: 8 out of 10).
* **Vernon Prater (White):** Deemed a "Safe Bet" (Score: 3 out of 10).
Two years later, the truth is out! The robot brain got it exactly backward! Miss Borden has walked the straight and narrow, while Prater, the "Safe Bet," is currently doing an eight-year stretch in the Big House for a daring warehouse heist involving thousands of dollars in electrical goods!
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### **THE SECRETS OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE**
How does this mechanical wizard operate? It is the brainchild of "Northpointe," a private syndicate of slide-rule wizards founded by statistician Tim Brennan and corrections man Dave Wells. Under the fancy moniker of **COMPAS**, this mathematical formula scores defendants based on a questionnaire of 137 queries.
It asks such nosey questions as: *“Was one of your parents ever sent to the brig?” “Do your pals take juice or dope?”* and *“Did you get into schoolyard scraps?”*
The big bosses at Northpointe guard their formula like the formula for Coca-Cola, crying "Trade Secrets!" when anyone asks to look under the hood.
But our intrepid scribes at *ProPublica* have audited the ledgers of Broward County, analyzing the scores of over 7,000 souls booked in 2013 and 2014. The findings are enough to make a honest flatfoot weep!
* **A Flip of a Coin:** When predicting any future misdemeanor or felony, the machine is barely more accurate than a toss of a copper coin—hitting the mark only 61 percent of the time!
* **A Total Flop on Violence:** In forecasting violent goons, the machine is a flat-out failure, proving wrong eighty times out of a hundred!
* **Prejudice by the Numbers:** The machine falsely flags Negro defendants as future criminals at *twice* the rate of white rogues. Meanwhile, white crooks are mislabeled as "Low Risk" far more often, slipping through the fingers of Lady Justice!
Even when our statisticians isolated the factors of age, gender, and past offenses, the dark-skinned defendant was still 77 percent more likely to be pegged as a future violent threat.
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### **SENTENCED BY PUNCH-CARD!**
In some corners of this great Republic, judges are letting this mechanical brain dictate the length of a man’s stretch behind iron bars.
Take the tragic case of Paul Zilly, a Wisconsin construction worker who fell back into the grip of the demon meth and swiped a push-lawnmower to sell for parts. The district attorney and the defense lawyer had shaken hands on a plea deal: one year in the county jail.
But Judge James Babler looked at Zilly's COMPAS card. The machine had branded the drug-addled laborer a high risk for violence.
"The risk assessment," the Judge thundered in court, "is about as bad as it could be!"
With a stroke of his pen, the Judge tore up the deal and sentenced Zilly to two years in the state penitentiary!
Only after the machine's inventor, Mr. Brennan himself, took the stand at an appeal and confessed he never intended his system to be the sole basis for a man's punishment did the Judge relent, shaving six months off the stretch.
"I believe people do change," Zilly told our reporters from his cell. But the machine has no heart to believe.
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### **A SYSTEM IN TURMOIL**
In 2014, the Nation’s Top Lawman, Attorney General Eric Holder, raised the alarm, warning that these automated scores might be injecting old-fashioned prejudice back into our courts under the guise of modern science.
Yet, the wheels of the racket keep turning. In Wisconsin, Eric Loomis is currently taking his fight to the State Supreme Court, arguing that sentencing a man based on a secret computer score violates his constitutional rights to due process.
Meanwhile, back in Broward County, the system is used to decide who gets out on bail.
Judge John Hurley, who handled the bail for young Miss Borden and her chum Sade Jones, raised their bail from the recommended zero dollars to a cold grand apiece. The two terrified teenagers spent two agonizing nights weeping in a cramped cell before they could raise the scratch to get out.
"I went to the five-and-dime and the hamburger stand, and they all said no because of my record," sobbed young Miss Jones, who was rated a "Medium Risk" despite never having been pinched before in her life. "It's all so difficult."
Will America continue to let its liberty be decided by the cold, unfeeling cogs of a corporate adding machine? Or will we return to the constitutional promise of a trial by a jury of our living, breathing peers?
*Stay tuned to these columns as this paper continues to wage war against the Robbery of Reason!*