An Algorithm Is Now Helping Set Bail in New Jersey
They say that everything is legal in New Jersey, but that's not quite true. If you do happen to be arrested in the state, an algorithm will help determine whether you can post bail.
In the past, New Jersey's bail system was a bit of a mess. Like many bail systems across the country, New Jersey's system was often criticized by criminal justice and civil rights activists for discriminating against people who are low-income or minorities. Because human judges set bail amounts, human biases often influenced those amounts.
To fix this, New Jersey implemented a new system on January 1 that supplemented those human judges with an algorithm to more fairly set bail amounts. The algorithm, called the Public Safety Assessment, mathematically determines the likelihood that a defendant will skip their trial or commit another crime. The new system takes much of the bias out of the system, ensuring that more people get a fair bail amount.
Using algorithms to calculate bail amounts isn't new, but implementations in many other states tended to simply reinforce the biases they were trying to eliminate. Many other algorithms use predictive markers like zip codes or level of education can often end up just predicting wealth or race.
New Jersey's algorithm instead relies on a dataset of more than 1.5 million cases, and looks at what factors are best able to predict the likelihood of someone skipping their court date or committing another crime. The developers found that race and income are very poor predictors, and that the most common thread is the number of previous convictions. If a person has many prior convictions they are more likely to receive a higher bail amount.
The system isn't perfect, and focusing on prior convictions may still unfairly penalize certain overpoliced demographics, but it is an improvement over the previous system. This system is already being used in many places besides New Jersey, and hopefully it will expand to the entire country soon.
Source: Motherboard
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