Analysis of the Pennsylvania Additive Classification Tool: Biases and Important Features

12/10/2021
by   Swarup Dhar, et al.
0

The Pennsylvania Additive Classification Tool (PACT) is a carceral algorithm used by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in order to determine the security level for an incarcerated person in the state's prison system. For a newly incarcerated person it is used in their initial classification. The initial classification can be overridden both for discretionary and administrative reasons. An incarcerated person is reclassified annually using a variant of the PACT and this reclassification can be overridden, too, and for similar reasons. In this paper, for each of these four processes (the two classifications and their corresponding overrides), we develop several logistic models, both binary and multinomial, to replicate these processes with high accuracy. By examining these models, we both identify which features are most important in the model and quantify and describe biases that exist in the PACT, its overrides, and its use in reclassification. Because the details of how the PACT operates have been redacted from public documents, it is important to know how it works and what disparate impact it might have on different incarcerated people.

READ FULL TEXT
research
10/20/2012

Identifications of concealed weapon in a Human Body

The detection of weapons concealed underneath a person cloths is very mu...
research
12/06/2021

Analyzing a Carceral Algorithm used by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

Scholars have focused on algorithms used during sentencing, bail, and pa...
research
12/19/2021

ArcFace Knows the Gender, Too!

The main idea of this paper is that if a model can recognize a person, o...
research
12/01/2021

Uncertainty in Criminal Justice Algorithms: simulation studies of the Pennsylvania Additive Classification Tool

Much attention has been paid to algorithms related to sentencing, the se...
research
01/11/2019

The Deeper, the Better: Analysis of Person Attributes Recognition

In person attributes recognition, we describe a person in terms of their...
research
10/22/2018

Interpretability is Harder in the Multiclass Setting: Axiomatic Interpretability for Multiclass Additive Models

Generalized additive models (GAMs) are favored in many regression and bi...
research
04/26/2020

Classification of Cuisines from Sequentially Structured Recipes

Cultures across the world are distinguished by the idiosyncratic pattern...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset