Reducing accuracy to try and improve fairness is definitely the politically correct thing to do. There was a good paper on this topic about how trying to make a model more fair can result in worst outcomes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 If some group does happen to have a higher recidivism risk, pretending this isn't true and just correcting against that fact will just result in more crime.
Fairness is a legitimate end unto itself, an essential part of what makes a justice system 'just'.
If reducing crime is our only objective, we can do so trivially by indefinitely detaining anyone who ever does something suspicious. I think most people would find this system to be deeply unjust, even if it eliminated crime.
As a society, we have some tolerance for crime, preferring to err on the side of personal liberty against totalitarianism.
Asking for fairness in this recidivism model isn't a case of political correctness run amok, it's a reasonable request from stakeholders in the system it affects: Why should an individual be punished for the actions of others who happen to have similar identity markers?
You can say that a biased system will be "more efficient", but efficient to what end? A system that is unfair may reduce crime but it won't achieve "justice".
> Why should an individual be punished for the actions of others who happen to have similar identity markers?
They shouldn't. But the algorithm shouldn't be making the decision in the first place.
The objection to making the algorithm incorrect in order to make the process fairer is that it's a quick hack done in the wrong layer of the system. It's like preventing SQL injection by adding escaping to JavaScript handling form submission - it's the wrong place and way to go about it.
Real world being what it is, I do however understand the worry that doing it the right way may be unrealistic.
I largely agree with what you're saying. But the challenge is that, while people are willing to tolerate some crime, they're generally not willing to tolerate more crime. Very few voters will bite the bullet and say realizing suchandsuch principle of fairness is worth 10 more murders each year, so any reform which can't convincingly explain how crime will stay down is dead in the water. (New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.)
>(New York in particular ran into this problem; they actually abolished bail in 2019, but brought it back immediately in response to preliminary suggestions the reform might have increased crime.)
The only part of your statement that's factual is that there were premature complaints that it increased crime. That has yet to be validated.
As for the rest, cash bail was not completely eliminated. Rather it was eliminated for most non-violent and some violent offenses.
The changes made by the NYS legislature made more (not all) violent crimes eligible for bail, and gave judges more discretion as to whether to set bail or not[0].
As such, in New York State most offenses are not bailable. Which is a huge improvement over the prior regimen.
Many people would languish in jail for months or years, while they lost their jobs and their homes.
Even more cruelly, prosecutors would use this to essentially force people to accept plea bargains which required them to plead guilty to crimes they may not have committed, just to get out of jail and try to salvage some semblance of their lives.
That just creates a group of people who are now homeless, jobless and have a criminal conviction -- just because they couldn't afford to pay for bail.
That's a great way to create more folks who have no means, a big red 'X' anytime they apply for a job and little respect for the law -- given how the "justice" system destroyed their lives with cash bail.
You might think "Well, they were put in jail for a reason." But this wasn't a sentence after conviction, it was criminalizing poverty. And that's just wrong.
I think cash bail is horrible. If you are so dangerous that you need to be kept away from the general public before trial, then you shouldn't have the option of bail at all.
And that should be proven via actual evidence before a judge, not any sort of ML model.
Many here seem to see this as a technical issue to be solved, with better training data, more refined models and clearer definitions of the problem/search space.
It's not. People's lives are often ruined by cash bail. Prosecutors should be required to prove, with actual evidence that each defendant is a real flight risk, or is likely to harm others before being remanded to custody without bail.
Everyone else should be required to respond appropriately to court orders WRT contact with prosecutors, appearance at hearings/trials, etc. but should not be required to post bail.
It seems to me that boosting accuracy is the only fair thing to do.
What was actually being compared in putting the models together was projection of accuracy, which as an estimate should not be confused with actual results... as the article eventually got around to pointing out.
When weighing guesswork against fairness, I agree with the decision to favor fairness, especially considering that the decision to grant bail has nothing whatsoever to do with a person's actual guilt or innocence- they have been charged, but not yet tried.
What's the point of your post? Are you really citing an ML paper as supporting the idea that the US justice system should not seek fairness? That's some weak FUD if you ask me.
