recidivate

The facts are that folks with jobs almost never recidivate.

Being in the group predicted to recidivate more will make you more likely to be predicted to recidivate.

It makes sense that anyone facing difficulties in finding jobs, for things they supposedly have paid for, are indeed more likely to recidivate.

Classifying a defendant as high risk is a prediction that they will recidivate, and we can judge the algorithm by whether it turned out to be true.

Except for the privatized prisons who don't actually want to rehabilitate their inmates so that they're more likely to recidivate and end up back in prison.

If of 15 defendants, the algorithm predicts ten will recidivate, of whom six actually do, that gives 60% accuracy with ~45% of those who didn't misclassified as high risk.

" That's a weird assertion to make; if every high-risk classification never recidivated but every low-risk one did, by that definition the algorithm still wouldn't be "wrong", but it would obviously be broken.

"Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime.

Even regardless of significance, the "analysis" is just correlation dressed up as some kind of shocking revelation.> Our analysis found that black defendants who did not recidivate over a two-year period were nearly twice as likely to be misclassified as higher risk compared to their white counterpartsWhich is exactly what you would expect to happen if the algorithm predicts that black defendants are more likely to recidivate.