Giving Compass' Take:

• Wendy Sawyer explains how risk assessments can lead judges' to hand down harsh sentences to youth, particularly if judges do not understand how the assessment was calculated. 

• Are risk assessments worth improving? How can they be transformed into a more helpful tool? 

• Learn how civic engagement in the judicial system can make an impact. 

Imagine that you’re a judge sentencing a 19-year-old woman who was roped into stealing a car with her friends one night. How does her age influence your decision? Do you grant her more leniency, understanding that her brain is not yet fully developed, and that peers have greater influence at her age? Or, given the strong link between youth and criminal behavior, do you err on the side of caution and sentence her to a longer sentence or closer supervision?

Now imagine that you’re given a risk assessment score for the young woman, and she is labelled “high risk.” You don’t know much about the scoring system except that it’s “evidence-based.” Does this new information change your decision?

For many judges, this dilemma is very real. Algorithmic risk assessments have been widely adopted by jurisdictions hoping to reduce discrimination in criminal justice decision-making, from pretrial release decisions to sentencing and parole. Many critics (including the Prison Policy Initiative) have voiced concerns about the use of these tools, which can actually worsen racial disparities and justify more incarceration. But in a new paper, law professors Megan T. Stevenson and Christopher Slobogin consider a different problem: how algorithms weigh some factors — in this case, youth — differently than judges do. They then discuss the ethical and legal implications of using risk scores produced by those algorithms to make decisions, especially when judges don’t fully understand them.

In theory, judges can still consider whether a defendant’s youth makes them less culpable. But, Stevenson and Slobogin argue, even this separate consideration may be influenced by the risk score, which confers a stigmatizing label upon the defendant. For example, the judge may see a score characterizing a young defendant simply as “high risk” or “high risk of violence,” with no explanation of the factors that led to that conclusion.

This “high risk” label is both imprecise and fraught, implying inherent dangerousness. It can easily affect the judge’s perception of the defendant’s character and, in turn, impact the judge’s decision. Yet in all likelihood, the defendant’s age could be the main reason for the “high risk” label. Through this process, “judges might unknowingly and unintentionally use youth as a blame-aggravator,” where they would otherwise treat youth as a mitigating factor. “That result is illogical and unacceptable,” the authors rightly conclude.

Read the full article about risk assessments by Wendy Sawyer at Prison Policy Initiative.