As many of you know, parole is often granted to prisoners who have demonstrated good behavior.
Well, now, Pennsylvania is considering giving criminals harsher sentences for crimes they may commit. According to the Philadelphia Tribune, Pennsylvania may consider implementing a computer program designed to predict future criminality, and its results will be used to determine a judge's sentence.
Plus, in an unbelievable display of irony, the program is call a Risk Assessment Tool, or RAT.
Y'all.
Veteran trial lawyer Troy H. Wilson explained the program, noting it “is a statistical model designed to basically ‘predict’ whether or not a person from a group of similarly situated persons will commit a crime in the future. If this model forecasts that the person has a high likelihood of committing a crime sometime in the future, that person will be placed in the ‘high risk’ category and therefore will receive a much harsher sentence for his/her present crime.”
Keir Grey of the Defender Association described it as an algorithm "to identify patterns of behavior based on certain characteristics … [that] would label people ‘low,’ ‘medium’ and ‘high risk." Grey added the program is far from perfect, and currently has "an error rate of 30 to 40 percent."
Grey also said the program takes race into account when deciding how much of a risk a criminal is.
According to the Defender Association, the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission has said in the program “individuals who are black will be predicted to recidivate 11 percent more than whites with the same history and charges."
This suggests RAT would dole out harsher sentences to black people than it would white people.
Pennsylvania's prison population is already mostly black. Hannah Sassaman, a Soros Justice Fellow, said Pennsylvania is “a state where almost nine black persons are incarcerated for every one white person.”
Wilson isn't here for it, and has referred to RAT as "a racist version of the 2002 Minority Report science fiction film starring Tom Cruise.” In that film, beings known as "pre-cogs" tell officers to arrest certain people based on crimes they have yet to commit.
The Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission has yet to implement the tool, and will hold a public hearing about its adoption on June 6. Pennsylvania residents who have signed up to testify ahead of time by calling 814-863-5729 will be allowed to share their opinions on RAT.
Based on these public testimonies and its own calculus, the commission will decide whether to scrap RAT or to recommend to the state legislature it be put into use through law in mid-June.
