Fairness in Criminal Justice Risk Assessments: The State of the Art

Understand

Objectives: Discussions of fairness in criminal justice risk assessments typically lack conceptual precision.

• Rhetoric too often substitutes for careful analysis.
• In this paper, we seek to clarify the tradeoffs between different kinds of fairness and between fairness and accuracy.
• Methods: We draw on the existing literatures in criminology, computer science and statistics to provide an integrated examination of fairness and accuracy in criminal justice risk assessments.