How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm

GlobeArrow RightCaretClose [Skip to content](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm#wp--skip-link--target)

[← Read the story](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing/)

Across the nation, judges, probation and parole officers are increasingly using algorithms to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of becoming a recidivist – a term used to describe criminals who re-offend. There are dozens of these risk assessment algorithms in use. Many states have built their own assessments, and several academics have written tools. There are also two leading nationwide tools offered by commercial vendors.

We set out to assess one of the commercial tools made by Northpointe, Inc. to discover the underlying accuracy of their recidivism algorithm and to test whether the algorithm was biased against certain groups.

Our analysis of Northpointe’s tool, called COMPAS (which stands for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), found that black defendants were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher risk of recidivism, while white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be incorrectly flagged as low risk.

We looked at more than 10,000 criminal defendants in Broward County, Florida, and compared their predicted recidivism rates with the rate that actually occurred over a two-year period. When most defendants are booked in jail, they respond to a COMPAS questionnaire. Their answers are fed into the COMPAS software to generate several scores including predictions of “Risk of Recidivism” and “Risk of Violent Recidivism.”

We compared the recidivism risk categories predicted by the COMPAS tool to the actual recidivism rates of defendants in the two years after they were scored, and found that the score correctly predicted an offender’s recidivism 61 percent of the time, but was only correct in its predictions of violent recidivism 20 percent of the time.

In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm correctly predicted recidivism for black and white defendants at roughly the same rate (59 percent for white defendants, and 63 percent for black defendants) but made mistakes in very different ways. It misclassifies the white and black defendants differently when examined over a two-year follow-up period.

Our analysis found that:

- Black defendants were often predicted to be at a higher risk of recidivism than they actually were. 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 counterparts (45 percent vs. 23 percent).
- White defendants were often predicted to be less risky than they were. Our analysis found that white defendants who re-offended within the next two years were mistakenly labeled low risk almost twice as often as black re-offenders (48 percent vs. 28 p

... (truncated, 28 KB total)