Court is now in session, Judge AI presiding
Algorithms help jurists run risk assessments on defendants, set bail.
CLEVELAND — The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist — courtesy of artificial intelligence.
In late August, Hercules Shepherd Jr. walked up to the stand in a Cleveland courtroom, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Two nights earlier, an officer had arrested him at a traffic stop with a small bag of cocaine, and he was about to be arraigned.
Not long ago, the presiding judge would have decided Shepherd’s near-term future based on a reading of court files and his own intuition. But in Cleveland and a growing number of other local and state courts, judges are now guided by computer algorithms before ruling whether criminal defendants can return to everyday life, or have to stay locked up awaiting trial.
Cash bail, which is designed to ensure that people charged of crimes turn up for trial, has been part of the U.S. court system for centuries. But it has drawn fire in recent years for keeping poorer defendants in jail while letting the wealthier go free. Studies have also shown it widens racial disparities in pretrial incarceration.
A bipartisan bail reform movement has found an alternative to cash bail: AI algorithms that can scour through large sets of courthouse data to search for associations and predict which people are most likely to flee or commit another crime.
Experts say the use of these risk assessments might be the biggest shift in courtroom decision-making since American judges began accepting social science and other expert evidence more than a century ago. Christopher Griffin, a research director at Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, calls the new digital tools “the next step in that revolution.”
Critics, however, say they worry that such algorithms could end up supplanting judges’ own judgment, and might even perpetuate biases in ostensibly neutral form.
percent in 2017, the highest rate since the country began compiling data under revised standards in 2000. Overall, the jobless rate is 3.7 percent, but almost half of South Koreans 65 and older live in poverty.
During the decades of fast growth after the 195053 Korean war, South Korea’s economy revolved around big, family-controlled industrial groups called chaebol. Industrial groups like Daewoo and Samsung enjoyed strong government and public support, backed by a belief that the wealth created by those big exporters would trickle down to the rest of society, creating jobs as demand rippled throughout the economy.
That formula worked, for the most part, in an era when automakers, shipbuilders, steel mills and other big industrial groups prospered, creating millions of stable jobs with solid wages and benefits.
Now, many of those older industries are in decline. Tens of thousands of jobs have been wiped out in painful restructuring, with still more likely to be eliminated.
“At night, the lights are off in this area,” said Kang Gi-seong, a union leader at Sungdong Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co., the last shipyard remaining after five others in Tongyeong shut down since the 2008 financial crisis.
Sungdong once employed up to 10,000 people in the scenic coastal city of 130,000. Now it hires fewer than 1,300. Most are on paid leave.
“There is no more work left,” Kang said by phone.
For now, there seems to be no end in sight for the chipmakers’ record-breaking run.
Both Samsung and SK Hynix reported record-high sales and profits in 2017 and are forecasting similar performances in 2018.
Young South Koreans like 24-year-old college student Min Shinee views the semiconductor sector as a winning bet.
“As a person majoring in semiconductors, I feel lucky to have a future for my career,” said Min, who plans to get a master’s degree before seeking a job at a chipmaker. “I feel bad to say this, but it must feel terrible to be majoring in architecture or shipbuilding.”