Michigan prisons to test automated security scoring on December 1

Images

×

An incarcerated man participates in employment counseling. foxnews.com

Stock image of a jail. foxnews.com

An incarcerated man stands in a resource center. foxnews.com

Artificial intelligence regulation debated as Big Tech doomerism is questioned foxnews.com

‹ ›

Michigan's Department of Corrections begins testing a new classification tool on December 1 at selected men's prisons, software that will calculate the security scores deciding which of roughly 32,000 incarcerated people live in low-security dorms and which sit in tightly controlled cells. The department says the system could improve predictions of future prison violence by around 30 percent. The software comes from Recidiviz, a nonprofit that supports criminal justice agencies in 19 states and analyzed ten years of Michigan classification data to redesign the scoring process.

The tool has been reported as artificial intelligence deciding who is dangerous, and Recidiviz has pushed back, saying the software follows predetermined rules, that AI plays no role in calculating scores, and that corrections staff make the final decisions. The distinction matters less than either side suggests. The current process is already a scoring exercise: employees fill out a manual form, the form produces a security level between I and V, and the level determines housing, supervision, and access to vocational training and higher education. The new system does the same arithmetic on the same records, only continuously rather than at scheduled intervals, so behavior changes register sooner. What the software examines is information already in prison files; the factors are selected by Michigan corrections officials.

That is where the measurement problem sits. The system learns from ten years of classifications and disciplinary records, and disciplinary records are authored by guards whose careers reward certain write-ups and punish others. The state writes the labels, the state consumes the predictions, and the inmate absorbs the error — a closed loop with no external auditor in it. A person moved to a higher security level loses access to the education programs that Michigan says remain available at every level but that lower levels make easier to reach. The vendor, being a nonprofit working with 19 state agencies, bears none of the cost of a wrong classification. Officials say the pilot's performance will determine whether the tool spreads to additional facilities, and the department has not said what would count as failure.

The department also has not said who, if anyone, will check the tool's work against anything beyond its own outputs.