ABOUT
The Author
Dr. Kameel Khan
Founder, Project ReMake, Visiting Scholar and DCI Fellow, Stanford University( 2017-2019), Judge( Ret.), U. K.
Dr. Kameel Khan is a lawyer, former judge and former law professor. Before practicing he taught law at University College, University of London, Reading University and the University of the West Indies. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. While teaching, he defended people on death row from the Caribbean before the Privy Council( U. K), the highest court of appeal for that region. He became a tax partner at a global law firm and later a judge in the Tax Court in the U. K.
Kameel heads the Ex-Offenders Program at the Prince’ s Trust Mosaic, which was created by HRH King Charles III to provide mentoring and training to young offenders. In addition, it seeks to provide employment for ex-offenders through partnerships created with corporations. The program now operates in 12 prisons and has over 200 mentors.
The parole board will use two sources of information to decide if you should be released. One is your lawyer. The other is a detailed dossier of information, including reports and records, to assess your behaviour and suitability for release. This dossier is compiled by HMPPS( prison and probation) and includes reports from various staff, among them prison officers and governors. Sometimes it’ s accurate, and sometimes it’ s not. Sometimes it’ s filled with hearsay and gossip inserted by third parties.
The experience in the U. S. is that algorithms reach the right decision over
80 % of the time
Now, do you think the parole board would make a better decision if they had an algorithm to help them out?
That algorithm would be designed to predict the future— specifically, your future behavior, and your chances of committing a parole violation if released.
Since 2001, the U. K. probation services have used a largely opaque algorithmic system, the
Offender Assessment System( OASYS), to help predict the likelihood of re-offending and guide decisions of sentencing, parole and rehabilitation. Normally these tools increase the accuracy of decisions. But this system has been criticized as having discrepancies in accuracy based on gender, age and ethnicity. Traditionally, parole boards make the right decision 50 %– 62 % of the time. The experience in the U. S. is that algorithms reach the right decision over 80 % of the time. 1 While not all algorithms are fair, equal or accurate( it depends on the quality of the data), good algorithms can have a big impact on incarcerated people, on society, and on government budgets and efficiency. They can enable more people to be released without impacting public safety. They can also enable governments to better allocate staff and budget. Instead of monitoring people who don’ t need to be monitored, they can do more to help low-risk people reintegrate into society and re-think their approach to high-risk people.
The use of AI by parole boards gives us a window into how AI can help improve decision-making more widely, and nudge us in arriving at better outcomes than we could achieve on our own.
If we can build an algorithm that provides valuable input to a lifechanging decision such as parole, we should be able to leverage
36 Bold ideas to power progress