Mechanical Jurisprudence and Domain Distortion: How Predictive Algorithms Warp the Law

Pruss, Dasha

doi:10.1086/715512

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…But a key detail often neglected in discourse about risk assessment instruments and other public sector algorithmic systems is that their recommendations are advisory. Algorithmic systems are socially situated, interacting and entangling by necessity with people, institutional practices, and societal norms [4,21,34,41]. Individuals like judges and police officers make on-the-ground discretionary decisions -what Michael Lipsky refers to as 'street-level bureaucracy' [29] -that ultimately impact the lives of individual people, not the technical details of the algorithmic instruments on their own, and human judgment can interact with algorithmic decisionmaking systems in unexpected ways.…”

Section: Background and Related Work 21 Risk Assessment Instruments A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghosting the Machine: Judicial Resistance to a Recidivism Risk Assessment Instrument

Pruss

2023

2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recidivism risk assessment instruments are presented as an 'evidencebased' strategy for criminal justice reform -a way of increasing consistency in sentencing, replacing cash bail, and reducing mass incarceration. In practice, however, AI-centric reforms can simply add another layer to the sluggish, labyrinthine machinery of bureaucratic systems and are met with internal resistance. Through a community-informed interview-based study of 23 criminal judges and other criminal legal bureaucrats in Pennsylvania, I find that judges overwhelmingly ignore a recently-implemented sentence risk assessment instrument, which they disparage as "useless," "worthless," "boring," "a waste of time," "a non-thing," and simply "not helpful." I argue that this algorithm aversion cannot be accounted for by individuals' distrust of the tools or automation anxieties, per the explanations given by existing scholarship. Rather, the instrument's non-use is the result of an interplay between three organizational factors: county-level norms about presentence investigation reports; alterations made to the instrument by the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission in response to years of public and internal resistance; and problems with how information is disseminated to judges. These findings shed new light on the important role of organizational influences on professional resistance to algorithms, which helps explain why algorithm-centric reforms can fail to have their desired effect. This study also contributes to an empirically-informed argument against the use of risk assessment instruments: they are resource-intensive and have not demonstrated positive on-the-ground impacts.

show abstract

Section: Background and Related Work 21 Risk Assessment Instruments A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghosting the Machine: Judicial Resistance to a Recidivism Risk Assessment Instrument

Pruss

2023

2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Character Comes from Practice: Longitudinal Practice-Based Ethics Training in Data Science

Bezuidenhout,

Ratti

2024

The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Science and values: a two-way direction

Ratti,

Russo

2024

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the science and values literature, scholars have shown how science is influenced and shaped by values, often in opposition to the ‘value free’ ideal of science. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the science and values literature by showing that the relation between science and values flows not only from values into scientific practice, but also from (allegedly neutral) science to values themselves. The extant literature in the ‘science and values’ field focuses by and large on reconstructing, post hoc, how values have influenced science; our reconstruction of the case studies, instead, aims to show that scientific concepts and methods too, because of specific identifiable characteristics, can promote some values rather than (or at the expense of) others. We explain this bidirectional relation in analogy to debates on the normativity of technical artifacts and on feminist approaches in science, and we illustrate our claims with cases from the health sciences and machine learning. While our arguments in this paper also draw on post hoc reconstructions, we intend to show where, in the science in the making, we should engage not only with the question whether a practice is value-laden, but also how specific conceptual and methodological choices can influence values down the road. All in all, these considerations expand the ways in which philosophers can contribute to more value-aware scientific practices.

show abstract

Mechanical Jurisprudence and Domain Distortion: How Predictive Algorithms Warp the Law

Cited by 4 publications

References 24 publications

Ghosting the Machine: Judicial Resistance to a Recidivism Risk Assessment Instrument

Ghosting the Machine: Judicial Resistance to a Recidivism Risk Assessment Instrument

Character Comes from Practice: Longitudinal Practice-Based Ethics Training in Data Science

Science and values: a two-way direction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About