Domain: Legal/Criminal Justice

Description: The COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) system by Northpointe is used by U.S. courts to assess defendant recidivism probability. ProPublica's 2016 investigation revealed systematic racial bias in these predictions.

Ethical Challenges:

• Racial Bias: Black defendants were almost twice as likely as white defendants to be incorrectly flagged as high risk of reoffending

• Error Rate Disparities: 77% more likely that Black individuals would be predicted to commit future violent crimes

• Algorithmic Transparency: Proprietary algorithm used in sentencing decisions without transparency

• Historical Bias Perpetuation: Reinforcement of existing disparities in the criminal justice system

Public Datasets:

• Primary: COMPAS Recidivism Dataset - ProPublica GitHub Repository

• URL: https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis

• Direct Data: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/dataset/compas-recidivism-risk-score-data-and-analysis

• Content: 10,000+ individuals from Broward County, Florida (2013-2014) including criminal history, demographics, COMPAS scores, and two-year recidivism outcomes

• File: compas-scores-two-years.csv with complete analysis code

• R Package: Available via mlr3fairness package - https://mlr3fairness.mlr-org.com/reference/compas.html