From the Media Mobilizing Project (https://mediamobilizing.org/):
This past June, under a mandate from the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission tried to push through a biased risk assessment tool – or algorithm – meant to shape sentencing decisions in the Commonwealth.
Thousands of you – from formerly incarcerated people to survivors of harm, from lawyers to community leaders – wrote the legislators on the Commission to oppose the tool. You cited the ugly bias in the tool, the data that trained it, and how it was meant to be used by judges – urging them to oppose its implementation. And because of your voices and organizing, the Commission pushed back voting on the tool and took it back to the drawing board.
But now the Commission is preparing to consider the revised sentencing tool, and its members need to hear from you. You can do it in minutes with this webtool created by our allies at the ACLU of Pennsylvania: Go to https://action.aclu.org/send-message/pa-unfair-sentencing-tools to write them now and say we need individualized sentencing to help end mass incarceration, not “future crime” predictions.
Based on our organizing this spring and our pressure on the Commission, the tool no longer tries to predict who will be arrested in three years once released from prison – a measure that we know is deeply biased, based on the ugly over-policing of Black, Brown and poor communities in the Commonwealth – instead trying to predict convictions within three years.
But even with changes to the proposal that took into account your public comments from the last round of hearings, the new proposal still will reflect significant racial disparities in sentencing and overall incarceration:
- It would spit out low, medium, and high risk scores without guiding judges on how to interpret these scores
- The Commission promised an independent report proving the tools were accurate and unbiased, but has not to date produced that report
- Risk assessment tools around the country have sometimes led to increases in incarceration, with little evidence they reduce racial bias in the criminal legal system.
People facing sentencing deserve individualized attention, and access to resources to help them reintegrate with the community and make amends for the harm they caused; not the intervention of an algorithm trained on a biased practice of policing, prosecution and criminal justice. Click here to write the Commission now to oppose this new tool, and to say we need individualized sentencing to help end mass incarceration, not “future crime” predictions.
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