(a) Prison operators are not currently incentivized to be experts in data science (b) Why? And will that fix things? There are plenty of examples of industries taking advantage of vulnerabilities, without those vulnerabilities being fixed. (c) How will it be retrained? Will there be a “We should retrain the model” lobby group, and will it act faster than the prison lobby?
Perhaps we should have a futures market in recidivism. When a prison gets a new prisoner, they buy the associated future at the market rate, and once the prisoner has been out of prison sufficiently long without committing further crimes, the prison can redeem the future. And, of course, there would be laws against prisons shorting their own prisoners.
If participants stop returning to jail at a rate of 10% or greater, Goldman will earn $2.1 million. If the recidivism rate rises above 10% over four years, Goldman stands to lose $2.4 million.
(a) Prison operators are not currently incentivized to be experts in data science (b) Why? And will that fix things? There are plenty of examples of industries taking advantage of vulnerabilities, without those vulnerabilities being fixed. (c) How will it be retrained? Will there be a “We should retrain the model” lobby group, and will it act faster than the prison lobby?
Perhaps we should have a futures market in recidivism. When a prison gets a new prisoner, they buy the associated future at the market rate, and once the prisoner has been out of prison sufficiently long without committing further crimes, the prison can redeem the future. And, of course, there would be laws against prisons shorting their own prisoners.
re: futures market in recidivism—http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/reducing-recidivism-through-incentives/