MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer
Innovation is straining a parole system in Phila. already short of resources, says parole officers' union official Louise Carpino.
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Program helps identify likely violent parolees
A typical high-risk case, he said, might be a 22-year-old male convicted of robbery, with seven priors, two involving guns. His first contact with the adult courts happened at 15, and he would return to a high-crime part of the city.
Race mattered only a little - and so Philadelphia decided to leave it out of the equation. Berk said he thinks the model should work fine without it and the decision to ignore race minimizes concerns about racial profiling.
When the Probation and Parole Department began restructuring in March, there was no money to hire more parole officers, researcher Lindsay Ahlman said. So it had to find some way to better use the resources it had. The average parole officer had been handling 150 cases, but as an early test, some were asked to supervise many more - 350 to 400 people flagged by the computer as low risk.
For comparison, the department had other officers take on the usual 150 cases, also from this low-risk group.
What this revealed was that less supervision did not increase crime among the low-risk parolees and probationers, she said.
Not all of the officers were sold. "They'd say, 'This guy had a knife at school - he's not low risk,' " she said.
She said she tries to explain that the computer can't make exact predictions about individuals, but it's good at predicting the number of crimes likely in a group of 350 to 400 people.
The difference is already becoming apparent, she said. Officers who used to handle 150 cases of all types were getting an arrest alert or two every day, Ahlman said. Now they've got upwards of 350 low-risk cases and are getting alerted to arrests only once a week or so.
Conversely, some officers are assigned much smaller groups of high-risk cases, typically fewer than 50.
Probation and Parole Department researcher Ellen Kurtz said they can't tell how well the program is working yet. A full evaluation will take at least six months, she said. She declined to say how the system rated any of the people on parole or probation who've been put through it.
But these innovations are straining a system that's already suffering from lack of resources, said Louise Carpino, president of the union that includes probation and parole officers.
Paying more attention to these "high risk" cases comes at the expense of all the others, she said. Officers can no longer help low-risk people get off drugs, go to AA meetings, or get a GED.
"I've seen this change people's lives," she said. "But you've got to have a human connection."
Criminologist Todd Clear of City University of New York said helping rehabilitate criminals was the original mission of parole and probation.
There's some evidence that it works, he said. But starting in the 1970s, the system has shifted to controlling people who are considered threatening. There's little evidence this does any good, he said.
Clear says he thinks the new machine-learning technology could tip the debate in either direction. But ultimately, he said, it will work only if it can help figure out how to transform "high risk" people into lower-risk ones.
Another hazard is that while the system isn't expected to be right all the time, it influences how people are treated.
"The main ethical concern," said Richard Bonnie, a law professor at the University of Virginia, "is the possible unfairness to the 'selected' offenders."
If the high-risk people do get more supervision, it means they face a greater risk of being caught in a technical violation that will send them back to prison. Should such power be relegated to a computer?
