by Angela Guess
Jason Shueh reports in Government Technology, “The U.S. spends $270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that’s spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation’s incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. ‘We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly — in every sense of the word — and we need to start to change it,’ Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop.”
Shueh goes on, “She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences. As a longtime counselor, advisor and analyst for the Justice Department and at the city and state levels, Overman said she has studied and witnessed an alarming number of issues in terms of bias and unwarranted punishments. For instance, she said that statistically, while drug use is about equal between African-Americans and Caucasians, African-Americans are more likely to be arrested and convicted. They also receive longer prison sentences compared to Caucasian inmates convicted of the same crimes. Other problems, Overmann said, are due to inflated punishments that far exceed the severity of crimes. She recalled her years spent as an assistant public defender for Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Defender’s Office as an example.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ .v1ctor Casale.