Every day, judges across the United States face an important decision: Should they jail a defendant awaiting trial—whose innocence or guilt has not yet been determined—or should they release the person on bail back into the community, where they might commit a crime? Increasingly, courts are turning to computer-based tools to help make those decisions, lured by the promise of complex algorithms that use an array of factors to spit out risk scores. But a new study suggests that at least one widely used algorithm produces risk assessments that are no better than those reached by online volunteers given just a few key pieces of information about a defendant.

中文翻译：

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算法是好法官吗？

每天，美国各地的法官都面临着一个重要的决定：他们是否应该监禁等待审判的被告——其清白或有罪尚未确定——或者他们是否应该将保释的人释放回社区，在那里他们可能会犯罪? 越来越多的法院正在转向基于计算机的工具来帮助做出这些决定，受到复杂算法的诱惑，这些算法使用一系列因素来输出风险评分。但是一项新的研究表明，至少有一种广泛使用的算法产生的风险评估并不比在线志愿者获得的风险评估好，因为仅提供了有关被告的一些关键信息。