How I Fought to Win My Freedom After Biased Algorithms Denied Me Parole

MUST RSVP HERE TO ATTEND: http://bit.ly/algoinjustice

Conversation and Audience Q&A with Glenn Rodríguez
and screening of documentary, "Algorithms Rule Us All"
Overview & Event Agenda
Is algorithmic decision-making currently used in our criminal justic system serving society or harming people due to opaque and biased software? What are advocacy groups and cities doing to impose accountability and transparency into software that decides the fate and freedoms of human beings?
Join us for an important discussion on the implementation and impact of automated risk assessment technologies in the criminal justic system being used to determine the fate and future of inmates in a number of ways -- in this case, specifically, relating to their eligibility for parole.

COMPAS, an acronym for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, is a case management and decision support tool developed and owned by Northpointe used by U.S. courts to assess the likelihood of a defendant becoming a recidivist. COMPAS has been used by the U.S. states of New York, Wisconsin, California, Florida's Broward County, and other jurisdictions.

Our special guest speaker, joining us to share his personal story and answer your questions, is Glenn Rodríguez who, after serving 26 years in prison in New York, was denied parole by COMPAS automated risk assessment software, despite having served his entire sentence with a near-perfect record of rehabilitation.

"Mr. Rodríguez was denied parole last year despite having a nearly perfect record of rehabilitation. The reason? A high score from a computer system called Compas. The company that makes Compas considers the weighting of inputs to be proprietary information. That forced Mr. Rodríguez to rely on his own ingenuity to figure out what had gone wrong.

This year, Mr. Rodríguez returned to the parole board with the same faulty Compas score. He had identified an error in one of the inputs for his Compas assessment. But without knowing the input weights, he was unable to explain the effect of this error, or persuade anyone to correct it. Instead of challenging the result, he was left to try to argue for parole despite the result.

Mr. Rodríguez was lucky. In the end, he made parole and left Eastern Correctional in mid-May. But had he been able to examine and contest the logic of the Compas system to prove that its score gave a distorted picture of his life, he might have gone home much earlier." -- Rebecca Wexler, When a Computer Program Keeps You In Jail (NY Times)

How has this process changed his life and the process of automated risk assessment technologies? What's being done today to ensure this doesn't happen again and that there is a system of transparency and checks and balances? After watching a screening of the documentary film, Algorithms Rule Us All, Glenn Rodríguez will join us for a fireside chat about his experience winning his freedom and fighting the invisible software that denied him his freedom, followed by an audience Q&A.

Lite bites, beverages and wine included.

Agenda
6:00pm - 6:15pm: Sign in, mingle, lite bites, beverages and wine served
6:15pm - 7:00pm: Screening of film, Algorithms Rule Us All
7:00pm - 7:45pm: Fireside Chat with Glenn and Charlie Oliver (Founder/CEO of Tech 2025)
7:45pm - 8:15pm: Audience Q&A
8:15pm - 8:30pm: More mingling and then bye!