It's not quite "Minority Report," but Pennsylvania is looking to the future in its criminal sentencing policy. As early as next year, Pennsylvania judges could receive risk assessments -- statistically derived tools based on age, sex and prior arrests -- to help them decide how likely a criminal is to commit more crimes and sentence that person accordingly. Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a public health reporter for FiveThirtyEight, talked with HuffPost Live on Monday about how this form of sentencing would work for the state.
"They take a lot of information about people who commit crimes and see what characteristics are most associated with reoffending," Barry-Jester told host Alyona Minkovski. "So then they come up with something that's sort of like a questionnaire, and try to determine the risk of a person who's like that person in terms of if they will reoffend."
Watch Barry-Jester describe risk assessments for prisoners and the danger of unfair biases against certain groups in the video above.
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