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Chapter 16: Revisioning Algorithms As A Black Feminist Project, Ngozi Okidegbe
Chapter 16: Revisioning Algorithms As A Black Feminist Project, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
We live in an age of predictive algorithms.1 Jurisdictions across the country are utilizing algorithms to make or influence life-altering decisions in a host of governmental decision-making processes—criminal justice, education, and social assistance to name a few.2 One justification given for this algorithmic turn concerns redressing historical and current inequalities within governmental decision-making.3 The hope is that the predictions produced by these predictive systems can correct this problem by providing decision-makers with the information needed to make fairer, more accurate, and consistent decisions.4 For instance, jurisdictions claim that their turn to risk assessment algorithms in bail, …
To Democratize Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
To Democratize Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
Jurisdictions increasingly employ algorithms in public sector decisionmaking. Facing public outcry about the use of such technologies, jurisdictions have begun to increase democratic participation in the processes by which algorithms are procured, constructed, implemented, used, and overseen. But what problem is the current approach to democratization meant to solve? Policymakers have tended to view the problem as the absence of public deliberation: agencies and courts often use algorithms without public knowledge or input. To redress this problem, jurisdictions have turned to deliberative approaches designed to foster transparency and public debate.
This Article contends that the current approach to democratization is …
The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?, Ngozi Okidegbe
The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
Jurisdictions are increasingly embracing the use of pretrial risk assessment algorithms as a solution to the problem of mass pretrial incarceration. Conversations about the use of pretrial algorithms in legal scholarship have tended to focus on their opacity, determinativeness, reliability, validity, or their (in)ability to reduce high rates of incarceration as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities within the pretrial system. This Article breaks from this tendency, examining these algorithms from a democratization of criminal law perspective. Using this framework, it points out that currently employed algorithms are exclusionary of the viewpoints and values of the racially marginalized communities most …