Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole

A parole board can have dissent and differing personal experience in its ranks. There can be disagreement, but that discussion might lead to a more right or more wrong outcome.

When you have the number spit out from some case management, there's no arguing with it. We just turned the programmers that wrote that bit of code into unassailable gods of the process, with whom we can only communicate with through Jira tickets. It isn't more right or more wrong, but it is consistent with the variables provided. That mindless consistency applied to human situations like this quickly becomes horrific.

"Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children."

They do not do this “inherently.” They don’t do it at all if they don’t have or create a feedback mechanism.

I've always wondered this about the many algorithms that keep getting used. They're being kept out of democratic decision making. It's always a committee somewhere in the executive that decides on the algorithm, not parliament, or any kind of elected board. They are implemented as a cost control.

1) what are my rights, I.e. Against what constraints was the algorithm implemented?

2) "we have decided": who is "we", it's actually good that a particular entity is responsible for the output of the algorithm, computers can't be responsible for things.

3) is there appeal or human review?

If a bad algorithm is part of some process that affects me I'm going to ask what my rights are, who's responsible and where I can appeal, not the specifics of the algorithm.