COMPAS

Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) is a case-management and decision-support tool developed and owned by Northpointe (now Equivant) and used by U.S. courts to assess the risk that a defendant becoming a recidivist. The COMPAS software uses an algorithm to assess potential recidivism risk. Northpointe created risk scales for general and violent recidivism, and for pretrial misconduct. According to the COMPAS Practitioner's Guide, the scales were designed using behavioral and psychological constructs "of very high relevance to recidivism and criminal careers."

It was the subject of a much-discussed 2016 exposé in the journal ProPublica: Machine Bias — ProPublica