The Arnold Foundation releases “re-validation study” of their predictive risk assessment tool by RTI International – a recipient of major grant funding by Arnold.
May 7 2018
The Arnold Foundation continues to bend the arm of researchers in an effort to validate their risk assessment tool – which has been under fire recently as questions of risky and biased outcomes of the tool have surfaced.
The last major revelation was that the Arnold Foundation is paying for various activist legal non-profits to sue the pants off of local jurisdictions for their bail systems. By so doing, jurisdictions are folding under pressure to use a risk assessment tool. Then, who happens to be standing there waiting to provide their free Public Safety Assessment tool is none other than the Arnold Foundation, which is calibrated to meet the social engineering standards of elitist billionaires trying to change the world.
For months, following a study by ProPublica finding that a widely used algorithm in sentencing, very similar to the Arnold Foundation PSA, discriminated against African-Americans, questions about other algorithms and the issue of bias have quickly become a major issue among researchers and those considering implementation of similar tools.
Legislatures in various states have finally awoken and began regulating these risk algorithms to ensure that they are transparent and that they do not increase the bias that is by all accounts inherent in the criminal justice system. With the Arnold Foundation PSA being heralded as the “gold standard,” the question on everyone’s mind has been—does the Arnold Foundation PSA suffer from the same problems as the tool evaluated by ProPublica?
Enter billionaire elitists who know how to buy their way to success. Last week, the Pretrial Justice Institute’s University of Pretrial (a non accredited University that has no professors or students), noted that a new study by the RTI International‘s “Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience” had been conducted on the Arnold Foundation’s PSA. It should come as no surprise that the study found that the Arnold Foundation PSA is race-neutral. In other words, no need to worry about bias from the Arnold Foundation. They are special.
When we looked into this a little further, we discovered the Arnold Foundation is instead up to its old tricks again – opening up the Arnold checkbook to further their cause. Despite repeated national calls for transparency, the Arnold Foundation instead did what it always does—it bought its way out of the problem.
This new study that concluded the tool was unbiased was done by another fake institute. This time, the Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience. What is that Center? Google it. There is no Center webpage. There is no discussion of who funds the center. There is of course a director of the Center, who works for a company called RTI, International. There are no professors at the Center. No description of the work of the Center, what the Center does to avoid conflicts, and whether the Center acts as hired guns for donors.
The study RTI published was: (1) not-published; (2) not peer reviewed; (3) not objective; and, (4) paid for by wealthy donors of the Center.
Well, turns out the Arnold Foundation, according to records we received and public disclosures, has paid RTI, Inc. $761,381.00 over the last couple of years in grant funding.
So, it should come as no surprise that RTI came out with a study finding that the Arnold Foundation PSA is unbiased. It had to do that—RTI knows how its bread gets buttered. This is vintage Arnold Foundation, so it should come as no surprise to anyone. Whether it is Dr. Van Nostrand and Luminosity or other vendors to whom the Arnold Foundation has paid millions, no study ever concludes that the Arnold Foundation PSA is nothing other than a panacea.
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation Grant Agreements – 2011 to 2017
Research Triangle Institute (RTI) – Grant funding from the Arnold Foundation
Yet, there is one other big problem if we take RTI’s analysis on its face—it rejected the very methodology used by ProPublica as not the right way to measure whether a risk assessment discriminates based on race. Leave it to the paid operatives to reject the ProPublica approach, which clearly demonstrated the problem of the false-positives and false-negatives, to instead reject that approach in favor of the “moderator regression approach.”
In rejecting the ProPublica’s methodology, the authors note that the disagreement in approaches is based on the “lack of formalization,” which sounds about as scientifically sound as the “short straw” method. The paper, of course, acknowledges that it is unlikely the Arnold Foundation PSA would be shown to be race neutral under the ProPublica methodology, stating that it would be “impossible” for a risk assessment to meet those standards and that “accuracy and fairness” are conflicting goals.
At the end of the day, the Center for Safety, Justice and Resilience are none other than paid biased validators for these billionaire social engineers.
The study RTI published was: (1) not-published; (2) not peer reviewed; (3) not objective; and, (4) paid for by wealthy donors of the Center.
We continue to be perplexed as to why users of this tool maintain that, despite the Arnold Foundation being the architect, builder, defender, validator and inspector of their secret “black-box” risk assessment tool, the tool can legitimately be objective and unbiased.
Social engineering is expensive business and John Arnold is digging deep to keep his precious algorithm from cracking under pressure, however, even the weight of his wallet cannot stop the unmasking of Arnold’s attempt to destroy accountability in pretrial release and weaken the criminal justice system.
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