“Exploring Computational Approaches to Sentencing Reform”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper available via SSRN authored by Aparna Komarla.  Here is its abstract:

Resentencing is a complex social and legal challenge to navigate for proponents of carceral reform.  Despite recent laws such as the Racial Justice Act (2020) and Prosecutor Initiated Resentencing (2018) that were successfully passed in California among other states in the U.S, their implementation is lagging behind, leading to a new contour in the injustice in justice problem.  While incarcerated folks have access to indigent defense, postconviction relief is unequally distributed due to resource constraints and political factors.  In the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), hundreds of criminal cases eligible for resentencing under sentence correction laws remain unidentified among overwhelming caseloads.  This paper demonstrates how interpretable and transparent AI systems help researchers and attorneys fill multifaceted justice gaps.  We show that our analytics tools democratize legal research and help correct decadal injustices in prosecutorial practices by augmenting (not replacing) legal expertise.  We will demonstrate how we apply data science to the field of law, empowering everyone from a non-expert advocating for carceral reform to an attorney at a legal clinic searching for a needle-in-a-haystack sentence to overturn.