Box of delight

Efforts to relieve the human and financial toll of prison overcrowding often rely on predictive tools that estimate how likely an inmate is to reoffend based on such risk factors as criminal history, education or employment problems and substance abuse.
Critics of this approach speculate that the tools unfairly target racial minorities and that "risk assessment" is little more than a race assessment that will expose minorities to harsher penalties.
But a new UC Berkeley study comparing recidivism risk scores among blacks and whites challenges this assumption.