The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders,the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they're released,we see nationally that 50 percent of those people are being released.The reason for this is the way we make decisions.Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they're making them subjectively.They're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses.They're being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making, which is that we are often wrong.What we need in this space are strong data and analytics.What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool,something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them.I looked all over the country, and I found that between five and 10 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool,and when I looked at these tools, I quickly realized why.They were unbelievably expensive to administer, they were time-consuming,they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they'd been created.So basically, they couldn't be scaled or transferred to other places.So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool,so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective, scientific measure of risk.
