Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) is a case management and decision support tool developed and owned by Northpointe (now Equivant) used by U.S. courts to assess the likelihood of a defendant becoming a recidivist. COMPAS has been used by the U.S. states of New York, Wisconsin, California, Florida's Broward County, and other jurisdictions. Risk assessment 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." Pretrial release risk scale Pretrial risk is a measure of the potential for an individual to fail to appear and/or to commit new felonies while on release. According to the research that informed the creation of the scale, "current charges, pending charges, prior arrest history, previous pretrial failure, residential stability, employment status, community ties, and substance abuse" are the most significant indicators affecting pretrial risk scores. General recidivism scale The General recidivism scale is designed to predict new offenses upon release, and after the COMPAS assessment is given. The scale uses an individual's criminal history and associates, drug involvement, and indications of juvenile delinquency. Violent recidivism scale The violent recidivism score is meant to predict violent offenses following release. The scale uses data or indicators that include a person's "history of violence, history of non-compliance, vocational/educational problems, the person’s age-at-intake and the person’s age-at-first-arrest." The violent recidivism risk scale is calculated as follows: where is the violent recidivism risk score, is a weight multiplier, is current age, is the age at first arrest, is the history of violence, is vocational education scale, and is history of noncompliance. The weight, , is "determined by the strength of the item’s relationship to person offense recidivism that we observed in our study data." Critiques and legal rulings Interventions of AI and algorithms in the court are usually motivated by cognitive biases such as hungry judge effect. In July 2016, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that COMPAS risk scores can be considered by judges during sentencing, but there must be warnings given to the scores to represent the tool's "limitations and cautions." A general critique of the use of proprietary software such as COMPAS is that since the algorithms it uses are trade secrets, they cannot be examined