One of the primary goals of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system is keeping kids out of lock-up. But in this pursuit, the county took a surprising step: It used a predictive analytics tool as part of a program to identify which specific kids might end up behind bars.
The process wasn’t incredibly complicated: It involved administering and assessing a questionnaire about a child’s family, arrests, drug use, academic success, and abuse history. But the goal was abundantly clear: separating out the good kids from the potentially bad.
Though the program—which was officially dubbed the Los Angeles County Delinquency Prevention Pilot, or DPP—ended in 2014, a new report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency looks into how the program functioned. It not only suggests that L.A. County’s strategy was on the right path, but also that more government agencies should consider testing similar programs all over the country.
[For more of this story, written by Matt Stroud, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/minority-report]
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