The COMPAS recidivism tool scores defendants from a 137-question survey

COMPAS - Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, made by Northpointe (later Equivant) - generates its recidivism-risk scores from a 137-question survey covering factors such as criminal history, employment, and education. The questionnaire does not ask the defendant’s race. ProPublica’s 2016 analysis nonetheless found that the resulting scores produced racially skewed error rates, which is how a model with no explicit race input can still yield outcomes that differ sharply by race: race correlates with many of the questions that are asked.