A recent audit of a Spanish algorithm used by the criminal justice system found “substantial deficiencies” in the reliability of its decisions on how likely prisoners are to reoffend. Eticas, an algorithmic auditing company, did what they say is the first adversarial audit of RisCanvi, an algorithm that calculates the risk of an inmate committing a reoffence based on a series of weighted characteristics. The company conducted interviews with inmates, lawyers and psychologists and compared data from 3,600 released prisoners in 2015, the only public data set available according to the team. Etic…