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LDS-TOOL:
Legal Decision Support Tool

      The Pittsburgh Youth Study found that 57 percent of juvenile delinquents continue to offend up to age 25. Juveniles who start offending before age 14 are likely to continue offending into early adulthood. As Erica Goode pointed out in her studies, this may be a reflection of the aggressive criminal justice and zero-tolerance policies for juvenile delinquents.

     In our study, we wanted to offer an alternative to the classical aggressive criminal sentences. Using a combination of public and private data, a Machine Learning algorithm suggests a personalised sentence for a juvenile criminal. The prediction takes into account the needs of each juvenile and tries to find an alternative solution to prison.

       The software was developed in Python, using the open sources libraries TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras and Pandas. The data was obtained from a small database provided by the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University. The model was defined by six layers. It was Trained with stochastic gradient descent for optimization, provided by the SGD class, and  with categorical cross-entropy loss for multi-class classification as its loss function, provided by the CrossEntropyLoss class, both classes from PyTorch.

        The testing process was bounded by the limited data availabe. Therefore, more data would be necessary to conduct a proper testing process.

IMPACT

       The idea of this project was born on a Rethinking Justice Hackathon, where interdisciplinary teams were given 24 hours to come up with a solution to a justice problem. Thanks to winning the Hackathon, we were given a cash prize, a networking lunch and most importantly, coaching provided by the challenge organisations to develop our idea. Here each team member had to make the choice of continuing with the project. Sadly, I was the only one on board, but luckily I had the support of the Institute of Data Sciences of Maastricht University who coached me through the process.

        Thanks to them I could develop the software, and even though much more data would be needed for the software to be reliable, it had great feedback and it was an amazing learning experience.

https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/news/great-creative-energy-rethinking-justice-hackathon

- https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/blog/2018/03/hackathons-research-education-rethinking-justice-hackathon

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