Federal Bureau of Prisons

Bureau of Prisons Program Statement 5405.01 (7 May 2026) states that PATTERN "is the automated recidivism risk assessment instrument" in the Bureau's First Step Act Risk and Needs Assessment System, that it "calculates a recidivism risk score based upon predefined criteria", and that only designated programme completions can reduce the score. The Act requires assessment of all sentenced inmates, and PATTERN is reassessed at regularly scheduled programme reviews. The National Institute of Justice's fourth review and revalidation report (1 August 2024) found PATTERN accurate across the five racial and ethnic groups analysed, but said the instruments still predict differently across those groups, including over-prediction of risk for Black, Hispanic and Asian men and women relative to White people on the general recidivism tools. The Justice Department's 2025 AI use case inventory (entry DOJ-0160, as consolidated by the Office of Management and Budget) lists PATTERN at the Bureau of Prisons as deployed, developed in-house and classed as classical machine learning, with an operational date of August 2021; the Department classes it as not high-impact on the ground that its output is not a principal basis for decisions with legal or significant effect. The same inventory lists a separate Office of Justice Programs entry under the PATTERN name. Neither the Program Statement nor the inventory states when the Bureau first began using PATTERN, so the start date is left open.