ES · Catalonia · June 2024
RisCanvi: the Catalan prison risk score few outside could check
Image: Público. All rights reserved by the owner.
- Reported by
- Eticas Foundation, El Confidencial, Publico, Euronews
- Story language
- EN · ES
- Methods
- Independent audit
- Interviews and surveys
- Data analysis
RisCanvi scores people in Catalan prisons, and its results shape furlough, parole and prison-grade decisions. An outside team audited it without access to its weights, using a small public dataset and interviews. They found it affected 7,713 people in 2022, and that professionals changed the final rating in under 5% of cases. The Justice Department began an update after the audit, which was reported as still underway in March 2026.
elconfidencial.comRisCanvi: the Catalan prison risk score few outside could checkA risk-assessment protocol and software used in all Catalan prisons. It scores inmates for general and violent recidivism, breach of sentence, self-harm and violence in prison, and its outputs inform furloughs, parole and prison-grade decisions.Spain (Catalonia) · Reported by Eticas Foundation, El Confidencial, Publico and others (opens in a new tab)How they investigated
- Methodology: RisCanvi: the Catalan prison risk score few outside could check (opens in a new tab)
- Official audit (Catalan): RisCanvi: the Catalan prison risk score few outside could check (opens in a new tab)
Independent audit
Eticas called its work the first adversarial audit of an AI criminal-justice system in Europe. It had no access to RisCanvi's internal data or weights, and combined an ethnographic audit with a comparative output audit. Separately, a consultancy (Dribia Data Research) did an audit commissioned by the Catalan government, using Justice Department data and dated January 2024. The Justice Department has since published it.
Interviews and surveys
Eticas ran 18 interviews between July and October 2023, with help from the rights group Iridia, with former inmates, social educators, psychologists, lawyers, a RisCanvi validator and activists. Publico's 2026 series drew on more than 15 interviews with lawyers and other judicial actors, plus a judge and a case study of one prisoner.
Data analysis
Eticas analysed a public dataset on 3,651 people released in 2015 and tracked to 2019, of which 1,889 observations were usable, with regressions and clustering.
Read alongside
ES · 2022
VioGen: auditing a gender-violence risk score without the dataThe two Spanish cases contrast: RisCanvi is an audit alongside a partly hidden formula; VioGen is an audit after the data was refused.