Against Prediction
Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age
From random security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing, actuarial methods are being used more than ever to determine whom law enforcement officials target and punish. And with the exception of racial profiling on our highways and streets, most people favor these methods because they believe they’re a more cost-effective way to fight crime.
In Against Prediction, Bernard E. Harcourt challenges this growing reliance on actuarial methods. These prediction tools, he demonstrates, may in fact increase the overall amount of crime in society, depending on the relative responsiveness of the profiled populations to heightened security. They may also aggravate the difficulties that minorities already have obtaining work, education, and a better quality of life—thus perpetuating the pattern of criminal behavior. Ultimately, Harcourt shows how the perceived success of actuarial methods has begun to distort our very conception of just punishment and to obscure alternate visions of social order. In place of the actuarial, he proposes instead a turn to randomization in punishment and policing. The presumption, Harcourt concludes, should be against prediction.
The University of Chicago Press: Gordon J. Laing Award
Won
"Bernard Harcourt has never had an uninteresting thought, or made an argument that does not provoke or engage or delight or enlighten--or do all of those things simultaneously."
"This is a creative, provocative, well-researched argument against current practice in sentencing, parole discrimination, and investigative profiling. Harcourt makes the case that a century of social science-inspired thinking about punishment and profiling should be cast out in favor of randomness. It is a position that will be dismissed by many as politically impractical, if not absurd. But that is often the immediate fate of revolutionary ideas."
"In Against Prediction, Bernard Harcourt stresses that while the benefits of actuarial predictions have been widely touted, certain costs have been largely overlooked. Indeed, actuarial prediction can under some circumstances actually increase crime, and generate morally problematic social wounds on the profiled classes that might outweigh the benefits even if crime is reduced. Once again, Harcourt has challenged the conventional wisdom in criminal justice policy, and offered an indictment to the practice of actuarial prediction that policymakers, scholars and concerned citizens will have to fully consider."
Chapter 1. Actuarial Methods in the Criminal Law
Part I. The Rise of the Actuarial Paradigm
Chapter 2. Ernest W. Burgess and Parole Prediction
Chapter 3. The Proliferation of Actuarial Methods in Punishing and Policing
Part II. The Critique of Actuarial Methods
Chapter 4. The Mathematics of Actuarial Prediction: The Illusion of Efficiency
Chapter 5. The Ratchet Effect: An Overlooked Social Cost
Chapter 6. The Pull of Prediction: Distorting Our Conceptions of Just Punishment
Part III. Toward a More General Theory of Punishing and Policing
Chapter 7. A Case Study on Racial Profiling
Chapter 8. Shades of Gray
Chapter 9. The Virtues of Randomization
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Retracing the Parole-Prediction Debate and Literature
Appendix B: Mathematical Proofs Regarding the Economic Model of Racial Profiling
Notes
References
Index
Law and Legal Studies: General Legal Studies | Law and Economics
Political Science: Political Behavior and Public Opinion | Public Policy
Sociology: Individual, State and Society
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