Against Prediction : Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age - Bernard E. Harcourt

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Against Prediction

Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age

By: Bernard E. Harcourt

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Paperback | 15 December 2006 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
264 Pages

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
23.13 x 16.48 x 2.1

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From routine 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.

Industry Reviews

"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."

--Malcolm Gladwell (8/28/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"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."

--John J. Donohue III, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law, Yale Law School (8/28/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"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."

--Jack Katz, University of California, Los Angeles (8/28/2006 12:00:00 AM)
"Against Prediction convincingly argues that the use of economic actuarial methods--predicting individual criminal likelihood based on the quantifiable characteristics of groups to which one belongs--is fundamentally flawed. . . . That we fail to see the harms of prediction, and that we proudly aspire to some quixotic goal of corrective 'efficiency' is to our collective shame as much as Against Prediction is to Harcourt's credit."--Peter Moskos "American Journal of Sociology"
"Against Prediction is inspiring in its breadth of erudition, from mathematics to philosophy, sociology, and history, and persuasive in its impassioned and provocative argument. . . . If we want to break the hold that racialist thinking has on criminal law, there is no better place to begin than the apparently neutral actuarialism of the new penology."--Ariela Gross "Law & Social Inquiry"

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Social Services & Welfare Crime & Criminology Social Welfare & Social Services Emergency Services Police & Security Services Law Jurisprudence & General Issues Study & Revision Guides for Law Laws of Specific Jurisdictions Criminal Law & Procedure

Prologue
Actuarial Methods in the Criminal Law nbsp; Part I. The Rise of the Actuarial Paradigm
Ernest W. Burgess and Parole Prediction
The Proliferation of Actuarial Methods in Punishing and Policing nbsp; Part II. The Critique of Actuarial Methods
The Mathematics of Actuarial Prediction: The Illusion of Efficiency
The Ratchet Effect: An Overlooked Social Cost
The Pull of Prediction: Distorting Our Conceptions of Just Punishment nbsp; Part III. Toward a More General Theory of Punishing and Policing
A Case Study on Racial Profiling
Shades of Gray
The Virtues of Randomization
Acknowledgments
Retracing the Parole-Prediction Debate and Literature
Mathematical Proofs Regarding the Economic Model of Racial Profiling
Notes
References
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Against Prediction

Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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