Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an

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.

Bernard E. Harcourt's Critical Reads

Bernard Harcourt - The Counterrevolution - Tom Durkin and John J. Mearsheimer

PDF] Almost politically acceptable criminal justice risk assessment

Punishment & Profit: Data and Information Systems - The Greene Space

Illusion of Order: The False Promise of book by Bernard E. Harcourt

Race, Prediction, and Pretrial Detention - McIntyre - 2013 - Journal of Empirical Legal Studies - Wiley Online Library

Settling institutional uncertainty: Policing Chicago and New York, 1877–1923 - Koehler - 2023 - Criminology - Wiley Online Library

Neoliberal penality: A brief genealogy - Bernard E. Harcourt, 2010

Themes in data mining, big data, and crime analytics - Oatley - 2022 - WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - Wiley Online Library

PDF) Risk and punishment: The recent history and uncertain future of actuarial, algorithmic, and “evidence-based” penal techniques (Sociology Compass 2019)

Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, Harcourt

7 Racial Bias and Disparities in Proactive Policing, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities