The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Harcourt, Bernard E.

doi:10.2307/1600548

Cited by 18 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…There is no consensus on the cause of this trend, though Harcourt (2004) suggests that it has occurred mostly because of a dramatic evolution in the investigatory search and seizure jurisprudence that has confirmed and reinforced the rights given to police to use traffic violations as a valid pretext for stop-and-frisk procedures when they suspect other more severe violations, such as drug trafficking. Such arguments are best studied in dynamic models of law enforcement.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can racially unbiased police perpetuate long-run discrimination?

Bunzel

Marcoul

2008

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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We develop a stylized dynamic model of highway policing in which a non-racist police officer exhibits a cognitive bias: relative overconfidence. The officer is given incentives to arrest criminals but faces a per stop cost which increases when the racial mix of her stops differs from that of the population. Every period, she observes the racial composition of jail inmates (generated from arrests made by her peers) and forms estimates about the crime rates of each race. In some settings, her overconfidence leads her to overestimate the crime rate of one race relative to another causing the long-run racial composition of the jail population to deviate from the "fair" one (one where the racial mix in jails is identical to that in the criminal population). We compare this to a situation where officers have detailed stop data on each race, similar to data being currently collected in many US states. DisciplinesOther Economics | Race and Ethnicity | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Abstract. We develop a stylized dynamic model of highway policing in which a non-racist police officer exhibits a cognitive bias: relative overconfidence. The officer is given incentives to arrest criminals but faces a per stop cost which increases when the racial mix of her stops differs from that of the population. Every period, she observes the racial composition of jail inmates (generated from arrests made by her peers) and forms estimates about the crime rates of each race. In some settings, her overconfidence leads her to overestimate the crime rate of one race relative to another causing the long-run racial composition of the jail population to deviate from the "fair" one (one where the racial mix in jails is identical to that in the criminal population). We compare this to a situation where officers have detailed stop data on each race, similar to data being currently collected in many US states.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can racially unbiased police perpetuate long-run discrimination?

Bunzel

Marcoul

2008

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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“…Security scores and predictive algorithms extend beyond transfers. In the criminal-legal system more broadly, algorithmic risk and security scores are used in policing (Wang, 2018); pretrial and sentencing assessments (Harcourt, 2003(Harcourt, , 2015Sonia, 2014;Summers and Willis, 2010); prison intakes (Austin, 2003); and post-release community supervision. 3.…”

Section: Worldingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prison fixes and flows: Carceral mobilities and their critical logistics

Brooks

Best

2021

Environ Plan D

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This paper asks how the logics of globalized supply chains—particularly through fixes, risk, speed and stoppages, and motility—are articulated in carceral space. We employ critical logistics in conversation with carceral geographies and critical mobilities to examine prison transfers, the routine movement of incarcerated people between carceral sites, as a logistical system designed to fix carceral crises; which is to say, to make prisons viable. This work emerges from preliminary research on prison transfers, conducted from 2018 to 2019, including interviews with advocates and formerly incarcerated people and analysis of data and administrative documents obtained from the New York Department of Corrections, among others. First, we locate the emergence of contemporary practices of logistical transfer management (“transfer logistics”) in the prison boom of the 1980s–1990s. We then examine the present-day transfer system to consider how risk calculation and carceral fixes inform movement throughout prison constellations as well as how transfers disrupt the fragile worlding that happens in prisons. Finally, we turn to how these logics are being reshaped and reiterated in the era of neoliberal urban planning through “justice hubs.”

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“…In turn, risk assessment led to new techniques of risk management, including the proliferation of technologies of surveillance, profiling, targeted use of the police powers of search and seizure, and, as a last resort, the preventive detention of those deemed dangerous (Cole 2009, Feeley & Simon 1994. Wider criminological attention has been focused on the growing use of risk technologies at each stage of the criminal process, from profiling by police and risk assessment with respect to pretrial detention and at sentencing to risk-based decisions with respect to punishment and parole (Harcourt 2003, Krasmann 2007, Lippke 2014, Monahan 2006, O'Malley 2010, Skeem & Monahan 2011, Zedner 2012.…”

Section: From Criminology To Pre-crime?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Restraint of the Preventive State

Zedner

Ashworth

2019

Annu. Rev. Criminol.

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Security has always been a core function of the modern state. Yet the rise of the Preventive State captures an intensification of that role as threats to security and demands for public protection increase, prompting states to prioritize new practices of preventive criminalization, policing, and punishment. The rise of the Preventive State may promise greater security, but the costs of ever more coercive preventive laws and measures are burdensome and pose a threat to civil liberties. This review considers the drivers, multiple manifestations, and direct and collateral consequences of preventive endeavors that assess and manage risk, target hazards, and restrain or detain those deemed dangerous. It also explores their ramifications for criminology and criminal justice. It concludes by considering the potential of criminology to join cross-disciplinary efforts to articulate a new jurisprudence of security and to elaborate principles of preventive justice with which to restrain the excesses of the Preventive State. 429

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The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Can racially unbiased police perpetuate long-run discrimination?

Can racially unbiased police perpetuate long-run discrimination?

Prison fixes and flows: Carceral mobilities and their critical logistics

The Rise and Restraint of the Preventive State

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