BiblioVault - Books about Criminal behavior, Prediction of

Against Prediction

Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age

Bernard E. Harcourt

University of Chicago Press, 2006

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.

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Crime and Justice, Volume 9

Prediction and Classification in Criminal Justice Decision Making

Edited by Don M. Gottfredson and Michael Tonry

University of Chicago Press Journals, 1988

Prediction and Classification: Criminal Justice Decision Making, a collection of commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars, is the ninth volume in the Crime and Justice series. Like its predecessors, Prediction and Classification is essential reading for scholars and researchers seeking a unified source of knowledge about crime, its causes, and its cure.

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The Criminally Insane

A Community Follow-up of Mentally Ill Offenders

Terence Thornberry and Joseph E. Jacoby

University of Chicago Press, 1979

The Criminally Insane is the largest scale in-depth follow-up study on mentally ill criminals yet to appear. This book challenges the assumption that inmates of maximum-security mental hospitals are extraordinarily violent and questions the necessity for maintaining maximum-security institutions which currently house some 15,000 persons in the United States.

In 1971, 586 patients were released from a Pennsylvania maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. They were not considered officially "cured," but a federal court held that their commitments had been unconstitutional. Through exhaustive examination of hospital and police records and interviews with hospital administrators and the subjects themselves, Thornberry and Jacoby assess the processes by which the patients had been retained in confinement, the impact of their release upon their communities, and their ability to adjust to the freedom of community life.

The authors demonstrate that the patients did not display a significant level of violent behavior during confinement, nor did they pose a major threat to society after release. In fact, their social and psychological adjustment to community life is shown to have been comparable to that of non-criminal mental patients. Yet despite these findings the subjects had been retained in maximum-security confinement for an average of fourteen years because they were predicted to be violent and "dangerous" to society. The authors explain this inaccuracy by a process called "political prediction," in which clinicians avoid any potential risks to the community, the reputation of their hospitals, and their careers by consistently overpredicting dangerous behavior.

The Criminally Insane will stimulate response from professionals in a wide variety of fields, including law, criminology, psychiatry, and sociology, and from anyone concerned with society's responsibility to the mentally ill offender.

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