From routine security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing, actuarial methods are being employed 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 theyre 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 profiled persons already have obtaining work, education, and a better quality of lifethus 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 alternative 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 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

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