ACTUARIAL JUSTICE

Actuarial justice refers to a theoretical model cur-rent in the criminal justice system that employsconcepts and methods similar to actuarial mathe-matics. Actuaries evaluate future risks such asunemployment, illness, and death. Their projectionsare the backbone of the insurance and financialsecurity industries. In these fields, actuarial tech-niques are used to produce insurance percentagerates needed to establish premiums to coverexpected losses and expenses. In the justice system,proponents of an actuarial approach attempt toevaluate risk and dangerousness of offenders and

treatment programs. Actuarial justice also underpinscrime prevention strategies and policing.

CHARACTERISTICSOF ACTUARIAL JUSTICE

There are at least four characteristics associatedwith actuarial justice:

Deviance is normal. Crime is now perceived as aninevitable social fact. We no longer try to eliminate it,for it is perceived as a direct consequence of livingin society. Like traffic accidents, for example, crimeis understood to be something that has a significantprobability of happening. We try to prevent it andminimize its consequence, by judging the risk thatvarious situations and individuals pose. In this view,crime has lost its moral component. It has beennormalized as a by-product of modern societies.

Risk profiles rather than individuals. One of thefundamental characteristics of actuarial justice is itsreliance on the concept of risk. The actuarial lensreconstructs individual and social phenomena asrisk objects. Hence, the unit of analysis in the crim-inal justice system is not the biographical individualanymore but rather one’s risk profile. Through actu-arial techniques, individual identity is fragmentedand remade into a combination of variables associ-ated with different categories and level of risk.

Managing rather than transforming. Changingindividuals was the key project of the disciplinarymodel. The goal was to transform criminals intolaw-abiding citizens through therapy or other cor-rectional interventions aimed at altering theirpersonalities. Within actuarial justice, transformingindividuals is no longer the exclusive goal, in partbecause it is difficult and resource consuming. Theobjective shifts to managing the risks that offendersrepresent. To do so, offenders are identified, classified,and organized in terms of a risk profile. Manage-ment therefore comes to be at the heart of the sys-tem. Institutional paths are provided for differentcategories of offender according to the risk theypose. Diagnosis and treatment have more and moregiven way to managerialism.

Actuarial Justice———11

A-Bosworth.qxd 11/16/2004 10:51 AM Page 11

The future rather than the past. Finally, actuarialjustice has a prospective outlook. It is primarily inter-ested in estimating and preventing the occurrence offorthcoming behaviors rather than with sanctioningthem or understanding and addressing their pastcauses. The focus of actuarial justice is mainly onincapacitating and regulating future behaviors.

Actuarial justice is a set of tendencies in thecriminal justice system that still needs to be docu-mented in order to be defined more clearly. Even ifactuarial justice is more easily delineated by oppo-sition to the rehabilitative and retributive models,the preceding characterization should not lead oneto think that these two models have been super-seded by actuarial justice. Neither should thesemodels be conceptualized as a sequence. As it willbe shown below, they coexist within the criminaljustice system (O’Malley, 1992). One step in thequest to comprehend actuarial justice is to identifyits theoretical underpinnings as well as its intellec-tual, political, and social conditions of possibility.

EMERGENCE OF ACTUARIAL JUSTICE

The origin of actuarial justice, and actuarial prac-tices more generally, traces back to our capacity toperceive and think about phenomena at a group orsocial level. Before the late 18th to early 19th cen-turies, averse events were mainly perceived as per-sonal misfortunes. Along with the birth of statistics,the capacity to conceptualized events socially madeit possible to observe patterns that affect people ona larger scale. Therefore, new realities came intoview: birth and death rates, patterns of accidents,unemployment rates, and so on. It allowed for theemergence of a new form of power focused on thepopulation as a set of characteristics or profiles. Inthe language of Michel Foucault, it is called gov-ernment or bio-power. Actuarial practices are amanifestation of that particular form of power.

Despite these early foundations, the idea of actu-arial justice became articulated as such only at theend of the 1980s. According to Malcolm Feeley andJonathan Simon (1994), there are three main rea-sons why these ideas became popular at this time.First, this particular line of thought was already

present in other fields of the law, namely, tort law.In effect, in tort law strict liability and no-faultgained ascendancy over the notion of individualresponsibility. Causality and guilt are not an issue intort law; the preoccupation is with managing of apool of averse events. Second, the supplanting ofthe individual justice logic by the system-thinkingand rational management logic contributed to thedevelopment of actuarial justice. In effect, we nowthink of justice in terms of a complex system insearch of efficiency and not as the operation of ajudge who impartially weigh an individual moralimplication in a crime. Finally, the utilitarian ideaof deterrence weakened the resistance against actu-arial justice in the sense that it replace the tradi-tional moral and individualistic view of crime andpunishment by an economic conception of individ-ual guided by the calculation of costs and pleasures.

On the political level, liberal and conservativestances both contributed to the rise of actuarial jus-tice, through their emphasis on management. Thefirst sought to regularize procedure through dueprocess; the second encouraged the use of extendedimprisonment and thereby increased the correc-tional population prompting the use of actuarialtechniques for efficient management.

ACTUARIAL JUSTICE IN PRACTICE

Instances of actuarial justice in practice can befound in many parts of the criminal justice system.For example, these days it is common to refer tocrime as a risk to be addressed by an insurance basemodel of control. Accordingly, tools such as targethardening, statistical profiling, opportunity mini-mization, and loss prevention are put in place. Tominimize the occurrence of negative events, propo-nents of crime prevention and the police rely on riskclassification. “Bad risks” are then prevented fromentering into some form of social relation as hap-pens in the selective incapacitation of high-riskoffenders. In addition, crime prevention aims atmodifying the context where aversive events mighttake place. Hence, the target of control shiftsfrom the criminals to the potential victims and theirenvironments. Finally, another sign that crime

12———Actuarial Justice

A-Bosworth.qxd 11/16/2004 10:51 AM Page 12

prevention is increasingly influenced by actuarialjustice is that when people are unable to avoid risk,strategies are implemented to systematically pass italong. Thus, for example, supermarkets often cal-culate the price of goods to include the foreseeableloss incurred by shoplifting.

Actuarial justice also permeates corrections toform what has been called the “new penology.” Thiscorrectional model encompasses all the characteris-tics listed earlier: the normalization of deviance andthe focus on risk, management, and the future. Underthese ideas, the practices of parole have changed sub-stantially. While originally, readmitting someone toprison while he or she was on parole demonstratedthe failure of the correctional system because itshowed that the person had not been successfullytreated during the incarceration, in the actuarialjustice model it has become a sign that the systemefficiently controls risks. The criminal is neutralizedbefore he or she commits further crime. Similarly,under an actuarial model, the criminal justice systemhas become increasingly reliant on long prison termsand three-strikes laws. Not only do these measuresaim at punishing offenders for past behaviors, butthey mostly seek to contain future crime.

The development of actuarial justice literaturewas, until recently, mostly based on research donewith male offenders. It is then reasonable to ask ifthis model is relevant to the situation experiencedby juveniles and women in the criminal justice sys-tem. Research shows that it is applicable to a certainpoint. Hence, Kimberly Kempf-Leonard and ElickaPeterson (2000) demonstrated that some parts of thejuvenile justice system are permeated by the actuar-ial justice model. Such a shift seems to challengethe parens patriae orientation. It is largely the caseat the prehearing detention stage, when the type ofdetention facility is chosen and when community-based services are used. In these instances, risk assess-ment and management as well as cost-effectivenessseem to prevail over the “best interest of the child.”In the same vein, Kelly Hannah-Moffat (1999)demonstrated that the actuarial justice vocabularyand logic are increasingly present in women’s impris-onment, alongside the disciplinary and retributivemodels.

CONCLUSION

Actuarial justice is a conceptual model of the crim-inal justice system that is preoccupied with manag-ing future risks rather than transforming individualand eliminating deviance. Even if its origin can betraced to the late 18th century, the actuarial justicemodel developed in the 1980s under the impulse ofthe system thinking and the management logic aswell as the utilitarian philosophy. Both the right- andleft-wing politics participated in its development.The actuarial model is pervasive in every part ofthe criminal justice system from crime preventionto sentencing and corrections. In conclusion, whileactuarial justice and the notion of risk suggest neu-trality and objectivity, actuarial practices are markedby gender, culture, and subjectivity. Invested with anaura of science and rationality, actuarial practiceshide the political processes behind the constructionof crime, the identification of segments of the popu-lation as high-risk offenders, and the exclusionresulting from the “necessary” protection measures.Finally, actuarial justice isolates the criminal justicesystem from the social finalities that were oncemeasures of its worth.

—Dominique Robert

See also Deterrence Theory; Michel Foucault;Incapacitation Theory; Just Deserts Theory; Legitimacy;Managerialism; Rehabilitation Theory

Further Reading

Feeley, M., & Simon, J. (1992). The new penology: Notes onthe emerging strategy of corrections and its implications.Criminology, 30(4), 449–474.

Feeley, M., & Simon, J. (1994). Actuarial justice: The emerg-ing new criminal law. In D. Nelken (Ed), The futures ofcriminology (pp. 173–201). London: Sage.

Glaser, D. (1998). Who gets probation and parole: Case studyversus actuarial decision making. In P. O’Malley (Ed),Crime and the risk society (pp. 439–450). Dartmouth,UK: Ashgate.

Hannah-Moffat, K. (1999). Moral agent or actuarial subject:Risk and Canadian women’s imprisonment. TheoreticalCriminology, 3(1), 71–94.

Kempf-Leonard, K., & Peterson, E. S. L. (2000). Expandingrealms of the new penology: The advent of actuarial jus-tice for juveniles. Punishment and Society, 2(1), 66–97.

Actuarial Justice———13

A-Bosworth.qxd 11/16/2004 10:51 AM Page 13

O’Malley, P. (1992). Risk, power and crime prevention.Economy and Society, 21(3), 252–275.

Reichman, N. (1986). Managing crime risks: Toward an insur-ance based model of social control. Research in Law,Deviance and Social Control, 8, 151–172.

Simon, J. (1987). The emergence of a risk society: Insurance,law and the state. Socialist Review, 95, 61–89.

Simon, J. (1988). The ideological effect of actuarial practices.Law and Society Review, 22, 771–800.

14———Adult Basic Education

A-Bosworth.qxd 11/16/2004 10:51 AM Page 14