Actuarial Justice

Characteristics of Actuarial Justice

There are at least four characteristics associated with actuarial justice:

Deviance is normal. Crime is now perceived as an inevitable social fact. We no longer try to eliminate it, for it is perceived as a direct consequence of living in society. Like traffic accidents, for example, crime is understood to be something that has a significant probability of happening. We try to prevent it and minimize its consequence, by judging the risk that various situations and individuals pose. In this view, crime has lost its moral component. It has been normalized as a by-product of modern societies.

Risk profiles rather than individuals. One of the fundamental characteristics of actuarial justice is its reliance on the concept of risk. The actuarial lens reconstructs individual and social phenomena as risk objects. Hence, the unit of analysis in the criminal justice system is not the biographical individual anymore but rather one's risk profile. Through actuarial techniques, individual identity is fragmented and remade into a combination of variables associated with different categories and level of risk.

Managing rather than transforming. Changing individuals was the key project of the disciplinary model. The goal was to transform criminals into law-abiding citizens through therapy or other correctional interventions aimed at altering their personalities. Within actuarial justice, transforming individuals is no longer the exclusive goal, in part because it is difficult and resource consuming. The objective shifts to managing the risks that offenders represent. To do so, offenders are identified, classified, and organized in terms of a risk profile. Management therefore comes to be at the heart of the system. Institutional paths are provided for different categories of offender according to the risk they pose. Diagnosis and treatment have more and more given way to managerialism.

The future rather than the past. Finally, actuarial justice has a prospective outlook. It is primarily interested in estimating and preventing the occurrence of forthcoming behaviors rather than with sanctioning them or understanding and addressing their past causes. The focus of actuarial justice is mainly on incapacitating and regulating future behaviors.

Actuarial justice is a set of tendencies in the criminal justice system that still needs to be documented in order to be defined more clearly. Even if actuarial justice is more easily delineated by opposition to the rehabilitative and retributive models, the preceding characterization should not lead one to think that these two models have been superseded by actuarial justice. Neither should these models be conceptualized as a sequence. As it will be shown below, they coexist within the criminal justice system (O'Malley, 1992). One step in the quest to comprehend actuarial justice is to identify its theoretical underpinnings as well as its intellectual, political, and social conditions of possibility.

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