Actuarial Justice

To what extent has actuarial justice displaced traditional penal practice in

contemporary societies?

The displacement of traditional methods of penal practice within contemporary societies in

favour of the more risk orientated model of actuarial justice has proved a contentious issue

amongst academic and political discourse and still remains an arena of vigorous debate.

The discussion surrounding the progressive area of actuarial justice may be seen to provide

opposing arguments of equal weight and pertinence within modern structures of national

criminal justice systems throughout the globe; however the construction and application

of this theoretical model of criminal justice may differ amongst societies and
have

heterogeneous effects in combination with differential cultural, economic and ideological

conditions.

The concept and practice of actuarial justice will first be considered and the way it

subsequently departs from more traditional procedures of penal practice, primarily analysing

western society, with a particular focus upon the British model of criminal justice.

The arguments suggesting that contemporary societies are indeed transposing conventional

penal practices (with a focus upon the offence and punishment of the individual offender)

towards an acknowledgment of potential risky and dangerous populations as a whole and the

consequential strategies of management will subsequently be discussed.
Case representations

of the way in which differential executions of the same model of actuarial justice may vary

between societies and the disparate consequences they deliver will additionally be considered

to highlight the divergent viewpoints and debates encompassing actuarial justice.

Drawing upon the various outcomes actuarial justice may be argued to impose, with specific

reference to the implementation of the indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP), the

debate accentuating the harms and inequalities which are promoted within particular models

of actuarial justice and thus the argument that on the whole many traditional methods have

not been displaced in favour of this new risk penology shall be assessed.

The concept of actuarial justice is the process whereby future threats and risks posed by

offenders to society are calculated and as such play a dominant role in contributing to

prevention techniques and policing which endeavour to respond to such perceived
risk

accordingly.

Actuarial justice assumes that deviance within society is habitual and will remain as an

enduring reality, thus crime can be seen to have undergone a process of normalisation,

viewed as directly resultant of modern society. By this standard, it adopts the position of

crime prevention through risk assessment, with a focus upon larger populations deemed

dangerous to society opposed to the established approach of criminal justice which

places the individual and their specific offence as preeminent.
It is through the depart of

individualisation to generalisation which has shaped the management techniques associated

with actuarial justice. It can be argued that this model of justice is consequently unconcerned

with the reformation of offenders, instead seeks to filter particular groups through specific

pathways within the justice system dependent upon their risk profile. As such it is possible to

deduce that actuarial justice is primarily concerned with the existing and future threat posed

upon society by offenders, making the paramount concern crime prevention and constraining

lawbreaking activity contrary to providing a suitable response and the comprehension factors

contributing to individual criminality.

The debate and evidence promoting the implication that actuarial justice is indeed displacing

traditional penal methods is one which is widely and comprehensively presented within both

academic and political discourse. Giddens (1994) proffers the suggestion that modern

societies are to a greater extent preoccupied with the notion of future risk, which may be
seen

as a by-product of the increased threat posed within the post modern world. Giddens and

Beck (date) refer to this focus upon sustained safety and prevention of future threat as

the ‘risk society’, in which social allegiance to the nation state is dissolved marked by a lack

of reverence in traditional institutions and an ascendance of global forces. Reflexive

modernisation, described as ‘the possibility of a creative (self-)destruction for an entire

epoch: that of industrial society. The ‘subject’ of this creative destruction is not the

revolution, not the crisis, but the victory of Western modernisation’ (Beck, date, pp2). A

concept which undercuts the formations of, for example, class, gender and occupation within

the social hierarchy, imposing self-confrontation with the consequences of risk society which

may no longer be managed under the practices of industrial societies ‘institutionalised

standards’. The paradigm presented by risk society therefore is the split from the protection

of the nation state to one of constructing individuals as responsible for their own safety and

risk management. The term ‘advanced liberal’ is deployed by Rose (1996) to further

emphasise this social shift, away from the explicit power of the nation state to one which

governance is achieved ‘at arm’s length’, promoting greater independence and furthering the

need for increased individual responsibalisation. This sporadic governance of society is one

which is still primarily concerned with the notion of risk and the probability of its subsequent

effect, exposing the aggregate populations which are identified as presenting danger to

society. The focus shifted to an increased managerial approach to crime, aimed at reducing

the rate of potential offences and eliminating the presence of ‘criminogenic situations’

(Garland, 1996). This is argued to have marked a divergence from rehabilitative responses

targeted at individual offenders, to the generalised management to particular sections of the

population (Simon and Feeley, 1992). No longer viewing offenders in a manner akin to

traditional criminal justice responses, understanding their motives and experiences and

consequently in need of reformation and treatment but as universal group of potential harm.