Challenging the Actuarial Method in Penal Systems

Actuarial methods now permeate the penal sphere in the United States. With the single exception of racial profiling against African-Americans and Hispanics, most people view the turn to actuarial methods as efficient, rational, and wealth-maximizing.
Bernard Harcourt challenges this emerging consensus. Instead of embracing the actuarial turn in the penal sphere, Harcourt argues, we should rather celebrate the virtues of random sampling : randomization in policing, it is the only way to achieve a carceral sphere that fairly reflects or in any way resembles the distribution of persons who are offending. In criminal law and enforcement, then, the presumption should be against prediction.
In this first article, Harcourt traces a genealogy of actuarial methods in the United States, In a second article, Harcourt demonstrates with mathematical equations and graphs the counterproductive effects of profiling and actuarial methods.