This paper addresses the development of post-disciplinary ‘actuarial’ or risk-based technologies of power. Arguing against models which focus on icreased efficiency as an evolutionary criterion for emerging technologies of power, it suggests that such technologies' place and form are largely dtermined by the nature and fortunes of political programs with which they are aligned. Thus the rise of neo-conservatism and related programs have extensively modified and curtailed programs based on risk models, and expanded those based on punishment and discipline. The paper examines the nature of situational crime prevention in the light of these ideas, and moves on to consider certain broader theoretical implications.

Risk, power and crime prevention

The impact of state prison populations on crime is typically estimated by applying the lambda, the individual crime rate, of prisoners or arrestees. We outline the problems with this approach, attempt to reanalyze the widely divergent lambdas derived in past research, and make adjustments necessary to use lambdas for estimating the incapacitation impact. The result is an uncertain estimate of 16 to 25 index crimes averted per year per each additional prisoner. We argue that regression analysis can provide a better estimate of the impact of prison population growth. Applying the Granger test to pooled state data over 19 years, we found that prison population growth leads to lower crime rates but that crime rate changes have little or no short-term impact on prison population growth. Next we regressed crime rates on prison population and conclude that, on average, at least 17 index crimes are averted per additional prisoner. The impact is limited mainly to property crime.

Prison population growth and crime reduction

American Criminal Justice Policy examines many of the most prominent criminal justice policies on the American landscape and finds that they fall well short of achieving the accountability and effectiveness that policymakers have advocated and that the public expects. The policies include mass incarceration, sex offender laws, supermax prisons, faith-based prisoner reentry programs, transfer of juveniles to adult court, domestic violence mandatory arrest laws, drug courts, gun laws, community policing, private prisons, and others. Optimistically, Daniel P. Mears argues that this situation can be changed through systematic incorporation of evaluation research into policy development, monitoring, and assessment. To this end, the book provides a clear and accessible discussion of five types of evaluation - needs, theory, implementation or process, outcome and impact, and cost-efficiency. It identifies how these can be used both to hold the criminal justice system accountable and to increase the effectiveness of crime control and crime prevention efforts.

American Criminal Justice Policy: An Evaluation Approach to Increasing Accountability and Effectiveness

Questions and answers about incapacitation abound in all discussions about criminal justice policy. They are among the most pressing of all research issues, yet estimates about the incapacitation effect on crime vary considerably, and most are based on very old and incomplete estimates of the longitudinal pattern of criminal careers. This paper provides an overview of the incapacitation issue, highlights information on recent estimates of criminal careers that are useful to the incapacitation model, and outlines an ambitious research agenda for continued and expanded work on incapacitation and crime that centers on developing better estimates of the characteristics of criminal careers and their relevance to policy choices.

https://www.public.asu.edu/~gasweete/crj524/readings/02-09%202007-Piquero-Blumstein%20(does%20incapacitation%20reduce%20crime).pdf

Does incapacitation reduce crime

This paper seeks to follow some of the twists and turns of recent penal discourse, especially those official rhetorics which support the marketization of the system as a principal means of addressing its problems I contend that there is a deeply vexed, but generally unarticulated, problem that haunts most discussions of prisons, prison disorders, and other aspects of penal politics, whether these spring from 'official' or 'radical' perspectives This is what has long been known to sociologists and political theorists as the problem of legitimacy It is a problem whose practical, theoretical, and normative dimensions need to be much more carefully and patiently examined than is currently usual in penal debates I want to suggest that in pausing to consider the problem of legitimacy directly, rather than obliquely and implicitly as is more often done, we may be able to organize and attain a critical point of purchase upon a number of otherwise confusing and apparently discrete recent developments Indeed, just as some commentators propose that legitimacy can rightly be seen as the central problem of political theory (see Beetham 1991: 41, revising Weber (1991) and Habermas (1976)), so I hope to show that it can provide an organizing idea in penal politics, in terms of which both the coherence and justifiability of particular practices and the adequacy of critical and reforming stances upon them can be considered In particular I want to try to assess the claim embedded in the rhetorics favouring privatization (or contracting out, or proprietary prisons, as the various locutions have it) to have answered many of the key legitimation problems of modern penal systems I will argue that in fact such concerns are more often evaded or suppressed than answered, and that the arguments over the justification of any practice of imprisonment (private or otherwise) need to be more strenuously pursued than contemporary rhetorics allow

David Greenberg

Papers

The Cost - Benefit Analysis of Imprisonment