This is an introduction to the techniques of predicting criminal behaviour, and the ethical and practical issues surrounding them. It discusses the use of prediction in bail, sentencing, and parole decisions, as well as in the allocation of treatments to offenders and presents a typology of predictive approaches. This typology serves as the framework for a discussion of the various predictive factors, including sex, race and ethnicity, age, personality and intelligence, socio-economic status, criminal history, institutional adjustment, drug and alcohol use, etc. Issues of variable measurement and sampling are reviewed, as are some of the statistical methods used to predict criminality, including the Burgess Method, predictive attributive analysis, multiple regression, multidiscriminant analysis, and log-linear techniques. The book concludes with an evaluation of the potential value of statistical predictions.

From random security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing, actuarial methods are being used more than ever to determine whom law enforcement officials target and punish. And with the exception of racial profiling on our highways and streets, most people favor these methods because they believe they’re a more cost-effective way to fight crime. In Against Prediction, Bernard E. Harcourt challenges this growing reliance on actuarial methods. These prediction tools, he demonstrates, may in fact increase the overall amount of crime in society, depending on the relative responsiveness of the profiled populations to heightened security. They may also aggravate the difficulties that minorities already have obtaining work, education, and a better quality of life—thus perpetuating the pattern of criminal behavior. Ultimately, Harcourt shows how the perceived success of actuarial methods has begun to distort our very conception of just punishment and to obscure alternate visions of social order. In place of the actuarial, he proposes instead a turn to randomization in punishment and policing. The presumption, Harcourt concludes, should be against prediction.

Prediction in Criminology is the first book to bring together a wide variety of articles on prediction research in criminology. It stresses not only substantive findings but also the methodology of prediction research, and demonstrates how similar issues arise in many applications: problems of research design, the choice of predictor and criterion variables, methods of selecting and combining variables into a prediction instrument, measures of predictive efficiency, and external validity or generalizability. The collection includes research from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain and will be of interest to an international audience of policy makers, practitioners, academics, and researchers.