Against Prediction : Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology and the Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt’s scholarship focuses on issues of crime and punishment from an empirical and social theoretic perspective. He is the author of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005) and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). He is also the editor of a collection of essays on Guns, Crime and Punishment in America (New York University Press 2003), and of the journal The Carceral Notebooks. Professor Harcourt earned his bachelor's degree in political theory at Princeton University, his law degree at Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in political science in the Government Department at Harvard University.

Lundi 12 février 2007
16h00 à 17h30
CICC, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, local C-4141

Résumé de la conférence : The use of actuarial methods has become common in the field of crime and punishment. From parole prediction to sentencing sex offenders to searching suspects in airports, law enforcement agencies rely increasingly on actuarial instruments. With the exception of racial profiling, most embrace the turn to prediction. In his talk, Professor Bernard Harcourt will challenge this growing reliance on actuarial approaches and, in place of the actuarial, will propose instead a turn to randomization in punishment and policing.