Actuarial risk assessment: Reflections on an emerging social-scientific tool

The purpose of this paper is to highlight recent developments in the practice of empirical social research, paying particular attention to the relationship between social-science practice, social-control strategies, and the role of interpretive frame-works. The essay describes how the social-scientific emphasis on quantification within a value-neutral framework corresponds to an overall reluctance within the social sciences to evaluate the phenomena of social life within an historical and moral context. Within this framework, it is argued that actuarial risk assessment, as a social science practice, meets the managerial needs of advanced industrial societies by legitimating interpretive frameworks which focus primarily on prediction as the main criterion in understanding social processes and by producing concrete technologies which facilitate the management effort. This essay calls upon quantitative social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which our practices and products may inadvertently project value positions that ought not be promoted without critical evaluation. This essay won first place in the 1998 American Society of Criminology Graduate Student Paper Competition sponsored by the Division on Critical Criminology. I wish to thank Drs. Patrick Akard, Henry J. Steadman, and John Monahan for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.