History, Race, and Prediction: Comments on Harcourt's Against Prediction

Abstract

This article reviews Bernard Harcourt's Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007). It places the rise of actuarialism in criminal law in the United States in the context of trends in other areas of law, as well as in penology. It further suggests that this move towards actuarial thinking cannot in fact be separated from race; that prediction has always involved racial profiling, and that it is no accident that it does so.