The will-to-incapacitate: An experiment in actuarial justice in the period between 1970 and 1987 in the United States.

Abstract

This thesis interrogates incapacitation as it developed in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States to conduct a genealogy of the conditions of emergence of actuarial justice (Foucault, 1981; Feeley and Simon, 1992; 1994) as it is enacted within this particular knowledge-power formation. Incapacitation is a penal rationale that concentrates on anticipating future crimes, and preventing offenders from committing crimes, effectively prioritizing public safety above all other considerations. My mapping of incapacitation demonstrates that it is recursively performed along two mutually conditioning poles that are illustrative of Foucault’s account of biopolitics and security (1978, 2003, 2007). These poles are: technocratic penal managerialism, which regulates the actions of diverse agents and authorities as they participate in a program of reducing recidivism within a mobile population of offenders; and, danger management of this distributed population of offenders, driven by a desire to anticipate and selectively incapacitate the most dangerous offenders. This analysis supports the mapping of actuarial justice provided by Feeley and Simon; however, my typology uses Galloway’s (2004) concept of protocol, to extend and refine their diagram about actuarial power. Given the high levels of scientific uncertainty about the efficacy of selective incapacitation as a penal policy, and the poor predictive powers of actuarial instruments in accurately classifying high-rate offenders in the early 1980s, my analysis demonstrates how protocollary power established the rules for modulating the participation of autonomous and diverse agents that are enlisted within the distributed networks of actuarial justice to propel its movement forward, this being the birth of evidence-based penal policy and practice. This protocol projects an ontological view of recidivism derived from criminal career research that filters and experiments with probabilistic actuarial codes or profiles of risk. These biopolitical codes regulate future research into advancing knowledge, predicting and controlling levels of dangerousness, and auditing of governmental performance in reducing recidivism, all of which are contingent upon the anticipatory longitudinal tracking of an aleatory population of offenders within the penal environment. Protocol is a biopolitical form of management that is central in the logistical control of this penal network and its nodes of operation and decision-making, constantly mining data for new possibilities. At the same time, I demonstrate that this will-to knowledge uses its technocratic expertise to distort, exaggerate, or conceal difference in its struggle for authority given high levels of uncertainty about recidivism and how to control it.