NCJ Number
188024
Journal
Theoretical Criminology Volume: 5 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2001 Pages: 61-84
Date Published
February 2001
Length
24 pages
Annotation
This article challenges the theories of "risk society" and "actuarial justice," inasmuch as risk calculation and its attendant capital accumulation project are at least as old as the mid-17th century, when it was the product of advancing bourgeois interests.
Abstract
The discourses of "risk society" and "governmentality" have played a progressively more important role in criminological theorizing. Studies of corrections settings, the public and private police, and examinations of actuarial practices within the criminal justice system have increasingly relied upon risk-society theory as an orienting strategy. This article offers reservations about the utility of risk theory due to its lack of consideration of the history of probability and the practices of early modern contingency planning. Rather than view risk society as a late modern development that is tied to 19th-century probability science, is forward-looking as opposed to retributive, and is an apolitical actuarial rationality, this article links risk to the techniques, aims, and interests of 17th-century English capitalists. By analyzing correspondence between the English projectors and thinkers contained in the papers of Samuel Hartlib and his circle, and by examining the works of Sir William Petty on both criminality and risk, this article argues that rationalizations of retribution and actuarialism are overlapping and tied to the emergence of capitalism. 46 references