The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The turn of the twentieth century marked a new era of individualization in the field of criminal law. Drawing on the new science of positivist criminology, legal scholars called for diagnosis of the causes of delinquence and for imposition of individualized courses of remedial treatment specifically adapted to these individual diagnoses. [M]odern science recognizes that penal or remedial treatment cannot possibly be indiscriminate and machine-like, but must be adapted to the and to the man as affected by those causes, leading criminal law scholars declared. Thus the great truth of the present and the future, for criminal science, is the individualization of penal treatment, -for that man, and for the cause of that man's crime.' The turn to individualized punishment gave rise to the rehabilitative project of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century -to discretionary juvenile courts, indeterminate sentencing, probation and parole, rehabilitative treatment, and the overarching concept of corrections. At the close of the century, the contrast could hardly have been greater. The rehabilitative project had been largely displaced by a model of criminal law enforcement that emphasized mandatory sentences, fixed guidelines, and sentencing enhancements for designated classes of crimes. The focus of criminal sentencing had become the category of crime, rather than the individual characteristics and history of the convicted person, with one major exception for prior criminal conduct. Incapacitation