What’s Race Got to Do with Justice?

Abstract

This article considers Aboriginal community responsibilization strategies and Hispanic and Asian individual responsibilization strategies at parole hearings These strategies reflect government attempts to manage the risk of Aboriginal inmates through partnerships with Aboriginal communi ties and the risk of Hispanic and Asian inmates through individual remorsefulness and shame. The use of race and ethnicity in risk management approaches to justice raises questions concerning due process in parole decision making and contrasts sharply with family responsibilization strate gies at parole hearings for white inmates. The introduction of risk assessment, risk management and responsibilization strategies over the last 30 years demarcates a shift in criminal justice decision making from due process to management of actuarial risks. This shift from due process to risk management then impacts on the dynamics and outcomes of parole hearings. Argua bly, the quest for cost-efficient management of a troublesome parolee population rests increasingly on considerations of race and ethnicity, giving rise to the question as to whether this invocation of race and ethnicity in managing actuarial risk is rooted in community and individual empowerment, or simply presentably dressed racial and cultural stereotyping. Foucault's governmentality speaks to governing populations and describes contem porary changes in neo-conservative, criminal justice decision making (Foucault 1991; Blomberg and Cohen 1995; Hindess 1996). Foucault alerts us to a range of government tactics, suggesting that we pay particular attention to government administrative appara tuses. This paper deconstructs both the processes and the rationale behind contempo rary measures of co-managing a troublesome population of parolees in communities. The argument had been forcefully made that actuarial approaches to risk assessment were superior to clinical approaches (Glaser 1962; Gottfredson and Tonry 1989). As a result, governments and the public lost confidence in professional clinical skills. Those responsible for management of troublesome populations sought new partnerships in sharing responsibility for crime and criminality (Garland 2001). In effect, professionals not only became less prominent in doing risk assessment; they were increasingly removed from the entire sphere of risk management (Garland 2001). The actuarial approaches that replaced past clinical approaches to crime control arguably became the platform to launch co-management processes involving varied risk-management partnerships in a community.