When Politicization Stops Algorithms in Criminal Justice

Smart On Crime: The New Language for Prisoner Release

Pascal D König and Georg Wenzelburger

The British Journal of Criminology, 2021, vol. 61, issue 3, 832-851

Abstract: The present paper sheds light on the conditions for successfully implementing pretrial risk assessment tools by looking at barriers to their implementation and, specifically, political factors that can derail this process. Drawing on theoretical assumptions about the role of agenda-setting and public discourse in policy change, we examine three US states where the implementation of pretrial tools was halted or heavily restricted. Our findings suggest that a politicization of these tools plays a central role for thwarting their implementation. This has less to do with their technical properties or performance. Rather, through reaching high-level politics, those tools are publicly linked to concerns about opacity, fairness and public safety such that it simply becomes politically safer for politicians to stick with the status quo.

Keywords: risk assessment; algorithmic decision-making; pretrial; agenda-setting; policy termination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azaa099 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:61:y:2021:i:3:p:832-851.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().