Selective navigation: risk prediction cultures in criminal justice practices

In his article ‘Selective incapacitation revisited’, Thomas Mathiesen (1998) addresses the dominance of a technical and scientific language associated with the risk prediction culture that originated from a criminological research community where risk is considered as objective and measurable. In this article I discuss how practitioners perceive these aspects of risk prediction. For policymakers, targeting means using thresholds to target groups of offenders, but for frontline officers, it means targeting an individual. The officer must set an individualised assessment against the aggregated assessments from risk predictions. I will analyse how this has manifested in three Norwegian risk assessment projects: the offender assessment system, risk assessment of violent extremism, and early intervention to prevent youth crime. This article contributes to the understanding of how the political aspects of risk impact practitioners, and how the concept of risk as an artifact is understood by practitioners. I will first present the context of selective incapacitation and the history of research in this field. I will then contextualise the different understandings of risk within policy and practice. The main section is an analysis of the three cases. I end by discussing how acknowledgement of the political aspects of risk can promote sensitivity around the use of risk assessment tools.