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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Interest in the concept of risk and its management can be dated, in this century, to the work of economists John Commons and Frank Knight and, later, to that of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in relation to the theory of games. They imagined that certain knowable patterns could be associated with how people operate in markets and organizations when full knowledge of the consequences of their decisions was unavailable. Another mode of interest was stimulated by social psychologists, who began to ask how individuals respond to well-formulated choices in which inference is required and full knowledge impossible. Some of the dilemmas of the pursuit of self-interest and collective well-being surfaced, as they had since the time of Adam Smith. (2) From this rather odd assemblage of reductionistic thinking, modelled on mathematics, grew an interest in policy analysis based on idealized odds of events happening and on the hypothecated consequences of choices made.
The idea, in outline, of this new form of rationality was to create an expert-sourced, idealized model of sequences and consequences that would result given a decision or event. This model had its first impact on the tactics of modern warfare, where it became the basis for formalized games of war-making, strategy, and tactics and challenged the study of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, Helmuth Molke, and tactician generals like Erwin Rommel. (3) It became the underlying premise of exercises called "war games" and was combined with the study of great battles.
In the field of criminal justice, scholars first began to see the impact of rational risk analysis in the field of corrections. This was signalled by Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon's analytic essay "Actuarial Justice" (1994), which argued that risk analysis was becoming the model in criminal justice, especially in corrections. In effect, this interest in risk analysis shifted concern from individual criminals and crimes to types of criminals, actuarial models of incarceration, and governing by databases, profiles, and assumed modes of human behaviour. It was a variation, as well, on the Durkheimian notion that modernity foreshadowed a move away from retributive justice. Yet the facts suggest that the move to risk analysis is simply another mode of control of the weak and marginal and that it has radically increased the prison population over the last 35 years. In effect, as computing systems became cheaper, more widespread, and easier to use, vast quantities of data, once disaggregated, could be used to plot formally any number of imagined risks; to mobilize resources; to shift or reduce them; to transfer the costs of this to government and away from corporations; and, simultaneously, to increase the potential for profit-taking by private and often greedy corporations from human services once undertaken by the state (Garland 2000). There is no small irony in the fact that this capacity led to more risks of every kind being uncovered, reported upon, and then entering into the common discourse as a result of media conflation, dilution, and distortion of the meaning of such figures and probabilities. (4)
Risk analysis and risk management have an ambiguous history of working best when applied to physical and material sequences such as bombing, planting and fertilizing crops, making and producing goods as needed to supply retailers, and so on. Their applicability to human choice remains controversial. However, risk-based approaches have become the most favoured in the rhetoric of government and corporations when discussing strategic planning and policy.
Considering the application of risk analysis (RA) and risk management (RM) to human deciding and human deciding about humans brings several questions to mind. The overall question that has arisen as I revise this article is, What are consequences in the field of criminal justice of shifting to risk analysis as a plausible public approach while, at the same time, using bureaucratic rules as resources to sustain control in matters of governing security, such as terrorism?
In this essay, I first consider the definition of risk and what sorts of risk there are. Clearly, risks are associated with some sort of social contingency--something with an outcome that cannot be fully known. I argue that in any organization there are several kinds of rationality and, therefore, several kinds of risks in place. I then ask what are the strengths and weaknesses of RM in connection with imagining rare social events with major negative consequences.
Overview
The questions used to organize the original seminar discussion made problematic the idea of applying risk analysis and management to social events. Of special, though not exclusive, concern during our seminar was the relevance of risk management to anticipating, preventing, or ameliorating the effects of low-probability yet very negatively consequential events: attacks on public water supplies, aircraft, airports, or public transport, inter alia. These attacks, even if only partially successful, damage targets that affect the lives and the morale of citizens. The present situation in North America is that we are vulnerable to acts of terrorism outside the context of a declared, stated, and formal...
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