The Uncertain Promise of Risk
| Author | Pat O'Malley |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.3.323 |
Pat O’Malley
Carleton University, Canada
Conventional debates over risk in criminal justice (and more gener-
ally) tend to fall into several traps. These include the assumption
that diverse configurations of risk can be collapsed into a single category,
to be contrasted en bloc with other approaches to government.
However, by attending to the diversity of forms of risk we can begin to
develop certain principles that could be put forward as tools for thinking
about the promise and limitations of ways of governing by risk. Through
contrasting actuarial justice with a number of other configurations of
risk-centred government, such relevant issues emerge as whether
specific techniques of risk are inclusive or exclusionary, whether they set
up a zero-sum game between victims and offenders, and whether they
polarise risk and uncertainty. While this is promising, the paper also
concludes that a democratic politics of security may provide more
promise than a politics of risk per se.
Liberalism has a distinctly ambivalent orientation to risk, thought of as a technol-
ogy of government that is based on the probabilistic prediction of futures. Since the
late 18th century, risk techniques such as insurance have been promoted as a good
that could provide security to the middle classes, teach the poor thrift and reward
them for their responsibility. By the end of the 19th century, there were compara-
tively few households in western Europe not covered by insurance of some sort
(O’Malley, 2002; Defert, 1991; Eghigian, 2000). During the first half of the 20th
century, contributory social insurance became the cornerstone of social security,
positively regarded as maintaining the independence and dignity of labour through
the requirement for financial contributions in exchange for benefits. More recently,
neo-liberal governments have continued supporting most forms of contributory
social insurance for this reason. They have promoted alongside these — and prefer-
ably superseding them — multiple regimes in which security of health and property
are purchased through a multitude of risk-reducing programs and technologies. In
such ways, risk-centred government has been valorised as contributing to freedom
in liberal societies where uncertainty — especially in the form of the free market —
is also constituted as a necessary condition of the wellbeing of all.1
Yet this is only half the story. From its foundations, many liberals have regarded
statistical probability and government through predictive techniques as compromis-
Address for correspondence: Pat O’Malley, Canada Research Chair in Criminology and
Criminal Justice, Department of Sociology, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive,
Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6. Email: pat_omalley@carleton.ca
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VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 2004 PP. 323–343
PAT O’MALLEY
ing freedom. In the 19th century, prominent liberals voiced concerns about the
implications of statistical prediction for the sanctity of free will. As Porter (1985,
pp.164–65) argues, after the publication of Buckle’s quantitative History of
Civilisation in 1847, debates on this issue became at least as prominent and urgent
as those generated by Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Thus Porter quotes an outraged
commentator from 1860 suggesting that:
[a] protest may safely be entered against this modern superstition of arithmetic,
which if acquiesced in, would seem to threaten mankind with a later and worse
blight than any it has yet suffered — that, not so much as a fixed destiny, as of a fate
falling upon us, not personally, but in averages.
In the late 20th century, and into the present, these fears and suspicions are alive
and well. Peter L. Bernstein (1998), in his phenomenally bestselling Against the
Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, suggests that probabilistic prediction of the
future creates a “prison” that consigns us to the endless repetition of past statistical
patterns over which we have no control. “Nothing we can do, no judgment that we
make, no response to our animal spirits, is going to have the slightest influence on
the final result” (p. 229). Bernstein recruits John Maynard Keynes to his cause, for
Keynes argued that there was no possibility of using statistical methods to forecast
such significant events as whether there will be war next month, or whether stock
market prices will rise or fall tomorrow. These are issues subject to what he called
“uncertain knowledge”. “About these matters”, said Keynes, “there is no scientific
basis on which to form any calculable probability whatsoever. We simply do not
know!” Bernstein concludes that a “tremendous idea” lies buried in this statement.
“Rather than frightening us, Keynes’ words bring great news: we are not prisoners of
an inevitable future. Uncertainty makes us free” (p. 229).
This same unease about risk, especially when translated into government,
characterises much of critical social theory’s analysis of the place of risk in contem-
porary society. For Ian Hacking, pessimistically, risk merely introduces new possibil-
ities for domination:
The erosion of determinism and the taming of chance by statistics does not intro-
duce a new liberty. The argument that indeterminism creates a place for free will is a
hollow mockery. The bureaucracy of statistics imposes order not just by creating
administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must
think of themselves and the actions that are open to them. The hallmark of indeter-
minism is that cliché, information and control. The less the determinism, the more
the possibilities for constraint. (1991, p.194)
Perhaps most famous, of course, is Ulrich Beck (1992, 1997), who is concerned that
in the world of the risk society, risk has become simultaneously hegemonic and
dysfunctional. Beck posits a scenario in which the forces of modernisation have
generated a giant Hegelian contradiction. The more modernity produces goods, the
more it produces harms of unprecedented magnitude. These harms, or “modernisa-
tion risks” have two principal characteristics. They occur too rarely for us to make
calculations about the probability of their occurrence, or even be aware of their
nature until too late. And they are of a scale and form such that none can escape
them. Nuclear contamination, holes in the ozone layer and international terrorism
324
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THE UNCERTAIN PROMISE OF RISK
are three examples he is fond of citing. While risk calculation becomes ineffective
as a technique for governing the future in this environment, the popular demand
for security promotes risk consciousness. Reflecting this, the populace urges scien-
tists and government to refine their risk calculations. A vicious circle is established,
for as a result more risks are discovered, and in consequence greater public insecu-
rity is generated. Accordingly, Beck regards risk frameworks in today’s world as
paralysing action: “risks only suggest what should not be done, not what should be
done … To the extent that risks become the all embracing background for perceiv-
ing the world, the alarm they provoke creates an atmosphere of powerlessness and
paralysis”: risk “dims the horizon” (1997, p. 141).
Of course, it is in the nature of much sociology to regard crises as normal and
catastrophes as imminent. Perhaps it is therefore unsurprising that most sociologi-
cal examinations of risk have been similarly negative. Nowhere has this been more
evident than in criminology (O’Malley, 2000). The criminological response has
been primarily to regard the emergence of risk techniques — almost invariably
illustrated by such examples as Actuarial Justice, Megan’s laws and risk-needs
analysis — as a blight on criminal justice (Hudson, 2000; Baumann, 2000;
Hannah-Moffat, 1999; Kempf-Leonard & Peterson, 2000; Miller, 2001; Garland,
2001). Risk techniques appear, explicitly or implicitly, as a negative turn that
undermines the modernist advances made toward a reform-centred, inclusive and
therapeutic criminal justice during the middle (welfare state) part of the twentieth
century. By centring insecurity and threat, this governmental grid of risk is seen to
work though negation. Certain persons are defined primarily in terms of their
purely negative and dangerous status as threats to others (victims), and accordingly
are incapacitated. Therapeutics are abandoned or become subordinate to a regimen
of risk reduction (Kemshall, 1998; Hannah-Moffatt, 1999). Risk-avoidance
negativity has been taken as the hallmark of risk in criminal justice, just as it has in
critical and liberal analysis of government more generally.
In this paper, I want to argue that while risk — like all government — is danger-
ous, critical criminology has attended too much to the negative side of risk. Of
course, there are other criminologies, governmentally committed and supported, in
which risk is uncritically regarded as the way forward. Most salient here are forensic
psychology and developmental criminology (O’Malley, 2001). While it is not at all
the purpose of this paper simply to join hands with these criminologists, I do want
to argue that a critical criminology has a responsibility to consider the promise, as
well as the problems, of risk. Such an exercise, however, cannot merely attempt a
balancing of the books, a review of the moral arguments for and against protection
of victims versus justice to offenders. Nor can it be a review of “what works” — of
the...
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