Knowledge, Neoliberalism, and Crime: A Critique of Evidence-Based Crime Policy

• In Event: Critical Futures: Transforming Identity, Digital Space, and Disciplinary Power

Abstract

Modern American criminal justice is characterized by a commitment to “evidence-based” practices and policies, an approach to managing law enforcement and punishment based on the most current scientific research on “what works” in preventing crime. This paper engages in a critical assessment of the development of evidence-based criminal justice based on an analysis of three cases – the “what works” doctrine in corrections in the 1970s, the popularization of broken-windows policing in the 1990s, and the emergence of risk/needs assessments in penal decision-making in the 2000s. Together, these cases highlight three problematic ways in which the glorification of “evidence-based” rhetoric has shaped the development of American criminal justice and crime policy. First, by acting on select scholarship to develop “evidence-based” practices and policies, policymakers exert tremendous power in delineating the bounds of legitimate scientific knowledge and in defining which research counts as fully scientific. Research that does not serve the needs of dominant lawmaking and political coalitions gets excluded from conceptions of prevailing scientific knowledge, since such work does not provide empirical backing for the policy preferences of those with institutional and political power. “Evidence-based” research is thus not distinguishable from other scholarship because it is the only work steeped in rigorous evidence, but because it relies on evidence that validates the political imperatives of dominant governing regimes. In the era of mass incarceration, this has valorized scholarship validating popular understandings of crime reinforcing punitive “law and order” mentalities. Second, evidence-based criminal justice obscures the structural, racial, and economic forces that drive crime in favor of focusing on the isolated criminal individual. Given that the “evidence-based” designation is applied to research legitimating the political goals of governing coalitions, law-and-order policymakers have preferred positivist scholarly perspectives emphasizing the individual criminal for analysis over perspectives studying crime’s structural, racial, and material foundations. This is because scholarship structured within positivist epistemologies and explaining crime with reference to individual-level factors more often than not reaffirms common sense, individualizing, and punitive assumptions about guilt and blameworthiness. Consequently, criminological scholarship emphasizing the individual above all else has been granted a monopoly over what counts as “evidence-based.” The practices that take shape out of this work have laundered the structural racial and class inequalities embedded into American criminal justice into individual-level problems best solved through a punitive hand rather than through the expansion of social goods or public assistance. Third, evidence-based criminal justice has become an inherently neoliberal project. This conclusion naturally proceeds from the prior two points. If the “evidence-based” label is only associated with scholarship validating the needs of governing coalitions, and modern evidence-based practices consistently emerge out of research focused on the isolated criminal individual, their consonance with neoliberal political priorities becomes clear. The cases reviewed in this paper, some of which were evidence-based endeavors endorsed by political actors on the Left and Right, led to the slashing of public goods and social services based on unforgiving cost-benefit analyses of what works and/or prompted the development of leaner and meaner approaches to criminal justice. In each case, evidence-based criminal justice legitimated neoliberal political projects behind the language of seemingly indisputable science, despite the contestable nature of the scholarship or the flawed assumptions on which it rested. The paper concludes by assessing what this history has to say for the contemporary “Defund the Police” movement. While a transformative reimagining of policing in the United States is a welcome endeavor, attempts to back up this controversial rallying cry with empirical analysis framed as “evidence-based” could have unintended effects on the future of policing. Those seeking to provide promising empirical assessments or favorable cost-benefit analyses of what a successful “defund” campaign looks like risk providing empirical legitimacy to those seeking to slash city public services, promote fiscal austerity, and sustain and expand punitive crime politics at low-cost.

Author

• Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University