Genealogy of a Flow Chart: Remodeling the "Criminal Justice System" through Science, Technology, and Systems Analysis

• In Event: Social Movements & Government

Abstract

During President Johnson’s Crime Commission (1965-67), criminal justice and industry representatives first explored how emerging information technologies could transform traditional US criminal justice practices. Here, I use extensive archival materials and staff interviews to investigate the commission’s use of systems analysis to reimagine and remodel criminal justice and governance. Drawing from perspectives of boundary-work, actor-network theory, and the dramaturgy of scientific advisory reports, I focus on the commission’s Science and Technology Task Force, which brought systems analysis from military applications to the field of “civil defense” through influential models of criminal justice as an integrated “system” whose components were coordinated towards the goals of crime control. I investigate how diverse visions of crime prevention and criminal justice were introduced, negotiated, packaged, and enacted over the course of the commission, and explore how knowledge production was shaped through organizational dynamics between commissioners and the staff. My technoscience focus reveals how Great Society commitments to poverty and social causation dropped out of competing technical mappings and models of the criminal justice process, anticipating and shaping subsequent policy approaches and the spatial extension of criminal justice technologies into everyday life.

Author

• Bruce Hoffman, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ohio State University