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

• In Event: Connecting History and Political Theory

Abstract

Progressive criminologists proclaim a commitment to “evidence-based” criminal justice policy, an approach to managing crime based on scientific research. But this paper critically assesses three historical cases in which law-and-order politicians justified punitive crime policy with “evidence-based” rhetoric – the “what works” movement in the 1970s, broken-windows policing in the 1990s, and risk/needs assessments in the 2000s. These cases highlight what progressives misunderstand in their calls for “evidence-based” crime policy. In each case, policymakers drew on select scholarship to develop “evidence-based” practices that served their own political imperatives. Politics played a key role in determining what research was considered legitimate scientific knowledge in a given historical moment. In the latter twentieth-century, evidence-based criminal justice has evolved into an inherently neoliberal project. Despite the claims of progressive criminologists that work attributing crime to structural inequality is the true basis of “evidence-based” policy, neoliberal lawmakers have been selectively amplifying scholarship that attributes crime to individual faults and engages in blunt cost-benefit analyses to justify “leaner and meaner” neoliberal crime policy. In the cases studied, evidence-based rhetoric legitimated such projects behind the language of science despite the contestable nature of the scholarship being cited. The paper concludes by assessing what this history means for contemporary attempts to back up calls to “Defund the Police” with social scientific evidence, which could create an opportunity for conservatives to provide empirical reason to reframe “Defund” as a way to slash city public services, promote fiscal austerity, and expand punitive crime politics at low-cost.

Author

• Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University-Camden