Actuarial risk assessment at sentencing: Potential consequences for mass incarceration and legitimacy

The growing utilization of actuarial risk assessment instruments (RAIs) in the American criminal justice system may potentially lead to more restrained, better-targeted uses of incarceration. However, critics have raised a variety of concerns regarding RAIs and suggested, among other things, that their incorporation into court procedures may tend to dehumanize defendants and exacerbate, rather than alleviate, mass incarceration. In response to such concerns, this article offers recommendations for policy and practice that may help an increasingly risk-focused criminal justice system to achieve decarceration goals – and to do so without undermining its own legitimacy in the eyes of defendants or the public at large. These recommendations are aimed particularly at judges, in their roles as sentencers and makers of courtroom and courthouse policy.