Radicalized risk assessment.

In not too long, our system of criminal justice will abandon the mythology of blameworthiness and desert, and not too long after that we will look back on retributive criminal justice with shuddering astonishment. Now, approaching the cusp of change, we have the unusual and ephemeral opportunity to observe and study criminal justice on the way to a paradigm shift, and to think about how the system we have will become the system to come. How will the retributivism we take for granted today be transformed into something different tomorrow? In this paper, I suggest that one of the drivers of the change to come lies in the use of empirically-informed risk assessment technologies in American criminal justice. As they develop, such technologies will inevitably smuggle radically transformative information about human wrongdoing into the criminal justice system and into our thinking about criminal justice generally. Moreover, they will deliver that information in a form well-tailored to drive change - a persistent and increasing flow of vivid, concrete, comprehensible facts that easily build into explanatory narratives about the genetic, environmental, cultural, and experiential causes of criminal behavior. Such concrete and credible criminogenesis narratives, I argue, will fuel deep and stubborn moral anxieties about retributivism, and their cumulative impact will ultimately drive us to reject retributive criminal justice.