The narrative of the number: Quantification in criminal court

Abstract

Scholars have documented the explosion in quantification of social phenomena within organizational settings. A key site of the quantitative turn has been in the penal-legal field, with purported transformative effects. This article draws from a field research project examining the on-the-ground implementation of the federal sentencing guidelines to explore how the guidelines’ numbers-based logic is both articulated and reconstituted by legal actors in the adversarial process. Complementing macro-level work that examines the transformative effects of quantification at the social-structural level, I take a micro-level, empirically grounded approach that analytically focuses on day-to-day interactions in court to reveal quantification’s possibilities and limits. I identify three adversarial strategies that narrate the meaning of the guideline calculation to demonstrate how the complex quantitative guidelines system becomes incorporated into narrative form to know, assess, and judge legal subjects.