Assessing the Risks of Risk Assessments: Institutional Tensions and Data Driven Judicial Decision-Making in U.S. Pretrial Hearings

Abstract

Risk assessments, which are predictive technologies designed to augment organizational decision-making processes, are expanding globally. The use of risk assessments may lend legitimacy to official actors who routinely adjudicate highly consequential decisions alongside competing institutional pressures. But because these tools are laden with measurement errors, using them may also magnify institutional tensions and erode the legitimacy of official actors’ decision-making practices. In this article, I use interviews with judges in four large U.S. criminal courts to reveal how they strategically engaged with risk assessment scores to navigate tensions within and among different institutional logics. In pretrial hearings, judges selectively invoked risk scores to legitimate punitive sanctions that mitigated tensions from bureaucratic logics to process high caseloads with limited resources, legal logics to protect public safety and impose the least restrictive conditions, and political logics to follow the law while facing public scrutiny. I discuss the implications of these findings for future research on penal change and the uses of discretion in the age of big data.