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SELECTIVE INCAPACITATION AND THE PROBLEM OF PREDICTION*
Recent innovations in sentencing policy across the United States reveal a renewed interest in the idea of selective incapacitation of criminal offenders. This is perhaps most evident in the proliferation of "Three Strikes and You're Out" habitual-offender statutes across the nation. Although the term was first introduced by David Greenberg in 1975, Peter Greenwood and Allan Abrahamse's eponymous 1982 Rand report represents the most fully articulated plan for implementing such a strategy. The report's release stimulated much discussion, because of the author's claims that selective incapacitation could simultaneously reduce crime rates and prison populations. Ethical problems inherent in such proposals as well as methodological inconsistencies in the original research warrant a reexamination of the proposal and of the empirical basis for the conclusions offered therein. Greenwood and Abrahamse's original research is replicated with a representative sample of California state prison inmates (N = 2,188) in light of these limitations, with specific focus on the methodological issues concerning the construction of the predictive scale. The selective incapacitation scheme advocated by Greenwood and Abrahamse performs extremely poorly in terms of both reliability and validity, thus precluding the implementation of such schemes. The article contains a discussion of other, more ethically acceptable uses of an instrument that identifies "high-rate" or "dangerous" offenders. In conclusion, some observations on the limitations of incarceration-based strategies of crime control are offered.
The use of imprisonment as a criminal sanction in the United States has generally been justified as serving one of four purposes: rehabilitation, deterrence, punishment/retribution, and incapacitation. At varying points in U.S. history, each of these purposes has been dominant in the construction of the ideology that guides incarceration policy. In the past century, a major shift has occurred in the prevailing ideology concerning the purposes of incarceration; the penal purposes of incapacitation and retribution have assumed much greater importance than they had previously. This shift in purpose has resulted in very different research agendas and policy prescriptions than those formulated assuming a different primary goal of incarceration.
Support for the "rehabilitative ideal" began to decline in the 1970s (Allen, 1981; Flanagan, 1996; von Hirsch, 1985). Increasing rates of crime throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Maguire and Pastore, 1997) coupled with a...