Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgments in Criminal Justice Decisions: Should One Replace the Other?

IN VIRTUALLY ALL decision-making situations that have been studied, actuarially developed devices outperform human judgments. This is true with respect to psychiatric judgments (see, for example, Meehl, 1965; Gough, 1962; Ennis and Litwack, 1974); graduate school admissions (e.g., Dawes, 1979; Dawes and Corrigan, 1974); prognostic judgments made by sociologists and psychiatrists relative to a parole-violation criterion (Glaser, 1955, 1962); parole board decisions (Gottfredson, 1961; Gottfredson and Beverly, 1962; Carroll, Wiener, Coates, Galegher, & Alibrio, 1982); mental health and correctional case worker judgments of offender risk (Holland, Holt, Levi, & Beckett, 1983), spousal assault (Hilton and Harris, 2005) and in other areas (Goldberg, 1970), including the analysis of credit risk (Somerville and Taffler, 1995). Indeed, a recent review and meta-analysis of 56 years’ accumulation of research on the “clinical vs. statistical” prediction “problem” conducted as part of a Festschrift for Paul E. Meehl, a pioneer in the field, again confirms that statistical models outperform clinical decision-makers (Ægisdóttier, White, Spengler, Maugherman, Anderson, Cook, Nichols, Lampropoulos, Walker, Cohen and Rush, 2006).

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