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12 Crim. Just. & Behavior 3 (1985)

handle is hein.journals/crmjusbhv12 and id is 1 raw text is: ON GUIDELINES, UNIQUENESS, AND ACCOUNTABILITY Exchange III LETTER FROM TOCH TO WILKINS One movement that is sweeping the country is that of actuarially-derived guidelines that limit the discretion of those who make decisions affecting people's futures. As the father of this trend, you are justifiably proud of it. We are reducing unfettered arbitrariness by enforcing reliability that imposes rules on fateful judgments. Those who dissent from rules must tell us why they dissent. You say this reduces tyranny, but what about bureaucratic anonymity? If machines do sentencing, ajudge is not an arbitrary and personal tyrant, but may become a reliable and impersonal apparatchik who does not take the responsibility because it rests in the machine-hence, nowhere. How does one appeal a prediction table? Who is one to blame if a released felon offends the next day, horrendously, in defiance of probabilities? The judge is now exempt-which he may like-but there is no one for concerned citizens or victims (or offenders who find the logic of prediction tables hard to translate into their personal fate) to relate to, and what impotence is greater than that? And in an unadulterated use of this system, what pride or skill or self-esteem is there in being ajudge? In fact, who needs one? I admit this is all a political point, but isn't yours as well? The point you would expect me to make is: How do we keep respect for, and attention to uniqueness (which only the mind can assess) in the composite equation? Or, to put the matter differently: How do we combine reliable extrapolations from CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 12 No. 1, March 1985 3-8 @ 1985 American Association of Correctional Psychologists 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.