ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that while risk —like all government —is dangerous, critical criminology has attended too much to the negative side of risk. Liberalism has a distinctly ambivalent orientation to risk, thought of as a technology of government that is based on the probabilistic prediction of futures. Since the late 18th century, risk techniques such as insurance have been promoted as a good that could provide security to the middle classes, teach the poor thrift and reward them for their responsibility. Actuarial Justice has been identified as the ascendant strategy of risk-based criminal justice. The War on Drugs certainly is not a risk-based strategy of justice, although it employs many risk-based techniques, including Actuarial Justice, in its repertoire of weapons. While the linking of such risk techniques to a framework of rational-choice subjectivities is not a necessary feature of harm-minimisation, in contemporary neo-liberal environments this has become central, at least in the Australian and New Zealand contexts.
