Disciplining Criminal Justice: The Peril amid the Promise of Numbers

When it comes to the opaque domain of criminal justice's inner workings, statistics have a penetrating potential that scholars and officials have deployed in governing discretion, achieving accountability, and revealing systemic faults. The growth of sophisticated scholarship and ideas adapting quantitative technology to unveil the hidden, spur debate, and police bad behavior is an important movement. Yet this Article sounds a note of caution against the primacy of numbers in disciplining criminal justice practices.