Operational Criminology: Leslie Wilkins and the Origins of Predictive Systems

How are we to understand the historical origins of contemporary predictive systems? How have criminologists designed methods that were built into these systems? The article responds to these questions by narrating a prehistory of predictive systems and the work of British criminologist Leslie Thomas Wilkins (1915–2000). Co-author of the first Home Office research study, Prediction Methods in relation to borstal training (1955), Wilkins spent the 1960s translating cybernetic ideas and methods to the discipline of criminology. Through leadership positions in the Home Office, the United Nations in Japan and at UC Berkeley, Wilkins formulated foundational methodological ideas that influenced a generation of policy and systems-oriented criminologists and the products of their work. The article turns to archival records from a 25-year period in Wilkins’s career (1945–70) to advance the claim that Wilkins’s unrealized proposals for an ‘operational criminology’ reveal several key latent methodological commitments designed into contemporary predictive systems.