Itay Ravid (Villanova University – Charles Widger School of Law) has posted Anti-Holistic Algorithms (78(6) Vanderbilt L. Rev. 1765 (2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article presents a critical tension in modern criminal justice between holistic criminal-justice aspirations and algorithmic governance: whether the holistic rehabilitation and reintegration project can survive technological determinism. As criminal legal systems embrace algorithmic risk-assessment tools as solutions to address recidivism, this Article reveals a profound epistemological concern: the fundamental incompatibility between viewing offenders as “whole persons” capable of transformation and reducing them to statistical probabilities within computational matrices. By doing so, it demonstrates how algorithmic mediation fundamentally alters—and potentially destroys—the holistic message itself.
In establishing this argument, the Article advances in two stages. It first identifies the development and dominant features of holistic criminal-justice reforms. It suggests, however, that many contemporary holistic reforms offer only thin versions of holism. In practice, these initiatives often replicate the logic of traditional, deficit-based rehabilitation models by emphasizing risk management and bureaucratic control rather than genuine human transformation. To recover the deeper promise of holistic criminal justice, the Article calls for a shift toward desistance-based approaches that foreground agency, identity development, and social belonging as the foundation for change. Second, the Article argues—through analysis of competing rehabilitation paradigms—that desistance-oriented approaches face profound challenges in the current techno-social environment increasingly governed by algorithmic decisionmaking. Specifically, the logic of algorithmic risk assessment directly undermines the very conditions successful rehabilitation through desistance requires by eroding three interdependent pillars of holistic rehabilitation: individual self-recognition, institutional commitment, and societal acceptance of redemptive possibility.
This sociotechnological critique transcends traditional discussions on algorithmic harms by interrogating deeper questions of human agency, moral recognition, and conditions necessary for transformation. The Article thus reveals how seemingly neutral technological tools carry embedded anti-holistic assumptions that threaten the holistic project. Ultimately, it offers concrete interventions designed to preserve humanistic values within our increasingly automated penal system.