Predictive Governance, Institutional Drift, and Correctability

This article examines the institutional consequences of predictive policing after probabilistic systems become embedded in organisational decision-making. Rather than focusing on predictive performance alone, it analyses how repeated reliance on probabilistic governance may gradually alter evidentiary authority, attribution practices, organisational responsibility, and institutional correctability over time. The article develops the concepts of probabilistic governance, epistemic expansion, institutional drift, and declining correctability as analytical tools for examining the democratic and rule-of-law implications of predictive policing. It argues that the central governance question is not whether predictive systems are used, but whether institutions retain the capacity to distinguish probabilistic relevance from evidentiary justification while preserving meaningful mechanisms for correction, review, and accountability. Within the broader theorem-driven crime-process research programme, this paper constitutes a downstream institutional and governance extension of the prevention-theoretical framework. Whereas the companion article analyses prevention fit at the level of crime-process intervention, the present article analyses how sustained reliance on probabilistic governance may reshape institutional decision-making over time. It is an institutional application of the programme's theoretical architecture rather than a reformulation of its core crime-process theory.