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An OR Missionary’s Visits to the Criminal Justice System

H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
ab0q{at}andrew.cmu.edu

One of the historic roles of operations research (OR) people in the problem domains they enter is that of missionary, bringing their OR techniques of quantitative modeling, system perspective, and planning to the fields where those approaches have not yet taken hold. One of the most primitive of social systems in that regard is the criminal justice system responsible for society’s response to crime. Over the past 40 years, I and a number of colleagues have been involved in this missionary function. The issues addressed have involved modeling of criminal careers as a stochastic process, bringing those analyses to the assessment of incapacitation effects of incarceration, review of trends in incarceration and factors contributing to those trends, and an examination of the interaction of incarceration and drug markets, with an analysis of some of the unintended counterproductive effects of that incarceration response to the drug problem.

Subject classifications: judicial/legal/crime; penal system; probability/stochastic model applications; government/programs; simulation/applications.
History: Received October 2005; revision received December 2005; accepted December 2005.