Operations Research · 1969 · 109 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesCriminologyCrimePenologyPolicingCrime PolicyCriminal CareersCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice PolicyCriminal Justice SystemsCriminal ProsecutionsAge - Crime CurveCost DifferentiationCriminal Career AnalysisCriminal Career DevelopmentCriminal Career PatternsFeedback
The criminal justice system—police, prosecution, courts, and corrections—must be studied in an integrated manner, including the societal feedback from released offenders. The paper develops a state‑level model that maps the flow of arrested individuals by crime type and allocates costs to system components and crime categories. The model incorporates a feedback mechanism where rearrest probability declines with age and a crime‑switch matrix captures successive‑crime transitions. The model yields cost distributions by crime type, estimates of criminal‑career costs, analyses of criminal career trajectories, and sensitivity of costs and offender flows to controllable variables.
The need to examine the total criminal justice system—police, prosecution, courts, and correction agencies—in an integrated way constitutes a central problem in improving law enforcement. Too, any such analysis must reflect the feedback into society of offenders released at various stages in the system. This paper formulates a model for the criminal justice system in one state; it depicts the flow of arrested persons through the system as a function of type of crime, and provides a basis for apportioning costs to system components and to types of crime. The model's feedback feature includes the probability of rearrest as a decreasing function of age and a crime-switch matrix reflecting the successive-crime distribution. The results from the model include a cost distribution by crime type, criminal-career costs, an examination of the courses of criminal careers, and estimates of the sensitivities of costs and offender flows within the system to changes in its controllable variables.