An OR Missionary’s Visits to the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

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.

The Systems Fallacy: A Genealogy and Critique of Public Policy and Cost-Benefit Analysis

“…Systems analysis played a key role in crystalizing the notion of a "criminal justice system," and a genealogic link can be traced at both the individual and institutional levels. Alfred Blumstein, for instance, a towering figure in American criminology, began as an operations researcher, was president of the Operations Research Society of America, and considers himself an "OR missionary"-tellingly, his appointment at Carnegie Mellon is University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research, Emeritus (Blumstein 2007). Institutions also sprang up early to analyze the criminal justice system, as illustrated, for example, by the creation in 1966 under Mayor John Lindsay of the New York City-RAND Institute, a joint project of the city and the RAND Corporation (Light 2003, pp.…”

The Systems Fallacy: From Operations Research to Contemporary Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Perils of Systems Analysis, Past and Present

“…In a fascinating memoire titled "An OR Missionary's Visits to the Criminal Justice System," 43 Blumstein refers to himself as an "OR Missionary" and traces his missionary activities in the area of criminal justice. Reflecting back on his trajectory, Blumstein would write that "the missionary function was an important role of OR, and so I encouraged OR folks to look to missionary opportunities.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on Humanitarian Applications: Doing Good with Good OR

“…The public sector has had a rich history of research from the OR/MS areas (Pollock et al 1994, Ritchie et al 1994, Johnson and Smilowitz 2007; examples include urban emergency service systems (Chaiken and Larson 1972), criminal justice (Blumstein 2007), policy modeling (Kaplan 2008), and airline safety (Barnett et al 2001). Yet many opportunities remain for OR/MS to get involved in public sector research.…”