Do You Know Who Your Probationers Are? Using Simulation Modeling to Estimate the Composition of California’s Felony Probation Population, 1980–2000

Community justice and public safety: Assessing criminal justice policy through the lens of the social contract

“…With respect to the formal criminal justice system, the empirical analysis of the case of California reveals that sentencing reforms intended to protect communities by selectively incapacitating the most dangerous offenders through incarceration have failed as a result of the poor selective success of these policies and practices. Instead, these reforms have had the perverse result of incarcerating ever-increasing numbers of offenders with increasingly lower risk profiles, while the pool of offenders under community supervision becomes more dangerous (see Auerhahn, 2007). This overreliance on incarceration has had the effect of degrading community-level processes that are central to the creation and maintenance of safe communities and impedes meaningful participation in this process.…”

Dynamic systems simulation analysis: A planning tool for the new century

“…If the model performs well in terms of reproducing the historical data, then the simulated values for the unvalidated states of the model may be considered as a useful "best guess" about the composition and the nature of changes in this population. Simulation models developed to evaluate the consequences of sentencing policy reform in California provided a basis for examining the changing composition of California's probation population over a twenty-year period (Auerhahn, 2007).…”

“…In addition to increases in the numbers of offenders undergoing probation supervision in California, the composition of the probation population has gone through some profound changes. These include increases in the proportional representation of offenders with lengthy and violent criminal histories, as well as an increase of over 35 percent in the proportion of offenders undergoing probation supervision for a violent conviction offense over a twentyyear period (Auerhahn, 2003(Auerhahn, , 2007.…”

“…Another example of the impacts of the systemic reality of criminal justice can be seen in the changing nature of probation populations (Auerhahn, 2007). For quite some time, the role of probation as a diversionary mechanism to slow prison growth has been recognized (Finn, 1984;Lemert, 1993), but little attention has been given to analyzing the impact that changes in sentencing policy and practice have had on the compositional dynamics of this, the largest correctional population.…”

How you can tell if the simulations in computational criminology are any good

“…Interpersonal cooperation and competition (Leik and Meeker 1995) is a useful illustration from sociology. Examples from criminology include the illegal actions of individuals (Vilaand and Cohen 1993; van Baal 2004;Perez and Dray 2005;Groff 2007) and wider systemic functioning (Blumstein 1967;Austin et al 2007;Auerhahn 2007).…”