NCJ Number
73030
Date Published
1980
Length
362 pages
Annotation
The report surveys contemporary criminal justice literature in an attempt to determine if a practical way exists to improve productivity measurement for a criminal justice agency or program.
Abstract
An introductory review of the literature establishes the need for law enforcement agencies to develop effective management systems required to facilitate program evaluation and program direction. Current law enforcement productivity measurement techniques are reviewed, including the application of failure rate analysis to recidivism, incapacitation and deterrence effect analysis, behavior prediction, system modeling, patrol allocation modeling, inventory modeling, crime seriousness indexing, and the service package concept. Another section surveys the literature which defines the problems encountered in attempting evaluation and measurement in criminal justice, such as definitional differences of recidivism, the lack of clear criminal justice system relationships between incapacitation and deterrence, the use of models and statistical or operations research techniques which are not totally applicable, the lack of total crime statistics or even of an agreement on how to delineate the area of unreported crime, and the lack of suitable input data for evaluation of the criminal justice system as a total system or for subsystem analysis. It is suggested that a valid evaluation method can be generated using the two concepts of a total criminal justice system model which defines interagency and environmental reactions and relationships and a crime seriousness or weighting index to establish the relative value of criminal justice activities applied to committed or prevented crimes. Internal references are made to the 82 entries included in the appended bibliography.