MODELING COURT DELAY
Quantitative modeling using operations research and related techniques has much less promise for mitigating court delay than proponents anticipate. Results to date have been discouraging, largely because trial court process is exceptionally difficult to model. There is no consistent sequence or path, and critical discretionary decisions are made by professionals based on individualized criteria that are hard to code. Also, participants (litigants and lawyers) are not part of the organization in any normal sense: Their very purpose is conflict, and they are as likely to try to subvert the court operation as support it. Manipulating court incentive structures is a more promising management approach.
Models of a Total Criminal Justice System
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.
Reconceptualizing Vagrancy and Reconstructing the Vagrant: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Criminal Law Reform in Canada, 1953-1972
This article explores significant reforms to the vagrancy section of the Criminal Code during the mid-to-late twentieth century. By locating the reforms within their unique social, political, and economic climates, I examine how they reconceptualized the offence of vagrancy and concomitantly reconstructed the vagrant as a social problem. The reforms played a seminal role in reducing the number of vagrancy offences, eventually leading to the demise of vagrancy in the criminal law. Yet, while the "vagrant" ceased to exist in the law, the law still continues to preserve vestiges of the vagrant in a highly gendered manner.