On the Transfer of Some OR/MS Technology to Criminal Justice

The very first sentence of the Editorial Policy of Interfaces says that this publication “is concerned with the operational problems of using management science and operations research.” Further on in the same policy statement it is stated that “exemplary content” could include “items briefly reporting specific applications, such as a first time application of a particular algorithm in a given industry.” It is our intent here to provide a brief case history, consistent with these concerns, of the application to criminal justice systems analysis and program evaluation of approaches very familiar to reliability engineers and biostatisticians, which turn out to provide much more powerful statistical tools for such assessments.