System Rates: An Approach to Comprehensive Criminal Justice Planning

It has proven far easier to describe the need for a systems approach to criminal justice planning than to design such an approach. This paper describes a planning design, an outline of procedures that will prepare a criminal justice system to deter mine what actions to undertake and how to evaluate the impact of such actions. This design requires a very broad conception of the criminal justice system and a conception of impact far broader than such notions as crime rates or recidivism.