Generalized Network Model of the Criminal Justice System User's Guide

• NCJ Number: 92734
• Author(s): J E Richards; S J Deutsch
• Date Published: Unknown
• Length: 77 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78 NI-AX-0003
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice; US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub
• Corporate Author: Georgia Institute of Technology
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

A stochastic network model which simulates the criminal careers of individual offenders uses the Generalized Network Simulator (GNS) to track offenders from their first arrest through each subsequent arrest and processing by the criminal justice system.

Abstract

This tracking continues until the offender's death or cessation of involvement in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system is modeled with resource constraints which impose delays on the processing of offenders. Annual time series data used in the model include the costs of operating the system, delay times in processing offenders, and several statistics on the offenders and their criminal careers. These data serve as excellent measures of performance for experimental analysis. Other collected statistics and their distributions aid in the empirical evaluation of the model structure and offender flows. This report describes and gives examples of the model's input, displays representative outputs from running the model, and lists the subroutines which are specially adapted to the simulation of criminals. Three references are listed. (Author summary modified)