NCJ Number
87436
Editor(s)
M E Sherman
Date Published
1977
Length
251 pages
Annotation
Following an overall view of strategies for studying crime patterns, essays deal with a demographic approach to crime's future, the impact of leadership ideologies on future criminal justice scenarios, an economist's approach to crime's future, and approaches to correctional forecasting.
Abstract
The opening essay discusses strategies in crime futurology in terms of time frame and orientation. The time-frame options are short-term forecasting (1-3 years), long-range thinking (5-10 years), and future studies (25 years and beyond). The orientations are termed descriptive, exploratory, and prescriptive. Research strategy and tactics for crime futurology are proposed. Another essay provides a framework for predicting future crime patterns by comparing census data with arrest statistics for homicide, robbery, burglary, and auto theft in five American cities from 1960 to 1970. The third study develops scenarios for criminal justice policy responses to future social trends in accordance with the 'liberal' or 'conservative' ideologies held by criminal justice leadership groups. Liberal and conservative scenarios are developed for the topics of prospects for crime reduction; crime prevention in the contexts of culture, education, and the family; victimless crimes; the courts; State prisons; alternatives to conventional prisons; the treatment of juvenile offenders; and the Federal role. The first section of the next study examines the relationship between age, unemployment, and crime rate, and the second section develops an econometric model that includes possible causal factors that correlate with changes in the incidence of crime. In the concluding essay, two general methods of correctional forecasting -- 'policy-blind' and 'policy-informed' -- are described, and the policy-informed approach examines the impact of two policy approaches upon various components of the criminal justice system, most notably corrections. For individual entries, see NCJ 87437-41.