This week, I read “An O.R. Missionary’s Visits to the Criminal Justice System” by Alfred Blumstein that appeared in the February issue of Operations Research (Read a synopsis of his article here). I remember the talk in 2005, which was an inspiration to me and a big reason why I started this blog on public policy OR. Dr. Blumstein's contributions to the criminal justice system are nothing short of amazing--he was even awarded the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research on criminal careers.
What I find interesting about Dr. Blumstein's approach to the criminal justice system is that he takes a systems-level approach and analyzes the impacts of each decision (i.e., sentencing guidelines) on the entire system to get counter-intuitive results.
