Abstract
Thinking about reducing crime through incarceration inevitably leads to deterrence and incapacitation, and incapacitation inevitably leads to measuring individual offending frequency or lambda, since the high-lambda offenders would be priority candidates for incarceration. A second major issue involves estimating the duration of a criminal career, and especially the residual career after a particular intervention, since longer sentences would waste prison capacity. That immersion in criminal careers inevitably leads to questions of sequences of crime types over the course of a career, their seriousness, and specialization. And that raises questions about the distribution of all these parameters and their determinants. With all these questions on the table, it was natural for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to create a panel to start sorting them out and pointing directions for the future.
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