An Analytical Model of the Passage of Defendants through a Court System

Abstract

A random sample of 1,067 adult arrest cases for non-summary offenses was drawn from Philadelphia Police Department files and each case was traced through the court proceedings to the point of exit from the judicial system. Careful statistical analyses of the pass age times between arrest and exit revealed that a set of differential equations could be used to model the passage of a defendant between major events in the judicial process. The fit of the data to the descrip tive equations is excellent and allows the model to be used for quan titative as well as qualitative aspects of court research, planning, and evaluation.

Following an introduction to this study and a description of the characteristics of the random sample, passage states of the court system are defined and explicit model equations describing defen dant flow through the court are developed. The equation solutions are then explored as they relate to defendant passage times extracted from the random sample. Finally, potential uses of the model are discussed, some of which are currently being explored by the authors. A number of examples of interest to court research personnel as well as court administrators are cited.