Shiny

The Prison Analyst's Dilemma - Using R to Model Recidivism

Recidivism, the rate at which those released from incarceration return or commit new crimes, is one of society’s most difficult social problems. The official estimate is that 55% of former prisoners will return within 60 months. Recidivism is also, I discovered, one of the most challenging things to model and understand statistically. In this blog post, I describe our efforts to build this simulation, including how we settled on some fairly basic control structures (for loops) without giving up too much in terms of efficiency and readability.