This paper describes the development of a new methodology tor making long ' term projections of the Prison Population. The mn ethodologv is based on a flow model of offenders in and oui of prison, allowing the effect of changes in court sentencing policy to be predicted. The heart of the methodology is a new theory of offending, al/owing the number of first time offenders to be predicted and also the recidivism ot those released from prison.-00000-In 1996 the Operational Research Unit of the Home Office was asked to develop a new 'Long Term' methodology to forecast the Prison Population in England and Wales. The requirement was to be able to predict the average population (broken down by age, sex, and type of offence) in any year up to around five years in advance.The purpose of these long term forecasts is to inform the Prison Agency's programme of estate management (cg how many new prisons to build, how many to refurbish, how many to close). The existing methods of projection were based on regression and time series models. The problem with such an approach is that as well as projecting changes in the nature of criminal offending, one must also predict changes in sentencing policy by the courts. Since 1993 there as been a dramatic increase (10 to 15%), year upon year, in the use of custodial (prison) sentences by the courts. It is difficult to see how a time series or regression approach can be helpful in such circumstances. Instead it was decided to investigate the possibility of building a 'flow' model which could be used to test the consequences of various policy scenarios (cg reduce the use of custody by 10% for non-violent crime or 'three strikes and you're out'). The final model was Tizo ar/ide remains Coma Gopvriht OR Insight Vol II Issue / -January-March /998 3 intended to be easily used by policy makers to test the results of various policy options.As we will see below, the construction of a flow model requires some understanding of the behaviour of offenders when confronted with the Criminal Justice System. This has resulted in the development of a novel but remarkably accurate theory of offending which will be described in this paper.Together, the 'flow model' and the theory of offending make exceptionally accurate predictions' of the prison population for years up to 1996 and, given accurate scenarios, can be expected to make similarly good future predictions.We describe below a summary of the main features of our model which is near completion. We hope to publish a more detailed description in the near future. A flow modelOne of the reasons for using a flow model is the inherent stability of the prison population over a period of a few years. This is partly due to the greater contributions of those with long sentences to the population (generally, one 'two year' sentence has the same contribution as two 'one year' sentences). One has good information about the current prison population and in particular about long sentence prisoners. As these make a large contribution to the total, they make up ...

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Most engineering faculty will agree that student engineers need a strong foundation in engineering ethics. Incorporating professional ethics into an already crowded engineering curriculum can be difficult. The engineering faculty at the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) have implemented a multidisciplinary approach to teaching ethics outside of the classroom environment. Our "Engineering Ethics Lunches" bring students and faculty from all four engineering disciplines: Electrical, Civil, Mechanical and Naval Architecture/Marine Engineering together in small groups to discuss ethics as they uniquely apply to the engineering discipline. Historically, ethics instruction at USCGA has been based upon a core "Morals and Ethics" course taken by all students, regardless of major. While this course provides the students with a good foundation in classical ethics theory, it did not include "engineering ethics". Specific instruction on engineering ethics was left to the instructors of each major's senior design capstone course. However, depending upon the knowledge, interest or even class time available to the individual faculty members, this instruction was inconsistent and varied each year. Starting in the 2006-2007 academic year, in an effort to improve upon and formalize ethics instruction for all engineering students, the four instructors of each major's senior design capstone project began holding multidisciplinary "Engineering Ethics Lunches". Students and faculty form small groups during scheduled lunches to discuss specific ethical topics related to the engineering profession. The discussions are based upon assigned readings and suggested talking points developed jointly by the faculty. Afterwards, the students are required to submit essays reviewing their discussions and answering an ethical question based upon the topic. Now in its fourth semester, the multidisciplinary ethics lunches have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both the instructors and students. This paper will discuss the format of the multidisciplinary ethics discussions, the type of topics covered and the authors' efforts to develop a handbook to reduce the preparation required for future lunches. The paper will also review the advantages of these lunches, including reduced workload for instructors and the integration of ethics into the curriculum without displacing discipline-specific engineering topics.

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Effective written communication is one of the most important skills an engineer can have. Yet, growing numbers of undergraduate students leave first-year composition courses without the skills, self-discipline and strategies to write effectively. This is especially troublesome for engineering students as they transition to the writing skills and styles appropriate to engineering at the same time as they struggle to improve their fundamental writing skills. In an effort to develop the writing skills of engineering undergraduates at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the Electrical Engineering and Naval Architecture/Marine Engineering programs have developed a close collaboration with the USCGA writing center. Initially this collaboration focused on how instructors could improve their grading and instruction of writing within engineering courses. As the relationship matured, focus was shifted to the importance of educating the writing center staff on the unique attributes of engineering writing as well as the engineering-specific writing skills expected of students by faculty. Unable to locate a writing guide that specifically met our undergraduate engineering needs, the writing center and Engineering faculty developed a handbook that outlines an effective engineering writing process and style for students, faculty, and writing center tutors. This paper provides an overview of the challenges the authors have experienced teaching writing within engineering courses and the benefits of collaboration with the writing center. Justification for the development of an engineering writing handbook includes: helping engineering students make the transition from first-year expository writing to upper level technical writing; orienting new faculty to institutional writing conventions; and clarifying expectations for engineering writing among students, faculty, and the existing pool of cross-disciplinary writing center tutors. Importantly, the engineering writing handbook provides a standard that ideally can be applied across all USCGA engineering courses. It thereby reduces the displacement of classroom content resulting from the need to provide extensive writing instruction in each course. Development of the handbook, recent internal applications, its status, and the possible application of USCGA experiences to other programs are discussed.