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Joan E. Jacoby

Joan E. Jacoby was Director of the Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia who co-led the 1969 team that designed PROMIS alongside Charles R. Work and project manager Bill Hamilton, and later directed national prosecution research programs at the National Center for Prosecution Management and the Bureau of Social Science Research.

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Joan E. Jacoby received a B.A. in sociology from Boston University and an M.A. in statistics from The American University. She is a published criminologist with work spanning prosecution management, criminal statistics, and information systems design.

Role in PROMIS Development

In 1969, while serving as Director of the Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia, Jacoby co-led the team commissioned by U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Flannery to design a computer-based case management system for the DC U.S. Attorney's Office, funded by a $60,000 LEAA grant (70-DF-047) administered through Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. The co-directors of the project were Jacoby and Charles R. Work (then Deputy Chief of the Superior Court Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office), with Bill Hamilton serving as project manager as a senior consultant at Peat Marwick. The resulting system was named the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) and deployed on January 1, 1971.1

Jacoby also developed a competing proposal during this period: a 1970 paper titled "Project TRACE — A System for the Tracking, Retrieval and Analysis of Criminal Events," presented at the Urban and Regional Information Systems Proceedings on November 12, 1970. Project TRACE (Tracking Retrieval and Analysis of Criminal Events) shared PROMIS's subject-in-process tracking concept but was not adopted for the federal program.23

National Center for Prosecution Management

After her time at the Office of Crime Analysis, Jacoby served as Executive Director of the National Center for Prosecution Management, a nonprofit corporation established by the Department of Justice with LEAA funding to provide management and technical assistance to prosecutors nationwide and conduct research on the prosecution function.1

Bureau of Social Science Research

In 1975, Jacoby became a Research Associate at the Bureau of Social Science Research, where she directed national programs of research in prosecution and criminal justice. She subsequently became Executive Director of the Jefferson Institute in Washington, D.C.1

Sources

  1. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report. House Report 102-857, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, September 10, 1992. ↩
  2. Office of Justice Programs, National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Abstract: "Project TRACE (Tracking, Retrieval and Analysis of Criminal Events) — Final Report." OJP Virtual Library. ↩
  3. Sessions, Vivian S. Directory of Data Bases in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Science Associates International, 1974. ↩

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