utionality of categorizing, treating, or even penalizing an individual on the basis of the prediction of future behavior on the basis of some quantitative procedure. This issue is of the utmost significance, and is involved in a number of criminal justice policy debates, such as the continued incarceration sex offender subsequent to the completion of prescribed penal sentences on the basis of a prediction of future behavior. To sluff over this issue in such a caviler manner places the author's credibility in question. In their development of the problem investigated in the study reported in the article, the authors acknowledged the contention that the prediction of future criminal activity on the basis of positive drug test results at the time of arrest is a needless and costly exercise, as other data known about arrestees, such as prior criminal history, are equally good predictors of future criminal activity. This contention is referred to as the redundancy thesis, and it was explored in some depth by the authors.
The authors justified the conduct of the research reported in the article by stating that, while the differential significance of drug use in predicting future offending, and the differential significance of factors such as prior criminal history in predicting future offending have been studied, the association between the two variables in predicting future offending had not, to their knowledge, been studied. Therefore, the study reported in this a
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