In Appendix I we illustrate some points about Holmes's Bad Man by presenting a simplified model of Anglo-American criminal process in the form of a flowchart entitled ‘The Bad Man in Boston’. This chart depicts the criminal process as a series of decisions and events, involving a variety of participants with different roles to perform at different stages in the process. When the Bad Man is viewed in the context of this process, it is easy to see that he is only one of a number of participants, and that his concern with predicting future events is only one aspect of a complex cluster of tasks that occur at different points in the process, in which other tasks are involved, such as detection, determining what has happened in the past, and sentencing.

In Chapter 2 we focused mainly, but not entirely, on the standpoint of the rule-maker, that is to say on actors who are in a position to introduce, change or adjust a rule in the process of tackling a problem.