Phila. D.A.'s Office anticipates changes in tracking data

Since her promotion after Williams took office in January, Hart has joined other top lieutenants in helping to advance his agenda. Among other priorities, she has been helping to develop his plan for so-called zone prosecutions, in which teams of prosecutors would be assigned to pursue cases grouped by neighborhood.

Hart also wants to use social science to help the office prioritize prosecutions.

She has already reached out to Richard Berk, a pioneering criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania and developer of a computerized way to identify high-risk parolees for the city Probation Department.

Berk and Hart are exploring ways to use the same computer model to identify which low-risk defendants can safely be diverted to treatment programs and which dangerous ones need to be hammered with, in Hart's social-science argot, "long, incapacitating sentences."

In large part, Hart said, her job is to figure out ways to apply new methods to old prosecutorial problems.

"We've always been about the business of figuring out risk," she said. "We just haven't done it very scientifically."

Contact staff writer Craig R. McCoy at 215-854-4821 or cmccoy@phillynews.com.

Inquirer staff writer Nancy Phillips contributed to this article.