241 M.D. Maltz and S.K. Rice (eds.), Envisioning Criminology: Researchers on Research as a Process of Discovery, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-15868-6_26, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 Like so many others, I fell into a “life of crime” by accident. An electrical engineer by training, my first post-postdoc job was with an engineering consulting firm, where I was engaged in doing operations research, mostly for the US Navy. While I was there, in the late 1960s, the firm was commissioned to develop a new management information system for the Boston Police Department, and I was assigned to work on improving the BPD’s communications system. As the project wound down, I was approached by the federal agency sponsoring the work, the US Justice Department’s Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (the predecessor twice removed from the Office of Justice Programs), to see if I would take a 2-year leave of absence and help put together the newly formed National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (now NIJ). When I broached the subject to my firm, they said that I could only take a 1-year leave, which I thought would be inadequate: from my experience in dealing with the Navy, I knew that it takes a year to learn your way around the bureaucracy and little time to make any progress. So I quit and instead moved to Washington for what turned out to be a 3-year stint at NIJ. But I had a bit of difficulty in dealing with the way research was done in the softer areas of crimi- nal justice research. In fact, when I first became interested in studying crime and criminal justice, I was struck by the fact that most of the research in the field relied almost exclusively on numerical and statistical techniques to analyze data, with the holy “ p < 0.05” criterion being the sought-after standard of success; graphical analyses of data were few and far between (and its practice was dismissively called “data dredging”). You were supposed to pro- pound a theory and test the data to see if it passed the ultimate test of “statistical significance”: I had to learn just what it meant, since I had never taken any statistics course (just one on probability the- ory), let alone one that focused on social science. As an undergraduate student in engineering, I was continually dealing with data that we had to present using graphs. We spent a great deal of time in the lab collecting data. Whether it was adding weight to a spring and measuring how much it stretched as a function of weight, or mea- suring the time it took for an object to fall differ- ent distances, or changing the voltage on the gate of a transistor and measuring how much the out- put voltage changed—all of these data collection exercises were followed by graphing the data. These as well as any of a hundred other examples imbued in me and my fellow students the value M.D. Maltz (*) University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: maltzmd@gmail.com Sometimes Pictures Tell the Story Michael D. Maltz maltzmd@gmail.com