"Usually, the idea is, 'I see it, I like it, I want it, I'll buy it and damn the consequences, ' " says Donald W. Black, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa.
"If we had not had that group of people with the vision to put this thing together and we tried to do it today, I think it would be damn near impossible, " said Jimmy Ray, director of Harris County's Justice Information Management System (JIMS).