Because of the importance in a democracy of keeping checks and balances among institutions that have the power to decide on matters affecting individual life or liberty, independent and highly fragmented institutions comprising the criminal justice system exist. This design at the micro level usually results in great difficulty in coordinating efforts at the macro level to maintain an appropriate balance of workload and resources in various phases of the criminal justice system. Efforts in the United States to achieve that synthesis during the 1970's under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration were largely unsuccessful, primarily because the critical "upstream" problem was to reduce crime and the knowledge base at the time was inadequate. The current situation of overcrowded prisons desperately calls for coherent planning. Overcrowding is well-suited to coordinated planning because it is an inherently "downstream" problem, and methods and knowledge for addressing it are readily available. With the growing recognition of the distinction between the micro need for fragmentation and the macro need for integration, and with the growing availability of methods and knowledge bases for conducting coherent planning, new opportunities exist to introduce more balance in criminal justice system operation and to anticipate consequences of operational or policy changes. 10 references and 2 figures