Economists view questions of crime and its control as a special case of the more pervasive social problem of mediating the conflict of personal interest resulting from relationships which have external effects. However, an economic analysis of criminal justice is incomplete without a specification of an explicit evolutionary dynamic, a mechanism through which developing structural inadequacies are identified and compensatory responses to them formulated and implemented. The contribution of biological analysis is the recognition that basic indeterminacies in the evolutionary process make unwise any value judgments regarding optimality and progress. Evolutionary biology also teaches that the study of evolving systems whose histories are not yet complete requires that both theoretical issues of deterministic prediction and empirical questions of methods of observation and hypothesis testing be reconsidered with particular care. Like analysis of natural selection, institutional analysis in criminal justice should rest on examinations of patterns and their shifts in the face of specific shifts in environmental shifts over long time periods. Like its biological counterpart, the institutional framework incorporates a theory of structural change which avoids the ascription of final causes and which therefore permits a seeking, through careful comparative analysis, both a means of empirical testing and a source of theoretical insight. Footnotes which contain references are supplied.