Highlights
What happens to crime studies of programs when compared to the best research methods?
The lesson is that it’s very hard to engineer social change through anti-crime programs. The bottom line is that we are not very good at understanding crime and what it takes to prevent or reduce it.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Thirty-five years of explaining crime data while directing multi-award-winning public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Retired federal senior spokesperson. Interviewed multiple times by every national news outlet.
Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs-University of Maryland, University College.
Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Certificate of Advanced Study-Johns Hopkins University. Former police officer.
Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization” available at Amazon and additional booksellers.
Quotes
All quotes are edited for brevity.
Introduction
The only “successful” program that reduces crime seems to be proactive policing and offender accountability.
No one is suggesting that programs designed to help those in need or caught up in the justice system shouldn’t be offered. Our moral or religious dictates tell us that we should be compassionate, caring people. There’s nothing wrong with offering drug or mental health treatment or teaching an inmate how to read.
The problem is the impact of programs and whether or not they make society safer. That can only be based on superb research methods and successful program replication. That’s the focus of this article.
Opinion
This article will make some readers upset. YOU believe that you know what works.
Everyone in the justice system believes that they know what will reduce crime. After decades in the system, I encountered a wide array of “experts” who insisted that their preferred methods lower crime. They all had impeccable academic credentials or had spent decades in the justice system. They ranged from police chiefs to respected academics to people with years of experience in their communities.
Yet many (most?) have simply been wrong.
Yes, I understand that we in the system just can’t tell citizens that nothing works or nothing works well. But if we were honest, we would understand that engineering social change is a hell of a lot harder than we make it. Sure, we could flood crime hot spots with a ton of police officers but we couldn’t do it for long; we don’t have the person power.
So we tell people what we “believe” to be true with very limited empirical evidence to back it up. That is our reality.
Per big city police crime dashboards, violence in 2023 shows signs of decreasing. When one large city chief of police was asked why, he stated that he sent police vehicles to high-crime hot spots and told them to turn on their emergency lights for a short period of time. If that were true, we could solve or reduce the violence problem tomorrow.
Community organizers insist that all delinquent youth need is job training and meaningful activities to keep them occupied.
Parole and probation leadership state that offenders under community supervision need housing, health care, jobs, drug and mental health treatment, and mentorship.
There’s little authoritative and/or replicated data to support any of the above.
For two decades, crime fell considerably (up to 2015 when the National Crime Victimization Survey stated that violence increased by 28 percent) yet there wasn’t a person in the country who could provide definitive reasons as to why crime fell.
The bottom line is that we are not very good at understanding crime and what it takes to prevent it.
National Criminal Justice Association Article
The National Criminal Justice Association offered an article titled, Do Studies Show ‘Lasting Benefit’ Of Anticrime Programs?
Summation:
“A new paper by University of Virginia law Prof. Megan Stevenson surveys more than 50 years of “randomized controlled trials” (RCTs) in criminal justice research and argues that almost no interventions have lasting benefit, and the ones that do don’t replicate in other settings.”
“RCT, a form of experiment used to control factors not under the direct control of researchers, is often called the gold standard of research methods.”
“Writing in the Boston University Law Review, Stevenson says that the relatively few RCT studies of anticrime efforts that survive the academic review process “are biased toward showing that the intervention evaluated was more successful than it actually was.”
“One example cited by Stevenson is the widely publicized Project Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (“Project HOPE”). It features a “swift, certain, and fair” punishment model in which a probation violation such as a positive drug test may result in a certain and immediate, but relatively mild sanction, such as twenty-four hours in jail.”
“One randomized controlled trial study showed that Project HOPE led to large reductions in both drug use and time incarcerated, with long-lasting effects.”
“The National Institute of Justice funded new studies to replicate Project HOPE’s success across five sites. Stevenson says. “The results were not promising: “swift, certain, and fair” sanctioning did not offer any detectable improvements over the status quo. While jurisdictions may continue to operate in a HOPE-like fashion, the balloon of optimism has largely deflated.”
Research
The gold standard for research is random assignment where those getting the intervention (experimental group) have an equal chance of getting the program with those in a control (comparison) group. If successful, then the program is replicated in other jurisdictions.
Then researchers collect similar studies (known as a meta-analysis or literature review) and come to firm conclusions.
Methodology is far more complicated than I describe it, and it’s impossible to do random assignments for many programs, but that’s how we come to grips with whether a program works.
The Best Studies In Crime Research?
To my knowledge, there are two programs with hundreds of high-quality studies on crime, proactive policing and criminal rehabilitation. Proactive policing showed reductions in crime but there were questions as to the degree of success. Criminal rehabilitation programs mostly failed to reduce recidivism and when they did, the results were very small.
The proactive policing study (a literature review) was offered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2017. It was financed by the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. The criminal rehabilitation study (another literature review) was offered by Vanderbilt University in 2019 and, again, it was funded by the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice (NIJ). NIJ-funded research carries robust quality controls.
Pushback
Making the statements above will cause immense anger. There are research organizations and advocates who will demand clarification. They will offer their studies showing that program interventions DO work.
Example: Better job prospects. Higher wages. A greater chance of staying out of jail. “Those are the key outcomes that we discovered for incarcerated people who get an education while serving their time.”
“Our findings were published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. They are based on an analysis of research studies on the effects of prison education in the U.S. We examined a range of programs, from adult basic education to college. We analyzed 152 data points from 79 research papers published between 1980 and 2023. Specifically, our analysis found: Reduced recidivism: Participating in prison education decreases the chances of recidivism by 6.7 percentage points – from 46% to 39.3%.”
So what are we supposed to make of these claims when the data from the US Department of Justice states that programs for offenders do not make a difference as to recidivism?
The US Department of Justice Study stated that: “There were no statistically significant reductions in recidivism found for other types of rehabilitation programs such as:
- work-related programs,
- academic programs,
- supportive residential programs,
- intensive supervision (such as reduced probation or parole caseloads),
- multimodal/mixed treatments (such as individual case management),
- and restorative interventions.”
And regardless, even if there are small reductions in reincarcerations or modest personal economic improvements (study above), most offenders associated with most programs failed per the combination of rearrests and incarcerations.
The study’s methodology is impressive and I urge readers to read it and form their own opinions. It’s just hard to reconcile this with previous federal data.
The study above used returns to prison as their method of recidivism when the US Sentencing Commission states that rearrests are the preferred method to evaluate a program. This study used three years of recidivism data while the US Department of Justice uses 10 years of rearrests and incarcerations. Adding arrests and a longer period of measurement may alter outcomes significantly.
Other Examples
State Prison Recidivism: Several states offer data stating that they reduce recidivism significantly among those released from prison yet every USDOJ study consistently shows that the rates of national rearrest and incarceration for released inmates remain astoundingly and consistently high.
States offered the same programs cited as ineffective by the US Department of Justice yet they “succeeded” where investigators using the best research techniques state that the programs they used mostly failed via a literature review. Detractors opine that the “successful” states simply lowered the bar as to offender accountability for crimes and serious technical violations.
Violence Interrupters: Violence interrupters come to mind. There is no doubt that they can diffuse potentially violent situations but what happens after that? Decades of being abused as a child, massive substance abuse, and problems with mental health won’t disappear because of an intervention. Yet violence interrupters are taking credit for crime declines in some cities.
Gun Violence: There are 350-400 million firearms in the hands of private citizens and per Gallup, 52 percent of American households have firearms yet there are people who insist that “gun violence” can be controlled through restrictions on ownership beyond adjudicated offenders and those with serious mental health issues through involuntary commitment. That approach has immense logistical and Constitutional challenges. Only 10 percent of violent crimes involve firearms per the US Department of Justice. Courts routinely reject (some-not all) firearm restrictions. I understand the grief of victims of gun and mass violence but there is little difference between AR-15s and the average hunting rifle (with multiple magazines). Most mass shootings involve handguns. Per FBI data, the overwhelming number of gun-related crimes involve handguns, not rifles. To have any meaningful impact, you would have to ban the Constitutionally protected ownership of all handguns.
Drug Decriminalization: Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children.
When the law was approved by 58% of Oregon voters three years ago, supporters championed Measure 110 as a revolutionary approach that would transform addiction by minimizing penalties for drug use and investing instead in recovery.
But even top Democratic lawmakers who backed the law, which will likely dominate the upcoming legislative session, say they’re now open to revisiting it after the biggest increase in synthetic opioid deaths among states that have reported their numbers.
Kendra’s Law: “An investigation reveals that legislation known as Kendra’s Law, which has been held up as a national model for the treatment and handling of the seriously mentally ill by forcing them into treatment programs when necessary, is failing, Amy Julia Harris and Jan Ransom report for the New York Times.”
“The investigation found that people under Kendra’s Law orders have been accused of committing more than 380 subway shovings, beatings, stabbings and other violent acts in the past five years alone, more than a third of which took place in New York City. In addition, more than 90 people have killed themselves while subject to Kendra’s Law orders in the past decade.”
I could fill pages with additional examples of programs not working or not working well.
Does Anything Work?
Once we move beyond programs and focus on societal changes, the answer is yes.
We reduced drinking and driving by 36 percent, domestic violence by 60 percent, and drug use through increased societal pressure.
Why can’t we do the same for violence? We can when communities and the larger society enforce their will. The emphasis here is not programs; it’s the pressure we all exert as a community, society, and the media. That philosophy was embedded in the successful “McGruff-Take A Bite Out Of Crime” national media campaign that I helped guide.
Does Anything Work? Child Abuse And Neglect
“The connection between the family and crime is not a new idea. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson — whose work on the link between institutions like the family and crime spans decades — observed that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of … violence across cities in the United States.”
“In a new study from the Institute for Family Studies, we, along with our co-authors Joseph Price and Seth Cannon, add to the body of evidence backing Sampson’s observation. We find that cities with above-median levels of single parenthood have violent crime and homicide rates that are 118% and 255% higher, respectively, than cities with below-median levels of single parenthood.”
Some programs sent social workers and nurses into the homes of troubled youth, most from “broken” homes that were successful because they reinforced what it takes to love, support and respect children in challenged households.
Conclusions
I entered the justice system as a police cadet decades ago yet the criminal justice system largely remains the same today.
Why has so little changed? It’s because there are few research programs indicating success.
From the author of the cited study powering this article: “This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting impact when evaluated with gold-standard methods of causal inference.”
“This claim will not be controversial to anyone immersed in the literature (emphasis added). But, like a dirty secret, it almost never gets seriously acknowledged or discussed. Nor is it widely known beyond the small circle of people trained in statistical methods of causal inference. The research that people hear about shows the rare cases of success; the remainder gets filtered from public view.”
“When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable via RCT and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in our ability to engineer change with this type of intervention (emphasis added).”
The essence of her argument is that it’s tough to engineer social change through programs.
There may be solutions but until we admit that social engineering via programs has a terrible track record, what works will never be found. Rather than call for a national convention to discuss our failures and focus on how to fix them, advocates insist that they DO work, thus impeding progress. We need a dramatically increased research budget.
When I left policing and studied criminology, I was told that society controls crime, not the justice system. Whether one beats their spouse or buys stolen items or engages in violence or does hard drugs or drives while intoxicated is primarily a matter for families, communities, and the larger society.
Based on the best available evidence, my criminology professors were correct.
When I went to college decades ago, there were studies suggesting that the impact of policing on crime reduction was limited. But my professors also said that if you doubt the impact of law enforcement, remove them and see what happens.
Through massively declining arrests and plummeting crimes solved because of thousands of police officers leaving, it may have contributed to the largest national percentage increase in violent crime (44 percent) in 2022 per the National Crime Victimization Survey’s latest data.
There’s a difference between what we passionately believe and what works, or what works well.
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