Criminal justice reform should be guided by evidence, not ideology, anecdote or magical thinking, writes Professor John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania in Vital City
The field of experimental criminology has become
influential in designing, testing and evaluating criminal justice reforms and
reporting their results, even when results are contrary to popularly held
beliefs. After all, science advances by trial and error and generating findings
sometimes that are at odds with prevailing beliefs. Science is about generating
objective evidence. The only faith required is the belief in the scientific
method. Findings should be objective as possible, recognizing that choices of
statistical analyses and program evaluation designs can change findings. Hence
the need for replication of results in other settings and reproductions of
results when new methods develop.
In the context of criminal justice reform, social
programs that do not show evidence of being effective at reducing crime or that
increase crime should be redesigned or abandoned, regardless of political
popularity. The esteemed economists John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman
rarely agreed, but there are two quotes that offer useful guides for criminal
justice reform efforts. John Maynard Keynes is attributed as stating “When the
facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” Similarly, Milton
Friedman stated,, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs
by their intentions rather than their results.”
Criminal justice reform efforts should be guided by
a basic understanding of the facts of crime and criminal offenders, and by
scientific findings from social programs that have been shown to prevent crime
and minimize the use of the criminal justice system. Over 100 hundred years of
research has revealed seven indisputable facts about crime and offenders:
First, crime is highly concentrated by place. As little as 3% of
addresses and 5% of street blocks account for more than 50% of crimes reported
by citizens to the police. The concentration of crime is even greater if one
focuses on more serious crimes that are less subject to under-reporting, such
as shootings and homicides.
Second, crime is
also concentrated by times of day, days of the week and months. Summers,
nights and weekends are peak times for violence. Burglaries happen during the
middle of the day when homes are empty and people are away at work, school, or
on errands.
Third, crime is highly concentrated among active offenders. Most
of the criminal offending in the population is generated by a small fraction of
chronic offenders, such that the incapacitation of one high-volume offender
abates an estimated 9.4 felony offenses.
Fourth, just as crimes are highly concentrated among places and people,
so are the social costs of crime. A subset of serious crimes generates the
most harm. Social costs of crime derived from jury awards, the willingness to
pay to avoid specific crimes, costs to victims, criminal justice system costs
and from sentences imposed for a given offense all show that violent crimes are
the costliest.
Sixth, offenders do not specialize in specific offense patterns.
Rather, active offenders tend to engage in what could be called a “cafeteria
style” of offending and select a lot of different offenses from a menu of
options. While some offenders show repeat behaviors, even the most optimistic
approaches to estimating offense specialization can only find some modest evidence
of offending preferences.
Seventh, criminal offending occurs within social networks, and
the most active offenders tend to be clustered within dense criminal networks.
One can debate about which theories explain these
facts the best, but the facts are indisputable. They exist across time periods,
demographic groups, countries and whether crime is measured by official records
or self-reported offending and victimization.
The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists
focuses on fostering informal and formal social control.
Evidence-based crime policy should be guided by
programs that confront these basic facts. The best evidence to guide policy are
programs or interventions that have been experimented with in the real world,
are attuned to the distribution of crime and offenders, can be scaled up to the
population, are sustainable and are constitutional. We are fortunate that
criminology has generated an abundance of experimental and quasi-experimental
evidence over the past 70 years for what works to prevent crime. This evidence,
however, has been largely absent from the current policy debates on criminal justice
reform. A truly progressive criminal justice reform should be guided by
evidence, not ideology, anecdote, or magical thinking.
The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists
focuses on fostering informal and formal social control. Social control focuses
on the constrained view of human behavior, or that society must control places
and people to have a lawful society. Informal social control typically refers
to the spectrum of actions taken by family, friends, neighbors and schools to
maintain norms and rules. Formal social control refers to the exercise of the
state to use sanctions or the threat of sanctions to enforce norms to prevent
crime and illegal conduct. In conventional terms, formal social control is
expressed through the functions of police, prosecutors and judges, and includes
the other mechanisms of the criminal justice system.
Informal and formal social control are clearly
linked to each other. While community safety is primarily produced by informal
social control, high-crime areas are in particular need of formal social
control like the presence of effective police and prosecutors when neighbors
are unable to regulate the conduct of public spaces. So why have progressive
criminal justice reforms in the past several years forgotten about social
control?
The current state of progressive criminal justice
policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy
generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental
evaluations in criminology.
This is a rhetorical question, as I realize there is
another view about the causes of crime that focus on crime as a social
construct and criminal offending as solely a result of social inequality. Under
this worldview, addressing crime requires redressing the social origins of
crime. While the social origins of crime, such as concentrated disadvantage,
can be viewed as “root causes,” we have few experimental or quasi-experimental
evaluations of social programs that address root causes and show appreciable
changes in the concentration of crime by place, among active offenders and
within offending networks. There are programs and policies that can help reduce
social inequalities and help mitigate crime, but they are longer-term
investments and not the proximal causes of changes in the crime rate in each
period.
Criminal justice reform needs to be tailored to the
present facts on the ground. The facts of crime in the moment need to be
responded to with efforts that prevent crime and not ignore those efforts in
the hope for a more promising distant future. Moreover, there is no logical
reason that policies cannot address both the current facts of crime in the
population and longer-term efforts to reduce future cohorts from experiencing
surges in crime and violence. A criminal justice reform effort that is
effective at controlling crime with the minimum use of punishment necessary
should be guided by evidence on what drives the crime rate and what can reduce
inequalities in the criminal justice system.
A close review of experimental and
quasi-experimental evaluations offers support for the following social programs
that focus on those at greatest risk of serious criminal offending, the
concentration of crime by place and the networked nature of offending:
Family: Functional
Family Therapy, Multi-systemic Therapy and Nurse Family
Partnership all are programs that have been demonstrated to work
through at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial among at-risk
youth. All these programs focus on teaching parenting skills and increasing
pro-social thinking among youth.
Schools: School-based programs that have
demonstrated efficacy similarly involve teaching thinking skills to constrain
aggressive or criminal behavior. Such programs include Life Skills
Training, Positive Action and Becoming a Man.
These programs focus on social control, helping youth learn self-control and
increasing bonds to school.
Places: Summer
jobs for at-risk youth are delivered to youth in communities with the
highest rates of crime and violence and thus fit within the general framework
of establishing social control in places. These programs help keep kids off the
streets in the summer with productive things to do. Also, having adults monitor
youth in actual jobs is another form of informal social control. Business improvement districts (BIDs), for example,
are a social program that involves local businesses organizing in a defined
geography and hiring private security guards and CCTV cameras, cleaning crews
and place promotion and marketing materials to make a commercial area look and
feel safer. The key logic model of BIDs is the focus on reducing physical
disorder in places and offering extra “eyes upon the street.” Other social
programs that focus on the physical environment and offer evidence for reducing
serious crime include vacant lot greening and vacant housing remediation, improving street lighting and nuisance abatement.
Criminal Justice Agencies: Social control from
criminal justice agencies may be one of the least popular social programs among
contemporary criminal justice reformers, but it is an area where we have
arguably the best evidence. This includes support for deploying extra police to
crime “hot spots” — when police stay vigilant about crime prevention in crime
hot spots, they exert a significant impact on serious crime and violence. The
theoretical logic of hot spot policing is also consistent with the
offender-specific program of focused deterrence, a multi-stakeholder approach that
involves providing direct deterrence messages to individuals with high rates of
offending. Rigorous designs that compare cities with and without focused
deterrence or groups of offenders that could have been eligible find that when
the program is implemented with fidelity, it significantly reduces serious
crime and violence. Research from several quasi-experimental studies also
suggests that increasing prison time for active offenders also
helps prevent crime.
The current state of progressive criminal justice
policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy
generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental program
and policy evaluations in criminology. Ideally, criminal justice policy reforms
should be logically consistent with facts of crime and criminal offenders,
tested in the field and implemented gradually.
By contrast, closing down summer job programs,
letting physical disorder and mismanagement of places spread in neighborhoods,
having the police pull back from high-crime intersections and the criminal
justice system failing to hold active offenders accountable are all examples of
ways to foster epidemic rises in serious crime and violence. These results were
witnessed during the 2020–2021 rise in violent crime in large U.S. cities, but
also echo the patterns of other violent crime cycles in American history.
Understanding the basic facts of crime and offenders
explains why social programs that foster informal and formal social control and
are targeted to those individuals and places at the greatest risk for criminal
offending generate sizable reductions in serious crime. We have good evidence
for social programs that work to prevent crime and minimize the footprint of
the criminal justice system. This evidence base offers good guidance for
effective criminal justice reforms. I am hopeful that the evidence generated
from experimental criminology on what works to prevent crime can have a greater
impact in the future than it presently has received from the policy community.
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