Journal of Experimental Criminology

To discuss the challenges faced in an experimental prisoner reentry evaluation with regard to managing the pipeline of eligible cases. This paper uses a case study approach, coupled with a review of the relevant literature on issues of case flow in experimental studies in criminal justice settings. Included are recommendations for researchers on the management of case flow, reflections on the major research design issues encountered, and a listing of dilemmas that are likely to plague experimental evaluations of prisoner reentry programs. Particularly in a jail setting, anticipating the timing of release of a prisoner to the community is probably impossible given the large number of issues that impact release, many of which will be unanticipated. A detailed pipeline study is critical to the success of an experimental study targeting returning prisoners. Pipeline studies should be conducted under what will be the true conditions and context for enrollment, given all eligibility criteria. With continued and systematic documentation of enrollment challenges in future experimental evaluations of reentry programs, as well as other experimental evaluations that involve individuals, academics can build a deep literature that would help facilitate future successful randomized experiments in the criminal justice field.

‘Citizenship’ is a structured probation supervision program based on ‘what works’ principles, designed for offenders on community orders or licenses supervised within the UK National Probation Service. The program was evaluated using survival analysis comparing the reconvictions of a cohort of all offenders in one probation area eligible for Citizenship over a 2-year period (n = 3,819) with those of a retrospective cohort of all eligible offenders in the same probation area receiving ‘traditional’ probation supervision (n = 2,110), controlling for risk related factors. At the 2-year stage, 50% of offenders in the comparison group had reoffended compared to 41% in the experimental group, and the difference between the survival curves was statistically significant. The hazard ratio was 0.69, which represents a 31% reduction in reconvictions in the experimental group over the proportion in the comparison group at any given time. Time to violation of a supervision order or post custody license was also statistically significantly longer in the experimental group. A key element of the program, promoting contact with community support agencies, was statistically significantly related to reduced reoffending in the Citizenship group. The overall effects remained after controlling for differences in risk scores although effectiveness varied by risk level. Contrary to other ‘what works’ research findings, the program was found to be most effective across the low–medium and medium–high risk thresholds, and was not effective with the highest risk group. This difference can be explained and is discussed in terms of risk, need, and responsivity principles. The Citizenship program was found to be cost-beneficial.

This response argues that the National Research Council (NRC) report, while valuable and thorough, would have benefited from conceptualizing evaluation activities along a continuum of knowledge development, with evaluations initially verifying the effectiveness of program concepts, before moving to evaluations of the feasibility and generalizability of anti-crime strategies and, finally, to evaluations of the costs and benefits of implementation of new strategies.

The crime prevention evaluation literature has identified several potential side effects of interventions. These often-unintended consequences occur at different stages of prevention processes, including before official start dates. They can improve or reduce intervention impacts. Evaluations using before-and-after designs with or without controls can fail to identify these effects. We describe a longitudinal framework to guide the design and evaluation of interventions that can account for these side effects when causal mechanisms are better understood. Our time-course framework provides a comprehensive assessment of the prevention process. Using place-based examples as illustrations, it builds on previously identified temporal benefits and backfires—such as anticipatory benefits, residual deterrence, and initial backfire—that have never been systematically organized into a single framework. We show how our framework can be incorporated into the EMMIE framework for assessing prevention utility. The proposed time-course framework links together all temporal effects, their underlying mechanisms, and shows how they can vary by context. The framework suggests that considering all decisions within these timelines will be more cost-effective and produce greater crime reductions in the long run. By considering the mechanisms that can be triggered at various points in an intervention’s time-course, we can better design experiments to test them and generate stronger evaluations of programs.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-021-09481-y

This article summarizes key points made in a panel at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) meeting in Atlanta in November 2018, entitled “20th Anniversary of the Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC): Looking Back and Forward,” organized by Friedrich Lösel as the AEC president. Seven (current and former) presidents of AEC contribute short papers about the past and future of experimental criminology, focusing on different and emerging areas of criminological experimentation, as well as identifying topics that require more attention in future, including field experiments and experimental neurocriminology. This article informs readers about the history of AEC, its links with the Journal of Experimental Criminology, current issues, and potential future developments in experimental criminology. It also briefly deals with arguments that question whether experiments are the “gold standard,” which were addressed by Daniel Nagin and Robert Sampson in another ASC session at Atlanta. Experimental panel members did not view randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as a ritualized and general “gold standard” for criminological research, because many important topics cannot be investigated in this type of design. This article is not intended to be a missionary statement for RCTs, but it does argue that experiments should be used whenever feasible, because they are most robust in ensuring internal validity as the basis for external validity and for generalizations that are necessary for effective practice and policy making.

To examine the impact of face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) meetings led by police officers between crime victims and their offenders on victims’ post-traumatic stress symptoms. Two trials conducted in London randomly assigned burglary or robbery cases with consenting victims and offenders to either a face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) in addition to conventional justice treatment or conventional treatment without a RJC. Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) within 1 month of treatment for 192 victims. We assessed the prevalence and severity of PTSS scores following treatment, using independent sample t tests and chi square statistics. We further measured the magnitude of the differences between the groups, using effect size analyses. Analyses show that PTSS scores are significantly lower among victims assigned to RJC in addition to criminal justice processing through the courts than to customary criminal justice processing alone. There are overall 49 % fewer victims with clinical levels of PTSS, and possible PTSD (IES-R ≥ 25). Main treatment effects are significant (t = 2.069; p < .05). Findings suggest that restorative justice conferences reduce clinical levels of PTSS and possibly PTSD in a short-term follow-up assessment. Future research should include longer follow-up, larger and more stratified samples, and financial data to account for the cost benefit implications of RJ conferences compared to ordinary PTSS treatments.

This study conducted a randomized controlled trial with 600 recently released homeless men exiting California jails and prisons. The purpose of this study was to primarily ascertain how different levels of intensity in peer coaching and nurse-partnered intervention programs may impact reentry outcomes; specifically: (a) an intensive peer coach and nurse case managed (PC-NCM) program; (b) an intermediate peer coaching (PC) program with brief nurse counseling; and (c) the usual care (UC) program involving limited peer coaching and brief nurse counseling. Secondary outcomes evaluated the operational cost of each program. When compared to baseline, all three groups made progress on key health-related outcomes during the 12-month intervention period; further, 84.5 % of all participants eligible for hepatitis A/B vaccination completed their vaccine series. The results of the detailed operational cost analysis suggest the least costly approach (i.e., UC), which accounted for only 2.11 % of the total project expenditure, was as effective in achieving comparable outcomes for this parolee population as the PC-NCM and PC approaches, which accounted for 53.98 % and 43.91 %, respectively, of the project budget. In this study, all three intervention strategies were found to be comparable in achieving a high rate of vaccine completion, which over time will likely produce tremendous savings to the public health system.