How do lawmakers know if their criminal justice laws are working?
It can be a challenge, experts told a session at this year’s NCSL Base Camp.
“We want to accurately assess either the cost-benefit of a program or just the overall impact on the outcomes that we’re interested in,” says Matthew Ross, associate professor of public policy and economics at Northeastern University. “The most important thing is, we want this to be a really rigorous, clean, concise, accurately estimated impact of the program.”
But variables can muddy the waters when, for example, evaluating the effectiveness of police programs in low-income, high-crime areas.
“The poorest neighborhoods where there’s a lot of crime often receive more police,” he says. “So, are we really finding the effect of police on crime—or police selecting into more dangerous neighborhoods which have more crime? That makes it very challenging, particularly in the criminal justice and policing space.”
Ross says causal research initiatives are best set up early. “If you’re implementing a pilot program or phasing in a particular policy, it is actually oftentimes quite easy, if you have a researcher involved in the early stages, to set things up in a way that replicates a randomized control trial. That makes evaluating the outcomes and the cost-benefit at the end really pretty bulletproof. You’re going to get an unbiased estimate if it’s set up correctly.”
Read more at NCSL
