After a half-century of high crime rates in the United States, what do we really know about crime and justice? We'd know a lot more if a succession of congressional and Justice Department leaders had paid more attention to the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research agency, says a new report from an expert panel assembled by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences. (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12929)
The first thorough evaluation of the agency in 33 years found that it has taken something of a scattershot approach. NIJ has accomplished much, said the panel chaired by criminologist Charles Wellford of the University of Maryland, but it has been "severely hampered by a lack of independence, authority, and discretionary resources to carry out its mission."
A rough translation is that a combination of congressional whims and the lack of a true researcher at the helm have left NIJ without consistency through the years, as its priorities have shifted to technology issues and away from aggressively pursuing "the causes and correlates of crime and [] what policies and practices work for whom, when, and under what circumstances."
It isn't just the National Research Council committee that is unhappy about aspects of NIJ. The panel took a survey of criminal justice researchers and practitioners, finding that their satisfaction with NIJ performance is low. Only 40 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with NIJ leadership, for example, and only 27 percent said the agency has adequate resouces. The panel said that in surveys of this kind, any score below 70 percent indicate "serious problems."
What is missing from NIJ's research portfolio? The committee cited several items, noting the "absence of research to shed light on the impact of policing activities on reducing crime," a key area. In the narcotics field, the committee noted the termination (for budget reasons) of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program, which measured current drug use by offenders in many big cities. Getting a better mark was the area of violence against women. The committee said "a great deal of what is known today about violence against women is based on NIJ research." One reason for that is that Congress specifically allotted funds for that research in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, part of that year's big anticrime law.
Overall, the committee said, NIJ-sponsored research continues in many areas, but "in others has ceased or has been sharply curtailed as sources of funds have dried up."
What is the remedy for NIJ's shortcomings? The committee made five major recommendations, although it's not clear that they will be addressed in the short term. That is because some of them are structural: giving NIJ more independence and stressing "building a body of cumulative knowledge" on crime and justice reather than spending lots of effort on forensic capacity-building. That takes action or at least endorsement from Congress, something difficult to come by in this age of highly-partisan wrangling.
NIJ should be helped by the fact that its newly confirmed director, John Laub of the University of Maryland, is the first academic criminologist to head the agency. He knows the issues but he has yet to take office because of delays in his confirmation, and he hasn't said publicly how much of the panel's critical report he embraces. Laurie Robinson, head of the Office of Justice Programs of which NIJ is a part, has applauded the report's stress on evidence-based crime fighting and should be a strong supporter of the agency.
A big question is how seriously Congress will take the report. Not much action is likely in this election year, but it's possible there will be more focus on it next year. The chairman of the panel that oversees Justice Department funding, Alan Mollohan (D-W. Va.) was defeated for re-election, as was Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who has paid close attention to Justice Department issues over the years. While other members are interested, it's not certain who will assume the roles of Mollohan, Specter, and other significant players, such as Vice President Biden. Congress has shown relatively little concern about basic research on criminal justice while it has been earmarking money for specific projects that may or may not be very worthy.
As it did in an earlier report on the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Research Council has offered a blueprint to bolster NIJ and in so doing, greatly expand what the nation knows about crime and justice. Now it's up to the Obama administration and key members of Congress to make it work.
Read full entry »As the Obama administration brings changes to criminal justice programs, there remain some leftover Bush administration issues to address. Among them are grants given by Bush-era juvenile crime agency chief J. Robert Flores to organizations such as the World Golf Foundation whose proposals did not score high in peer reviews.
The Justice Department Inspector General could not determine the propriety of Flores’ actions, but they won’t recur, say current and former department officials. Jeffrey Sedgwick, who was Bush’s assistant attorney general with authority over the juvenile program, says he required agency heads to give him written justifications for passing over any high-scoring proposals. Sedgwick also made sure that solicitations for proposals were public for at least 60 days so that insiders could not benefit from advance knowledge of grant opportunities with short intervals to apply.
Sedgwick’s successor under Obama, Laurie Robinson, kept these rules in place to insure the integrity of the grantmaking process. This is especially important in these days of higher funding. Robinson says that her Office of Justice Programs now is processing 3,000 applications for competitive grants in the new federal recovery law, as many as the agency handled in an entire when she headed it back in the 1990s.
Obama’s principles of “fairness, competition, and transparency” will be followed as the decisions are made on who will get the money, Robinson says. Watch for more news about which programs get federal anticrime funds. It should be noted that many of the decisions are being made at the state level and not by the Justice Department, as states get funds directly under pre-determined formulas.
Read full entry »Criminal justice advocates are anxiously awaiting passage of the economic stimulus bill now quickly making its way through Congress. The reason? It could include up to $4 billion for justice system improvement projects. This would be a huge turnaround from December 2007, when Congress without warning deeply slashed the popular Byrne JAG program, which provides aid to states and localities, to a mere $170 million annually from $520 million--a sum that had itself been cut from previous years.
Republicans could still force cuts in the new bill, but the likelihood is that police and other justice system agencies could get a quick infusion of funds. At least one version of the bill could require spending plans within 60 days.
Are states ready to spend this money? Yes, they say. Maine, for example, would use funds to prevent the layoff of 7 agents on its statewide antidrug task force. The state also would fill vacant positions to prosecutor drug and domestic-violence cases, among other things. North Carolina would use money to continue drug treatment courts that would otherwise have to close because of a state funding shortage. It could also use aid to expand the number of delinquency prevention programs, including alternative schools for suspended and expelled students.
On the policing side, both the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee favor spending $1 billion on hiring police officers, roughly 13,000 nationwide.
The National Criminal Justice Association, which represents states and localities in Washington, says that three-fourths of the stimulus money could be used for personnel, which is one of the bill's main purposes. Now the question is how much will be available and when.
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