In This Issue:

• Recent Events:
  JPC Director Nancy La Vigne delivers speech at Princeton University
  
  JPC Senior Research Associate John Roman testifies before Youth Accountability Task Force in North Carolina
  
  JPC Senior Research Associates Amy Solomon and John Roman serve on panel at the Washington Office of Latin America
  
• Program Spotlight:
  JPC’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Portfolio
  
• In The News:
  Nancy La Vigne speaks to ABC News about CCTV in Chicago
  
• Publications:
  SVORI
  
  Cost-Benefit Analysis of Reclaiming Futures
  
  Simulated evidence on the prospects of treating more drug-involved offenders
  

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JPC Director Nancy La Vigne recently spoke at the Princeton University Policy Research Institute for the Region on March 5, 2010. At the event, which was titled “Reforming the Corrections Environment: We Can’t Keep Paying These Costs – Can We?” La Vigne discussed the options available to practitioners attempting to better address the correctional cost conundrum. Her suggestions included sentencing reforms, pre-release programs, drug rehabilitation, vocational training, reentry programming and other appropriate options. A full copy of her remarks can be found here.

On March 18th, 2010, JPC Senior Research Associate John Roman testified before the Youth Accountability Task Force in North Carolina. The North Carolina Legislature set up the task force to study the question of raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction from 16 to 18. Roman discussed the key steps related to estimating the costs and benefits of raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction: 1) defining the scope of the study; 2) estimating the direct costs to the juvenile system; 3) estimating direct savings to the adult criminal justice system; and 4) estimating the changes in criminal behavior and overall costs and benefits to society from the proposed change.

The Washington Office of Latin America (WOLA) also sponsored a panel, titled “Reducing Drug Abuse, Crime and Incarceration: Innovations in Community Supervision and the Future of Drug Courts,” on March 25, 2010 with JPC Senior Research Associates Amy Solomon and John Roman, Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Affairs, and Peter Reuter, Professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. The panelists argued that well-run community corrections would allow jurisdictions to substantially reduce drug consumption, drug-involved crime, and illicit markets while reducing their reliance on incarceration. The panelists also discussed recent innovations in community supervision, including Hawaii’s HOPE probation program, and the impact and future of drug courts.

The criminal justice policy and practitioner communities have demonstrated an increasing appetite for evaluations that include an analysis of the degree to which the benefits of programs and interventions outweigh the costs. In response, JPC has developed a strong and growing analytic capacity for cost-benefit analysis, making it a key component of many of the research projects we undertake. Two such projects focus on the cost-effectiveness of using DNA in law enforcement investigations: A Randomized Controlled Trial of DNA in Motor Vehicle Theft Investigations and The Costs and Benefits of the DNA Field Experiment. Led by John Roman and JPC Research Associates Kelly Walsh and Joshua Markman, both projects employ randomized trials and cost-benefit analyses to test whether it is cost-effective for police departments to collect DNA evidence from scenes of high volume crimes, such as motor vehicle thefts and property crimes. Part I of the DNA Field Experiment was completed in 2008, and found that using DNA in property crime investigations more than doubled the likelihood of a suspect identification and arrest. Part II of the Field Experiment, due to be completed this summer, will translate those outcomes into estimates of the costs and benefits of using DNA to solve these crimes.

Under the direction of Shelli Rossman, John Roman and Mitch Downey are evaluating the costs and benefits of adult drug courts as part of the Multi-Site Adult Drug Court evaluation. That report will be released in the early fall of 2010. Also under the direction of Shelli Rossman, John Roman and Mitch Downey are conducting a cost-benefit study of mental health courts in New York City. In addition, John Roman, Jocelyn Fontaine and Carey Nadeau are studying the costs and benefits of a reentry program designed to find housing for individuals returning from Ohio prisons with a history of homelessness.

The Washington, D.C. Crime Policy Institute (DCPI), a joint project between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, will develop a next generation cost-benefit model. The model will use recent developments in Bayesian statistics to develop a model that incorporates research from other times and places to estimate the costs of implementing new policies and programs in Washington, DC. JPC researchers working on DCPI include John Roman, Joshua Markman, Jocelyn Fontaine and Mitch Downey.

JPC researchers have recently published three cost-benefit studies. A study of the costs of the death penalty by John Roman and former JPC staff Carly Knight and Aaron Chalfin was published in the American Law and Economics Review in December 2009. There are also a number of new JPC publications in the cost-benefit analysis field.

ABC News interviewed JPC Director Nancy La Vigne, Principal Investigator of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services-funded Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Evaluation Project, to discuss the impact that cameras have had on crime in Chicago. La Vigne mentioned that findings from the evaluation suggest that CCTV has had a cost-beneficial impact on crime in Chicago, one of three study sites for the project (Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are the others). The study sought to answer the following questions: do the cameras reduce crime? Do they just move it? Is there a cost benefit to their use? In the interview, La Vigne said that one of the key findings in Chicago was that for every $1 spent on CCTV, the city saved $2 from crime aversion in areas with cameras. Watch the entire segment here.

SVORI

Christy Visher and Pam Lattimore

In partnership with researchers at RTI International, JPC recently completed a multi-year, multi-site evaluation of the Serious Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) funded by the National Institute of Justice. In 2003, the US Departments of Justice, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services established the large-scale SVORI program, providing over $100 million to 69 grantees to develop programming, training, and state-of-the-art prisoner reentry strategies at the community level. The evaluation explored the degree to which these programs accomplished the overall goals of the initiative and assessed the relative costs and benefits of the programs. The SVORI findings were mixed; the evaluation indicates that SVORI program participation increased the receipt of services and programming for adults. While modest improvements in outcomes for the adult SVORI participants were detected, evaluators observed few differences between the juvenile SVORI and non-SVORI participants. Additional analyses will determine whether there are specific programs or subgroups associated with positive outcomes and will examine the relationship between receipt of specific services and outcomes.

John Roman, Aaron Sundquist, Jeffrey Butts and Aaron Chalfin

This month, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published a study by John Roman and former JPC staff Aaron Sundquist, Jeffrey Butts and Aaron Chalfin on the costs and benefits of the Reclaiming Futures initiative, an intervention designed to link juvenile substance abusers with age-appropriate substance abuse treatment. The evaluation found strong evidence that the systems change initiative created a foundation for improving substance abuse interventions for youth. Results from the stakeholder surveys found improvements in the target communities in treatment delivery and effectiveness, cooperation and information-sharing among youth service providers, and family involvement in youth care.

Simulated evidence on the prospects of treating more drug-involved offenders

John Roman and Avinash Bhati

This month, John Roman and former JPC Senior Research Associate Avinash Bhati published an article in the Journal of Experimental Criminology. They used evidence from several sources to construct a synthetic dataset for answering the question: What are the benefits we can reasonably expect by expanding treatment to drug-involved offenders? They combined information from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program to estimate the likelihood of various arrestee profiles having drug addiction or dependence problems, and used those sources to also develop prevalence estimates of these profiles among arrestees nationally. They also used information in the Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) to compute expected crime-reducing benefits of treating various types of drug-involved offenders under different treatment modalities. The findings from the study indicate that annually nearly 1.5 million arrestees in the U.S. are at risk of abuse or dependence and that treatment alone could avert several million crimes that these individuals would otherwise commit.