REMARKS OF

THE HONORABLE DEBORAH J. DANIELS

ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL

OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

AT THE

4TH ANNUAL JERRY LEE CRIME PREVENTION SYMPOSIUM

ON

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2004

WASHINGTON, DC

Good afternoon. Let me begin by recognizing Jerry Lee, Larry Sherman and Laurie Robinson, each of whom has contributed significantly not only to the body of knowledge which can inform criminal justice, but also to my personal ability, and that of the Office of Justice Programs, to do what I believe is the most important thing we can do.

That is, each of these distinguished and dedicated individuals has helped to bring into the mainstream of criminal justice practice the benefit of good science, thus making it possible for OJP to identify and encourage the employment of truly effective approaches to crime and delinquency prevention and reduction.

We have reached a promising new era in law enforcement and criminal justice. In the past, criminal justice practitioners operated on instinct, not science. They tried new approaches, if they did so at all, because they sounded as though they should be effective; but it did not occur to the practitioners to examine the research before they instituted a particular practice, or to measure its effectiveness as they deployed it.

Further, yesterday's system was completely reactive. Police responded to radio runs; prosecutors thought their job was to move cases - preferably, to win them - and judges thought their mission was to have an efficiently-run docket. Any effort to see one's mission as even in part to reduce crime and its impact on the community would be viewed by yesterday's judge as demonstrating a bias toward the prosecution.

Today's reality is far different. Criminal justice practitioners recognize, to an increasing degree, that their public trust is far broader than "moving cases through the system efficiently". They understand that their mission includes a responsibility to actually increase public safety and the quality of life in the community.

They recognize that the public, too, has a role in community safety - and that economic development, home ownership, and individual employment also play an important role in crime suppression. And they recognize that a tough, vigorous approach to violent predators and an aggressive delinquency prevention approach are not mutually exclusive; nor are drug supply and demand reduction.

In fact, practitioners and policymakers alike understand, virtually universally, that all these approaches, in tandem, are necessary to achieve safer communities.

Similarly, as expressed most recently in the President's State of the Union address this year, we know that, for the sake of public safety, we need to assist convicted offenders who are returning to our communities following a period of incarceration.

While it is clear that lengthy prison sentences for serious offenders have contributed significantly to our current record-low crime rates, it is equally clear that most of these offenders will at some point leave prison and return to communities which, statistics show, will be markedly less safe as a direct result of their return.

So we are engaged in a broad-based approach to the reintegration, or re-entry, of these offenders, involving education, drug treatment, mental health treatment, job and life skills training, housing assistance, and mentoring, in addition to close monitoring.

However, even though we, as a criminal justice community, are moving in this promising new direction, we still find ourselves without sufficient information about what approaches to crime reduction make a significant difference. Larry Sherman has, of course, done some groundbreaking work - and the Campbell Collaboration continues to do so - in reviewing research and cataloguing what works, what's promising, and (perhaps most importantly) what does not work, or has been found actually to do harm.

Similarly, the Blueprints for Violence Prevention project, conducted by the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, with funding from our Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, has identified programs that have been shown, through rigorous evaluation, to make a positive difference in delinquency prevention, and that are capable of replication.

Unfortunately, we are faced with several challenges in clearly identifying exemplary programs, sharing that information in an understandable way with the criminal justice community, and using good science to influence practice. Among those challenges are these:

• Various agencies of the federal government use different definitions of what constitutes an "exemplary", "model", or "promising" program. Embarrassingly, though OJJDP has put significant funding into the Blueprints program, our own Title V program within OJJDP uses different definitions than those employed by the Blueprints initiative.
• We do not possess, even within OJP, much less on a cross-agency basis, a single repository of all the information currently available on what works.
• The 2004 National Institute of Justice social science research budget is so bare-bones that the Department of Justice cannot afford to add nearly as much as we would like to the national knowledge base.
• We have to struggle to keep even our own grantees from using Department of Justice funds to put out unscientific "best practices" information.
• And, perhaps in part because of a dearth of scientific evidence, our discretionary program budget is, for the third year in a row, 100% directed to projects favored by individual Members of Congress, most without regard to scientific evidence of effectiveness.

The good news, however, is this:

• We know that criminal justice interventions can be measured using randomized controlled trials - and both practitioners and social scientists are embracing the potential for truly rigorous scientific research into crime reduction. For example, the American Prosecutors' Research Institute, the research arm of the National District Attorneys' Association, just concluded a series of meetings on how to measure outcomes in the prosecutorial arena.
• There is a growing recognition across the federal government that we must embrace randomized controlled trials as the "gold standard" for research on government-funded programs, and seek to come as close as possible to that standard in the research we fund.
• You heard this morning from Jon Baron, of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a subsidiary of the Council for Excellence in Government.
• Jon came to OJP in late 2002 to discuss his proposed approach to evidence-based policy within the Department of Justice; we broadened his proposed effort to include other agencies with which we intersect (including HHS, the Department of Education, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy); and together we obtained the blessing of the top domestic policy advisors to the President, who attended a meeting on this subject last fall, also attended by Jerry Lee.
• The President's White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth specifically addressed this issue as well.
• OJP is spearheading a cross-government effort to standardize our definitions of "exemplary", "model", and "promising" programs - in fact, we have a meeting scheduled next week with representatives of various federal agencies to see if we can come to consensus.
• We are developing a "what works" web site, through which we will pull together the scientific information currently available, catalogue it, and help communities to make good use of this information to problem-solve at the local level.
• In all our grant programs, we are requiring grantees to benchmark and measure the impact of the programs on the problem they are seeking to solve.
• We're also helping communities build their own capacity for measuring the performance of the programs they support - both with and without the aid of federal dollars. For example, we're encouraging communities to partner with local universities to help collect data needed to inform policy making and programming and to conduct evaluations of funded programs.
• And we are seeking to collaborate with other federal agencies whose research budgets are healthier than ours, to add to the overall knowledge base.
• We believe we could also do a better job of collaborating with private foundations that fund or might fund criminal justice-related research.

We are so grateful for the work of people like Jerry Lee, Larry Sherman, Jon Baron and Laurie Robinson, as well as the other excellent speakers you have heard at this symposium, for their dedication to furthering the national research agenda - and I know that all those present today share that dedication.

We at the Office of Justice Programs look forward to continuing to work with all of you toward the worthy goal of informing all criminal justice practice through research. Thank you so much for the opportunity to address you today.