This is an archive of an Office of Justice Programs Special Focus Section. This page is no longer updated and may contain outdated information and links that no longer function.
White House Office of Management and Budget Memorandums:
Next Steps in the Evidence and Innovation Agenda | July 26, 2013
Use of Evidence and Evaluation in the 2014 Budget | May 18, 2012
The President has asked his Cabinet to carry out an aggressive management agenda for his second term that delivers a smarter, more innovative, and more accountable government for citizens. An important component of that effort is strengthening agencies' abilities to continually improve program performance by applying existing evidence about what works, generating new knowledge, and using experimentation and innovation to test new approaches to program delivery.
Justice professionals have been collecting, analyzing, and using evidence for centuries—in laboratories and courtrooms. In investigations and in the courtroom, evidence collected by crime scene investigators is generally used to reconstruct past events based on limited bits of information.
Today, a new notion of "evidence" has developed using scientific methods to help design and determine the effectiveness the full array of "evidence-based" programs and practices of criminal and juvenile justice professionals and victim service providers. The term "evidence-based" originally comes out of the health field and implies the use of social science methods and findings to help practitioners and policy makers expand their base of scientific knowledge and transform research into practice, leading to improved performance, outcomes, and effectiveness.
As financial realities demand more innovative approaches to securing public health and safety, using rigorous social science, OJP is helping criminal and juvenile justice professionals and victim service providers find better and more cost-effective ways to solve the persistent challenges of crime, delinquency, and victimization by expanding their base of scientific knowledge and transforming research into practice, leading to improved performance, outcomes, and effectiveness.
OJP’s Evidence Integration Initiative, called E2I, is an ongoing, agency-wide effort to integrate science and research into programs in order to generate quality evidence in the form of research, statistical, and programmatic evaluations. These goals have guided program and policy development in a variety of ways at every level across OJP in recent years. Most importantly, OJP is working to move evidence into practice by funding evidence-based programs. (Source: OJP, "Understanding and Using Evidence-Based Practices," Justice Resource Update, June 2010).
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