Jo-Anne Wallace, Domingo Herraiz and Theron      Bowman

Frank Hartmann moderated the roundtable

Criminal Justice Policymakers Assemble to Examine – and Embrace – Failure

In December 2007, the National Law Journal ran an op-ed highlighting the Center for Court Innovation's efforts to study failed criminal justice reforms. The op-ed grew out of a roundtable convened in 2007 by the Center for Court Innovation and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance which gathered 19 judges, court administrators, probation officials, prosecutors, police chiefs, defense attorneys and others from around the country to discuss failure and innovation in criminal justice reform.  At its heart, this failure inquiry was an effort to shift the way criminal justice experts perceive failure, from a stigmatizing and wholly negative force to a necessary companion and contributor to success.

Why failure matters:  Criminal justice literature is full of “best practices” – depictions of how drug courts reduced recidivism or COMPSTAT helped lower crime rates in New York City or DNA testing enabled a culprit to be nabbed.  And rightly so: success in any endeavor is difficult to achieve and deserves to be celebrated.  This is especially true in criminal justice, where for too long practitioners labored under the widespread assumption that “nothing works” and that it was impossible to reduce crime or change the behavior of offenders. 

In general, it is human nature to shout about new ideas that have succeeded – while failure is discussed in hushed whispers, if at all.  In truth, we know that it is impossible to have trial without error.  Nobody is perfect.  Nearly every criminal justice agency has attempted projects that have fizzled or failed to meet expectations.  If we want to encourage criminal justice officials to test new ideas and challenge conventional wisdom, we need to create a climate where failure is openly discussed.  We need to learn from our failures (and partial successes), examining whether an initiative works for some groups but not for others and figuring out what was wrong with the underlying assumptions that led us to try such an approach.

Failure “red” paper:  After interviewing a number of criminal justice innovators, the Center for Court Innovation prepared a "red" paper on the topic.  The red paper identified four contributing causes of failure:  failure of concept/premise (i.e., "a bad idea"); failure of implementation (i.e., "poor execution"); failure to manage "power dynamics" (such as "big-p" and "little-p" politics, funding realities, and inter-agency cultural conflict); and failure to engage in self-reflection (such as failing to make mid-course adjustments or recognize the early warning signs of trouble). 

Failure roundtable:  In January 2007, the Center for Court Innovation and the Bureau of Justice Assistance convened an all-day roundtable, facilitated by Harvard's Frank Hartmann, at the Center for Court Innovation's headquarters in midtown-Manhattan.  The goal was to drill deeper into these topic areas, identify concrete examples of such failures and find ways to celebrate failure.   In particular, the discussions explored the conflict between inoculating reform from political pressure and maintaining a transparent, self-critical culture.   

Click here for the  “red” paper and click here for the edited transcript from the roundtable.
For more information, please contact Adam Mansky at amansky@courtinnovation.org.