David Wilson is Associate Professor, Administration of Justice at George Mason University and a member of the Campbell Collaboration's Crime & Justice Coordinating Group, an international network of researchers that prepares, updates, and rapidly disseminates systematic reviews of high-quality research conducted worldwide on effective methods to reduce crime and delinquency and improve the quality of justice.
How do researchers define failure?
There are outcome failures and then there are process failures. Some programs fail because they are implemented poorly in the first place. If you read the program evaluation literature, this is a common problem. On the outcome side, it’s a lot harder to establish what would constitute failure, unless you have a good comparison group. Programs can have very bad outcomes and still be successful if they’re doing better than the comparison group.
Does the public define failure differently?
I think that researchers generally think about relative success and failure, while the public often views success and failure in absolute terms. From a public perspective, if a lot of people re-offend, a program is a failure. This is a “knee jerk” concept and I do think that when presented with better information, the public will accept a program that produces a reduction in offending even if overall recidivism rates remain high. That is, I think that most everyone accepts the notion that no program is going to help everybody.
What are realistic expectations for the public to hold about crime prevention programs?
Policymakers and the general public need to have modest expectations for how much we can change the behavior of offenders. Most criminal justice interventions only work with people for a short period of time. For example, a court-mandated batterer intervention typically only involved about 28 contact hours. Changing behavior that has developed over a lifetime in 28 hours is a tall order. What is amazing is that criminal justice interventions often work and serve as a turning point for some offenders.
Why is it important to talk about failure?
The role of researchers is to doubt whether programs work. A challenge for policymakers and practitioners is to recognize the uncertainty of programs and policies. Front-life staff members are developing their working lives to a specific program and are trying to have a positive effect on the lives of offenders or society more generally. It is difficult and threatening for any of us to question the value of what we do. It is even more difficult to recognize that we may be doing things that are harmful. There's a widespread belief that a well meaning program can only have positive outcomes. In the medical field, we have the Food and Drug Administration that ensures the safety of medical interventions before they become publicly available. When it comes to the social world, having an intuitively appealing idea is often enough.
Can researchers stop harmful programs if they come up with evidence that they don’t work?
Program adoption usually comes before the evidence of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness has developed. Policymakers and the public are continually dissatisfied with current practice and new ideas that resonate with the public can spread quickly. One example is boot camps. The evidence is pretty strong that boot camps are no more effective than regular prisons. They may actually be worse in some cases. But they make sense to the public because they are perceived as providing discipline to offenders---an intuitively appealing idea. It takes time for research on a program to be conducted and even longer for the evidence to diffuse into public discourse. Evidence of ineffectiveness may slowly lead a program being modified (e.g., DARE) or slowly receding in popularity (e.g., boot-camps).