Jeremy Travis is the President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Prior to his appointment, he served as a Senior Fellow affiliated with the Justice Police Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research and police organization in Washington, D.C. There, he launched a national research program focused on prisoner reentry into society. From 1994 to 2000, Travis directed the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Why are we so reluctant to focus on failure?
It’s a natural human instinct to want to trumpet success and celebrate it, particularly in criminal justice where we’ve found so many ways that our policies are ineffective. When we find success, it’s like discovering a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. At the same time, I give a lot of credit to the police for their willingness to “bounce off” findings of no effectiveness in the 1970s and develop a new model of policing that’s been very effective. It’s an open question whether the field of corrections and parole will have the same experience.
Are you hopeful about the ability of corrections and parole to manage the failure process as creatively as the police?
We are seeing signs of openness to innovation that I think will take 10 years to flourish. The reentry movement opened up a wider policy conversation about the challenge of helping people return home from prison. Ten years ago when we first started thinking about reentry issues, institutional correctional officials had a very narrow view of their mission. Many felt that their job was over once a person left prison – they weren’t responsible for success or failure on the outside. Now every institutional corrections executive in the country is engaged in statewide policy level discussions about successful reentry. Prisoner reentry has become an elevating goal for corrections. It connects corrections to larger policy debates about workforce development and public health that elevates their mission. The result has been more respect for what they do and more resources, including the recent passage of the federal Second Chance Act that enshrines in federal legislation the need to think about reentry.
What role can research play in helping the criminal justice field be more thoughtful about failure?
It’s a tough slog to introduce more evaluation into the field. When you look at fields like medicine and engineering with a different cultural tradition, the contrast to criminal justice is easy to see. If an intervention reduced breast cancer by 30 percent, it would quickly become mandated practice, and conversely, if there was a practice that hurt people, it would be discontinued. I can’t say the same thing about criminal justice.
How does that change?
We should be following the maxim that no experiment can be tried without being evaluated. That’s particularly true for the federal government. It should fund experiments before it funds programs and make sure that they are evaluated rigorously.
Have you experienced professional failures?
In the 1980s, I ran a victim services project at the Vera Institute. We had a $1 million grant to increase attendance in court and encourage victim participation. We did a lot of things but found that our efforts had no effect on participation rates. That was a pretty sobering and discouraging finding, but I’m proud to say we were able to go back and ask some pretty basic questions about what we were trying to do. Based on what we found, we created another demonstration project that was much more successful. The lesson for me was that there is life after a finding of no effect.
