Improving the evaluation of anticrime programs: There’s work to be done

Abstract

The summary version of the National Research Council’s report, Improving the Evaluation of Anticrime Programs, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, was accompanied by eight commentaries from distinguished criminology researchers. This paper responds to those thoughtful and provocative commentaries by further discussing the two broad questions that they raised: What anticrime programs should be evaluated and what methods should be used to evaluate them. The main themes of this response are that (a) evaluation is needed for the programs, practices, and policies in actual use, not only those developed by criminologists; (b) programs developed and tested by criminologists are more likely to be used if they build on existing programs and give as much attention to “implementability” as to theory; and (c) evaluation of practices, policies, and area-wide programs will be limited unless credible applications of observational and quasi-experimental methods can be developed.