Guest Editor’s Introduction

Criminal justice reform—it is timeless. Since the founding of the United States, policymakers at federal, state, and local levels have tinkered, sometimes dramatically, with criminal justice. The end result has been reform after reform after reform. And that has been for good reason. Many problems have plagued, and continue to plague, how America addresses crime and achieves justice.

What are the problems? A short list includes: the politicization of crime; a vast array of competing interests that influence criminal justice policy and implementation; massive expenditures on policing, sentencing, and corrections, with questionable returns; little consistent reliance on research evidence when designing, implementing, and evaluating policy; little systematic inclusion or understanding of public opinion when shaping policy; and persistent and increasing concerns about inequality. That barely scratches the surface, but the list highlights the challenges and opportunities that face us.

Given how vast scale of what might count as “criminal justice reform,” it may seem odd to have a special issue devoted to it. Surely a small number of articles cannot do justice to the many and diverse reforms that have surfaced in recent decades. That is a fair concern. Such an issue in fact cannot cover entire literatures on the varied types of reforms that have been contemplated or that are needed for policing, sentencing, court operations, prison and jail systems, and so on.

What it can do, though, is rise above the vast amount of reform and related scholarship to provide a bird’s eye of “big” topics that that bear on efforts to improve criminal justice. A detailed view risks getting lost among the trees. This is especially concerning because many reforms do little to appreciably alter criminal justice in meaningful ways; they target piecemeal change without addressing larger, systemic challenges. A special issue on criminal justice reform thus offers an opportunity focus on the forest. In so doing, it can shed light and provide guidance on a timeless concern of continued and pressing importance in contemporary America.

To this end, the papers each tackle “big” topics. Taken together, they highlight the complexity that attends to criminal justice reform and the need for coherent, systemic change. They illuminate ways in which piecemeal change achieves little. And they identify directions for research and ways to create persistent and large-scale improvements to criminal justice.

In the lead-off essay, Mears describes the “Sisyphean” trap that plagues criminal justice reform efforts. We continue to repeat the same mistakes again and again, wasting resources and missing chances to reduce crime and injustice. A better approach entails identifying the causes of crime, injustice, and inefficiency. That requires research infrastructure. Alone, it is not sufficient. There must also be policymaker and criminal justice system commitment to acting on research and to improving systems rather than tinkering around the edges. The essay identifies ways to do so that are a substantial reach, yet feasible and, indeed, necessary for lasting and meaningful improvements to how we go about producing public safety and justice.

Charis Kubrin and Rebecca Tublitz focus our attention to the need to better understand “policy talk” (i.e., how we define problems and what types of solutions are promoted) versus “policy action” (i.e., the design and implementation of policy) when thinking about criminal justice reform. Failure to do so consigns us to missing ways to better align policy talk with policy action. They argue that clarity about the two dimensions leads to insights about the importance of examining normative views about the goals of punishment, and policy more generally, and practical realities that attend to policymaking. In contrast to accounts that emphasize “evidence-based policy,” they emphasize the importance of the policy change process. This view is not in conflict with a focus on evidence-based policy. To the contrary, it acknowledges that, in the “real world,” a diverse array of factors influence the framing of and response to crime and injustice. Better understanding of these factors and how to improve policymaking processes provides a critical platform for enacting effective reforms.

Pam Lattimore examines the last 50 years of efforts to enact criminal justice reforms to identify how we can do better going forward. Her career in both federal government, working at the U.S. Department of Justice, and RTI International, conducting policy evaluations uniquely position her to provide a “forest”-level view of what has happened and what needs to improve. As part of her account, she provides an overview of major crime trends as well as national policy shifts and their effects. She then explores why reducing recidivism has proven so difficult for the criminal justice system. One of the factors centers on the complex lives of the people who become enmeshed in the criminal justice system. There are no simple “fixes” to the problems that they face. Another factor is the persistent reliance on programs that lack adequate logic models that that frequently are poorly implemented. Lattimore cautions that we should have realistic hopes for what can be achieved. At the same time, she underscores that even small improvements can create meaningful impacts on public safety. There are, in short, many challenges to improved reform, but also many opportunities for creating more effective policy.

Thomas Blomberg, Jennifer Copp, and John Thrasher turn our attention to translational criminology and politics. Researchers tend to focus on “evidence-based policy” but, by and large, do not systematically consider the political aspects of policymaking. Building on their policy-focused research and the insights of Thrasher, who served not only as the President of Florida State University but also spent decades serving in the Florida Legislature, the authors describe important developments in, impediments to, and promising practices for improving translational criminology effectiveness. To ground their discussion, they provide, first, a case study of state-level translational criminology efforts in Florida and then, second, a case study of local-level translational criminology efforts in Palm Beach County. Their account is sobering but also provides grounds for optimism about how criminal justice policy can be improved.

John Roman provides a comprehensive account of different explanations for the crime decline in the 1990s to identify lessons for contemporary policy. He describes not only potential policy-based explanations for the decline but also explanations that focus on changes in society or indirect effects of policies that target social problems other than crime. A central conclusion is that most of the explanation for the crime decline stemmed from factors outside the criminal legal system. That suggests that future efforts to reduce crime might want to concentrate on these factors, especially those, such as consumer behaviors, that might be amenable to policy “nudges.” More generally, Roman argues for a pragmatic approach to improving policy—identify the causes of a problem and target for change those most amenable to policy influence.

William Sabol and Miranda Baumann tackle an issue of central relevance to all of criminal justice but that frequently gets overlooked in research and policy—forecasting. They argue that forecasting, though used by criminal justice agencies to guide some decisionmaking, rarely gets used to formulate or evaluate policy proposals. To illustrate the problems with this situation and the potential for improved policy development and evaluation, they focus on predictive policing and prison population forecasting. Their essay highlights the critical importance of transparency for ensuring that forecasting results in credible information and that it grounds policy in a manner that is legitimate, and that diverse stakeholders view as such. They identify concrete steps that government and agencies can take for using forecasting to create more effective reforms.

Kevin Drakulich focuses on public opinion and criminal justice reform. Especially in a democracy, public views matter, or they are supposed to matter. How, in fact, does public opinion contribute to discussions about criminal justice policy and reform? How can it be used to improve policy and reform efforts? He identifies that, unfortunately, a great many problems exist in how we measure and monitor public opinion. There are problems in public understanding about crime and the criminal justice system. And there are problems in how the public receives information and learns about crime and justice that can make it difficult to enact reforms that can better promote public safety while reducing policy harms and inequalities. Drakulich discusses what we know, where the big research gaps lie, and steps, such as more systematic collection and analysis of public opinion, that can be taken to improve research and policy.

Sarah Wakefield draws attention to a central problem that swirls around any discussion of the criminal justice system and reforms—inequality. As she discusses, a large body of scholarship documents diverse ways in which the criminal legal system is a “stratifying” institution. It reflects societal inequalities, it can worsen existing inequalities in a myriad of ways, and it can create new kinds of inequalities. She highlights that reform strategies might help to reduce the extent to which the legal or justice system worsens existing inequalities or create new ones. These would be important achievements, and she identifies ways that they could be pursued. Such strategies will not, though, appreciably alter societal conditions that create inequalities before individuals are ever arrested or sentenced. This insight points to the possibilities and the limits of reforms that focus only on the criminal justice system, and the need for societal changes that can prevent inequalities in the first place and, by extension, reduce their amplification through law enforcement and punishment policies and practices.

Natasha Frost directs us to an overlooked but critical nuts-and-bolts issue: Who, she asks, is going to do the work of criminal justice reform? The traditional research education model in higher education focuses on training doctoral students, and often that training focuses on academic publications. Many students, though, will not get doctorates and those that do may find that their research training does not equip them well for policy evaluation. These and other insights lead to a focus on a key idea—research training should target undergraduate and graduate students. It should help them to understand the intracies of academic and policy-focused empirical studies. And it should help them appreciate the relevance of research to policy creation and evaluation. Doing so can help to ensure that the people who go on to become legislators or agency officials or personnel can advocate for and use research to create needed reforms. They also can ensure that these reforms have a greater likelihood of being well-implemented and effective. Pie-in-the-sky thinking? No. She identifies a number of strategies for achieving this goal.

Robin Engel, Gabrielle Isaza, and Hannah McManus examine one of the most pressing areas of criminal justice reform in contemporary America—policing. Reflecting on years of experience conducting research in this area and on the voluminous literature on law enforcement, the authors highlight why police reforms have consistently failed. The factors that they identify include reliance on knee-jerk responses to perceived or actual problems, concentrating attention on problems rather than on how to achieve important aspirational goals, and a lack of credible empirical evidence about which reforms are effective and under what conditions they “work.” These are, notably, lessons that generalize beyond policing and extend to many other areas of criminal justice reform. The tendency to be reactive and to not invest in the infrastructure for achieving meaningful improvements plague many reform efforts, as does an absence of large bodies of strong, methodologically rigorous research on effective programs and policies. Engel and colleagues close by highlighting many ways in which policymakers, police executives, and researchers can contribute to stronger, more evidence-based reform.

Finally, McKenzie Jossie, Alfred Blumstein, and J. Mitchell Miller zero in on a pressing contemporary social problem—COVID-19—that has important consequences for society and the criminal justice system, and that can be used to identify the need for systems reform. Their essay alerts us to the importance of understanding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the criminal justice system and those processed through it. It alerts us to the opportunity that a focus on COVID-19 provides for developing theoretical insights, grounded by empirical research, about such topics as contagion control and tele-justice. As the authors highlight, natural experimental research opportunities abound because of COVID-19 and can be leveraged for new theoretical and policy-relevant insights. Not least, the essay’s focus on COVID-19 points to the importance of understanding criminal justice systems, including the factors that affect their day-to-day operations, variation in how parts of these systems respond to change, and the need for adaptations that can improve the entire criminal justice system.

The need for better research on criminal justice reform, for better reform, and for improved approaches to criminal justice have never been greater. Longstanding challenges to effective policy persist and will not magically go away on their own. As this collection of essays identifies, many opportunities exist to make progress. It will require much of researchers in both academic and non-academic settings. And it will require much from policymakers, criminal justice practitioners, and the public. It is, in short, time for everyone to roll up their sleeves and get to work.