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If you have issues viewing or accessing this file contact us at NCJRS.gov. U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice Research Program Plan Fiscal Year 1989 '--------------------- --- - 113180 U.S. Department 01 Justice Natlonallnstltute of Justice duced exactly as received from the This document has bee~ !epro olnts of view or opinions stated person or organization originating It. P thors and do not necessarily In this document are tho.s.e of the laC~es of the National Institute of represent the official posItion or po I Justice. """j...hted material has been permission to reproduce thIs COI"'I' "''' granted by • P u b J i c DOroa..in+'N.LJ----------;- =:_u...-Sr.-----D-8-pa-r-tment--G-f---:-J-U-&i;-~-C e to the National Criminal Justice Reference ServIce (NCJRS). Further reproduction outside of the NCJRS system requires permIs­ sion of the CGD~f;igllt owner. Research Program Plan Fiscal Year 1989 November 1988 NCJ 113180 N·CJRS NOV 4 \988 AGQU.J.SiTIONS National Institute of Justice James K. Stewart Director The Assistant Attorney General, Office of Justice Programs coordinates the activities of the following program Offices and Bureaus: National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and Office for Victims of Crime. Foreword Two decades ago, there was little or no strengthening their link to their systematic, objective infonnation avail­ communities. able on crime and criminal justice poli­ cies. Over the years, the National Institute • cut drug-related robberies and burgla­ of Justice has sponsored research that ries through police strategies to stop spurred an evolution of understanding of street-level traffickers. crime and its impact. Today, we recognize • offer judges intennediate punishments that the costs of crime are far greater, its that avoid the "prison or nothing" choice effects on victims more traumatic, and its through use of such alternatives as propor­ corrosion more widely spread throughout tionate fines, house arrest, electronic our society than we realized two decades monitoring, and restitution. ago. Insights provided by research have set in motion a rethinking of how we view • marshal resources beyond the criminal crime and criminal offenders. justice system-in the private sector and the community-to bolster safety and The accretion of such knowledge laid the solve specific crime problems. groundwork for a new direction in re­ search that has in the past 5 years acceler­ • measure the effects of various policies ated our momentum. Moving beyond the with far greater precision and understand­ limits of general surveys and descriptive ing of the costs and benefits of policy studies, the National Institute refocused its choices. efforts-away from studying institutions • develop and apply new tools of meas­ and toward research aimed at infonning urement to address our field of science policy and practice. and to collect far more accurate and real­ The value of research can be seen in the istic data. emerging policies that are making a • estimate the cost of not imprisoning difference in our ability to safeguard the high-rate offenders. public and concentrate scarce criminal justice resources where they will do the Research in the seventies confirmed the most good. Today, we have the potential existence of the career criminal, for to: example, and documented his specific impact. Following up on this important • cut the demand for drugs among crimi­ insight, the Institute supported surveys to nals through court-supervised drug gauge the impact of the high-rate offender testing. on crime and on criminal justice opera­ • reduce the chances of repeat violence tions. From this basic knowledge came against victims of spouse assault, and at the idea of focusing criminal justice re­ the same time lower the murder rate. sources selectively on career criminals and trying to differentiate more clearly • reduce the number of victims through between official records and actual crime new strategies for deploying police and iii ~--- -------------------- ----------------------------------------- rates. Today, the concept of the career efficiency. Analysis of police calls in one criminal and the high risk offender is major city, for example, revealed that in a firmly entrenched in criminology and I-year period over 50 percent of the criminal justice-a dramatic rethinking of repeat calls were from less than 3 percent policy and practice. Now research is of the addresses. By getting at the source examining ways to identify these offend­ of these calls, police can intervene to ers more accurately, moving toward the reduce this enormous drain on their recommendation of one recent study that resources. Research has demonstrated that concluded that public safety would clearly proactive problem-oriented policing can benefit from incarcerating a larger propor­ be effective in solving problems that tion of high-risk probationers and prison­ would otherwise lead to crime and disor­ ers, and for longer periods of time. der. The solutions are not restricted to police resources but have a wider applica­ Research also corroborated the link tion. The problem-solving approach between drug abuse and crime. We have reduced crime in targeted areas through known for several years that drugs accel­ solutions that drew upon a wide variety of erate an individual's crime rate from four public and private resources in Newport to six times what it is when the offender is News, Virginia, the real-world laboratory relatively drug free. Now, we no longer for the test. need to watch helplessly as drug-spawned crime vitiates entire neighborhoods. We These and other contributions are the can do something. Policies, informed by product of the increasingly fruitful empirical research, can make an enormous collaboration between practitioner and re­ difference without great cost or violation searcher. It has been gratifying to see the of individual rights. marked increase in the use of research by practitioners and policymakers and in the Recent experiments in Washington, D.C., working relationships between researchers and New York revealed that arrestees and practitioners that only rarely existed a using drugs were more likely to be re­ decade or so ago. arrested than those not on drugs. Manda­ tory, court-supervised drug testing repre­ The use of and involvement in research by sents a scientific, objective test for policy makers, I believe, emanates from distinguishing these high-risk defendants several important developments. from low-risk defendants. With these data, judges are in a position to decide First, crime and its consequences are far empirically the appropriate conditions for more important than many realize. The the pretrial period, including periodic costs of crime and criminal justice to our testing. society have become so great that we can no longer afford lIot to measure effective­ In the area of law enforcement, we have ness and assess consequences. Fiscal demonstrated various options for deploy­ limitations force tradeoffs that demand a ing forces with greater effectiveness and better understanding of the benefits and iv costs of various approaches. This crisis fication, to name just a few. This prob­ has created an opportunity for policy­ lem-oriented approach will help avoid the oriented research to help agencies work fragmented response of the past and smarter, not harder. Practitioners have assess how the policies of each criminal recognized the need for solid, objective justice institution can contribute its information, and researchers have em­ resources to reducing crime--our ultimate ployed their skills to respond to that need. objective. Second, we have moved far in creating a Fourth, we have made striking advances favorable climate for collaboration, in the methods of criminal justice re­ building understanding and respect search. In the past, we lacked the meas­ between those who design and conduct urement tools to disclose with precision research and those who set and carry out the benefits of changes in policy. Accord­ crime control policies. The National ingly, much research tended to report no Institute of Justice maintains a continuing difference or no measurable effectiveness. dialog with criminal justice practitioners Now, through experiments and more and policymakers to ensure that research sophisticated methodologies we can is attuned to the challenges they face and heighten the reliability of research find­ that the new information we gain is ings and the strength of our policy disseminated in the most accessible and recommendations. useful way. In the 1960's, field experiments in crimi­ Third, we have reorganized the way the nal justice were rare. They increased National Institute allocates its resources. somewhat in the 1970's, but it was not In the past, research funds were funneled until the 1980's that every area of crimi­ primarily to the three sectors of the nal justice policy making saw scores of criminal justice field: police, courts, and experiments completed and more in corrections. Each of these institutions had progress. its own set of problems, and these expen­ ditures undoubtedly improved their This year's Program Plan reflects the functioning. But this approach also tended National Institute's continuing interest in to compartmentalize our thinking and experimentation as a uniquely valuable information and to fragment our justice tool. More than any other type of re­ system. search, the

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