Lawrence W. Sherman, "Crime Prevention's Bottom Line," THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL, August 6, 1997, p. A 15.
Crime rates are going down and Washington is eager to take
credit. The Crime Act of 1994 quadrupled funding for state and
local crime prevention to more than $3 billion per year, the
highest levels ever.
Whether that funding increase caused the subsequent decline in
violent crime is unclear, primarily because federal funds support
hundreds of different programs. Some programs work, some don't,
and some may even increase crime. But until Congress spends more
to evaluate these programs, we can't tell.
That is the major conclusion of a report prepared by the
University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at the request of the Justice Department and mandated by
Congress. By asking for a comprehensive scientific evaluation of
the Justice Department's funding for local crime prevention,
Congress framed a more basic question: How do we know what
works? What's the bottom line?
Despite recent efforts to reinvent government with closer
analogues to a bottom line, the more appropriate model for
evaluating crime prevention programs may be the Food and Drug
Administrations approach to evaluating drugs: Do field tests
with human beings show this program to be safe and effective?
There are already documented examples of how this approach is
relevant to crime prevention:
l. A University of Southern California evaluation of a gang
prevention program found that the program was holding the
gang together and sustaining its violent crimes. When the
program lost funding, the gang broke up and its crime rate
declined.
2. Controlled evaluations of mandatory arrests for misdemeanor
domestic assaults show that while arrest deterred some
assailants, arrest caused some other assailants to increase
their violence against women.
Despite these research results, Congress has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on domestic violence and gang
prevention programs that may actually cause more crime to occur.
Whether Congress is aware of these bottom-line results is
unclear. What is clear is the absence of a systematic process
for measuring the effectiveness of crime prevention programs.
Some of the most popular crime prevention programs have already
been tested - at great federal expense - and found ineffective.
Yet their funding continues unabated. Military-style boot camps
for juveniles, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) Classes
taught to schoolchildren by police officers, and neighborhood
watch programs are but three examples of proven failure to which
Congress gives millions of dollars annually.
More effective ways of treating juvenile offenders and preventing
drug abuse have been demonstrated by careful evaluation research.
Teaching juvenile offenders skills like reading works better than
boot camps. Making schools more firm and consistent in overall
discipline works better than D.A.R.E. But these strategies lack
political advocates and lose out in the competition for funding.
The biggest danger from ignoring the bottom line of program
evaluations is not wasted funding; it is wasted opportunities.
Some of the most effective crime prevention strategies known to
science are not even on the national agenda for funding, let
alone in congressional appropriations for the Justice Department.
Two of these focus on a widely recognized cause of crime
problems: early childhood development in the home.
In early infancy, home visits by nurses can produce major
reductions in child abuse, which is a risk factor for later
delinquency. Such visits are required in a number of Western
nations. Hawaii offers it on a voluntary basis to all new
parents, the majority of whom accept. Repeated visits for the
first two years of life provide the greatest benefit to children
at high risk. This is expensive, but the results are good. A
recent RAND study suggests that home visits to infants may be
more cost-effective than prison.
In preschool years, Head Start programs with home visits by
teachers can prevent delinquency up through age 25. This clear
effect has been found in several controlled tests started in the
1960s. Yet today, few Head Start programs are budgeted for
teacher home visits, and Head Start itself lacks sufficient funds
to meet demand.
The good news is that there is increasing evidence to support the
largest single program in the 1994 Crime Act: putting 100,000
more police on the streets, funded at $1.4 billion in fiscal year
1996. National Institute of Justice studies show that an
increased police presence reduces crime in high crime "hot
spots," where most crime is concentrated. Full enforcement or
"zero tolerance" policies in those hot spots may even reduce gun
crime, the leading theory about New York City's free-falling
homicide rate - now almost two-thirds lower than in the early
1990s.
The bad news is that much remains unknown about strategies for
deploying police and the cost-effectiveness of different
alternatives. Sudden increases in personnel provide an
unprecedented opportunity for controlled tests of policing
strategies, especially in high-crime poverty neighborhoods where
policing often backfires. Funding this program without a
substantial investment in comparing the impact of hundreds of
different approaches to community policing is more than a wasted
opportunity. It is comparable to the Eisenhower administration
giving schoolchildren many different polio vaccines without
testing any of them for safety and effectiveness.
The University of Maryland report recommends that 10 percent of
all federal funding for local crime prevention be set aside for
independent evaluations of the programs' impact, commissioned by
an independent evaluation agency in the Justice Department.
Several bills now pending in Congress use the same formula.
Opponents of this idea say that evaluation money could be better
spent on effective programs to fight crime. But until Congress
invests more money in program evaluations, it will have no way of
knowing which programs are effective.