A veteran criminal justice researcher argues that academics must reform themselves if they hope to have an impact on the real world.
Within the first 10 days of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, federal agencies began to remove data files from government websites and cancel funding for research programs, including those supporting crime prevention. Crime issues are always political, but the federal government has not traditionally stopped research efforts to gauge their compatibility with a president’s political positions.
The link between research evidence and crime prevention is fragile. Researchers conduct hundreds of studies every year to identify effective crime prevention approaches. Scholars rely on insights from criminology, psychology, sociology, political science, law, public health, social work, economics, anthropology — even engineering and architecture. However, crime still dominates the news. Voters perpetually believe that crime is getting worse. Politicians advocate some policies and denigrate others with little regard for the available evidence.
Many things can explain the disconnect between evidence and policy, but researchers are part of the problem. Our studies are seemingly endless, but our effects on crime are spotty at best. Too often, we design research to demonstrate our statistical techniques and earn academic praise rather than genuinely trying to improve community safety. Knowing more about crime brings us greater rewards than actually doing more.
Perhaps this is as it should be. After all, our job is to develop knowledge for others to use. Still, we could do a better job of attending to our own usefulness and our theoretical reach. We often evaluate efforts to change individual behavior while ignoring the social structures and institutions that shape behavior. Public officials can draw on our studies if they want to reduce crime by people already known to police, or crime by people suffering from mental health disorders and cognitive dysfunctions. But how much crime stems from known offenders and afflicted people? Less than half, it turns out.
At least half of all crimes are never reported to police. Many crimes are committed by people without diagnosable mental disorders, although they may be traumatized from living in communities harmed by economic, social and racial disparities. By the time young people in disadvantaged communities reach the age of 21, they may lose respect for society’s rules. When conventional means of material success and social standing appear illusory or corrupt, crime can become an acceptable alternative.
Too often, research is designed to demonstrate statistical techniques and earn academic praise rather than to improve community safety.
Building public safety by improving equity and economic opportunity sounds too ambitious or too liberal to many Americans, so our elected officials rely instead on strategies rooted in law enforcement and state-sponsored punishment — systems that deter some crime while delivering harmful and costly consequences for communities.
How can researchers help? To enhance our impact on crime prevention, researchers should improve three things: 1) the questions we ask, 2) the data we use to answer them, and 3) the way we share our answers with communities.
Good questions
Our top priority should be to ask good questions. Researchers should test any credible method of preventing crime using the most appropriate research design for each topic, including mixed methods and action research designs. Researchers should not prioritize study topics according to whatever involves the statistical models and evaluation designs that advance our career goals and academic publication records.
Theoretical framing is essential. Too many studies presume that crime problems are a function of individual pathology. Despite decades of research showing that the social environment shapes behavior, justice evaluations usually restrict their focus to interventions targeting individuals, perhaps due to our cultural tendency to blame people for the social problems affecting them but also as a consequence of the reward structures governing research. Individual-level interventions can be evaluated more quickly and economically, with greater chances of producing the type of statistical results valued by academic publications.
Accumulating publications with impressive statistical effects advances our careers, so we naturally focus on individual-level interventions. However, individual interventions are not a comprehensive approach to public safety. Researchers should investigate a wide range of prevention strategies and address the big question: what makes communities safer? Real researchers investigate whatever strategies might lead to community safety. They are agnostics, not believers.
Public officials and funding bodies should be equally adventurous. They should manage public safety studies like an investment portfolio, balancing statistical precision against policy relevance, feasibility, cost and theoretical salience.
Relevant data
The next task required to improve the impact of research is to broaden the information we use to generate our findings. Much of the research affecting policy and practice today relies on information created by bureaucracies, including social services, law enforcement, courts and corrections. Administrative records generated by justice-related agencies are readily available and relatively cheap, but they are not the best information for measuring the safety of communities. Building research projects around organizational data makes sense if the main goal is to evaluate agency operations, but using administrative data to assess community safety is often misguided.
Numbers generated by justice agencies are organizational work products (people arrested, cases filed, etc.). Administrative data records may not address the concerns of neighborhood residents. Crime prevention studies should incorporate data about the experiences and perceptions of residents using interviews, surveys and even direct observations. Of course, collecting this information may require more money and time than drawing upon pre-existing administrative records, and analyzing such data can involve special procedures. Qualitative methods, for example, must involve more than simple narratives. Personal opinions and perceptions are insufficient for policymaking unless researchers use analytic methods designed to identify substantive themes and causal inferences. When used properly, however, qualitative analyses can help researchers track outcomes, comparing treated and untreated areas with information reflecting residents’ experiences and not only the operations of justice-related agencies.
Public dissemination
Finally, we must diversify the methods used to disseminate research. Study findings must be accessible and understandable by people outside the research field. University-based researchers tend to publish their work in “peer-reviewed” journals hidden behind the paywalls of corporate publishers. Unless an aspiring reader happens to work for a university, they may be charged $30 or more for a single article, and the article will come with legalistic copyright warnings about the consequences of freely sharing materials. Placing research findings in an academic journal is essentially saying “hands off” to community residents.
Publishing research in academic journals may advance the goals and methods of researchers but with diminished, delayed or absent effects on policy and practice. Scholarly journals were once the key arbiters of quality and accuracy, and they remain the best way to advance through the occupational ranks of academia, but better dissemination options exist today. Easy internet access means researchers no longer need to serve the historically paper-based corporate publishing sector. Academic journals are not even the guarantee of quality they once may have been.
Free, high-quality research can be found today on the websites of universities, nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups. Their products should still undergo thorough editing and rigorous quality control, but that work could be completed without depending on the publishing industry’s tradition of asking academic “peers” to volunteer their time for anonymous, often cursory reviews.
Internet-based, open-access publishing is not the future. It is the present. Public safety researchers should embrace it and collaborate to improve it. Academics may resist efforts to publish the open-access research they disparage as “grey literature,” but future policy and practice reforms depend on it.
One last thing needed to improve public safety research is perhaps the most difficult: asking researchers to create clear and accessible written products. Research reports must be prepared in ways that enable non-researchers to comprehend their meaning and importance. Academics can be poor writers. They may even be rewarded for incomprehensible writing. If someone finds my writing difficult to grasp, an academic may reason, it means I am smarter than they are. But sharing research findings should be a public service, not an academic performance.
I once suggested that researchers could assess their professional orientation by asking themselves a simple question: Are you (1) using your research career to build public safety or (2) using public safety to build your research career? I fear many researchers would honestly have to select option 2. We must do better. And one day, hopefully, we will have political leaders who use research to fashion crime prevention strategies with verifiable facts, rather than merely using the fear of crime to divide communities and motivate voters.