J-PAL North America launches Initiative for Effective US Crime Policy

Crime and public safety are among the most pressing concerns across communities in the United States. Violence fractures lives and carries staggering costs; the economic burden of gun violence alone tops $100 billion each year. More than 5 million people live under supervision through incarceration, probation, or parole, while countless more experience the collateral consequences of arrests and criminal charges. Achieving lasting public safety requires confronting both crime itself and the collateral consequences of the U.S. criminal legal system.To help meet these dual challenges, J-PAL North America — a regional office of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) — with generous grant support from Arnold Ventures, launched the Initiative for Effective US Crime Policy (IECP). This initiative will generate rigorous evidence on strategies to make communities safer, reduce discrimination, and improve outcomes at every stage of the criminal legal process.“There are a lot of open questions. We desperately need to be trying new solutions, but we need to try them in a way that enables us to learn whether they work,” notes Jennifer Doleac, executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. “There is a path forward for us to step up and make a concerted effort to make sure that we are being very strategic in how we spend our time and where we are directing our resources.”Building on more than a decade of pioneering randomized evaluations, J‑PAL North America’s IECP will fund rigorous new studies in the criminal legal space, offer hands-on technical assistance, and connect researchers with practitioners. By reviewing both established and emerging evidence, the initiative will also help decision-makers focus resources on interventions that demonstrably improve public safety.“Through this initiative, we aim to expand the use of rigorous existing evidence and help scale interventions that are proven to improve outcomes, from prevention to reintegration,” says Sara Heller, associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan and co-chair of IECP. “At the same time, IECP seeks to fill critical gaps in the evidence base by supporting new research on what works to improve the criminal justice system in the United States.”A platform for collaborationIn June at the MIT Museum, IECP convened over 70 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to identify research priorities and catalyze collaboration. Speakers explored the structural drivers of violence, effective pathways for translating evidence into policy, and strategies for establishing successful partnerships between researchers and practitioners.Speakers also reflected on the value and limits of existing evidence and discussed areas in which randomized evaluations can help address the most pressing questions. Randomized evaluations have contributed powerful insights in areas such as summer youth employment programs, reminders to increase court appearances, hot-spot policing, and the use of body-worn cameras. Yet many important questions remain unanswered.“We know randomized evaluations can answer hard policy questions, but only if we ask the right questions, with the right lens, at the right scale,” says Amanda Agan, associate professor at Cornell University and co-chair of IECP. “This convening was a call to push further: to design studies that are not only rigorous, but also relevant to the lived experiences of communities and the structural forces that shape public safety.”How to take partAre you a practitioner with a promising idea in the criminal legal space, a policymaker planning a new program, a researcher developing a real-world intervention, or a funder investing in rigorous empirical evidence? IECP supports research partnerships to advance scalable, evidence-based solutions in the criminal legal system by funding impact evaluations, connecting researchers and practitioners, and supporting the design of randomized evaluations and the dissemination of evidence.   To learn more about this initiative, please contact iecp@povertyactionlab.org.