Evaluating Criminal Justice Reforms

Research on the implementation of criminal justice reforms, such as sentence guidelines, determinate sentence laws, and no plea bargaining policies, has proliferated in recent years. This research raises a variety of concerns about how one should evaluate the effectiveness of policy innovations. We deal here with recurring issues in the evaluation of criminal justice innovations, including the problem of specifying goals against which to measure “effectiveness,” the need to interpret research findings in light of theories about how criminal courts operate, and the importance of choosing appropriate time periods in which to conduct implementation or evaluation studies.