Program History

For more than twenty years, the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management has conducted research on major issues in criminal justice policy and management. Established in 1980 by the Daniel and Florence V. Guggenheim Foundation, the Program has had a continuing commitment to include practitioners in its work; to devise situations in which the researchers learn from the practitioners and the practitioners learn from both the researchers and each other; to synthesize and extract the best ideas; and to work to put these ideas into good currency. Integrating theory with practice and academicians with practitioners--through research, Executive Sessions, teaching, writing and publishing--the Program in Criminal Justice has attempted to challenge conventional wisdom in various domains of criminal justice policy.

The Program's research agenda has included policing, prosecution, drug policy, youth violence, firearms trafficking, public defense, and community revitalization. The overarching themes that link these subject areas are: improving public safety, creating partnerships between communities and public agencies, problem solving, and enhancing the quality of life in communities. The Program is particularly proud of its work on, and contributions to, the strategy of community policing, the problem-solving process that led to the reduction of youth violence in Boston and elsewhere, and its role in what might be called "the movement toward community" in all parts of the criminal justice process.

The Program in Criminal Justice can point to several important accomplishments. Through its Executive Session on Policing (and projects that grew out of this work, such as the Perspectives on Policing series and ongoing discussions with the National Institute of Justice and others) the Program has been a major contributor to the evolution of community policing. For example, just as "broken windows" has become a common term in public safety (originating with the 1982 article published in The Atlantic by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling), community policing has become the dominant strategy of policing across the country.

In the area of youth violence, the Program's research helped to reduce youth gun homicides in Boston. Led by David Kennedy, Anthony Braga, and Anne Piehl, the Boston Gun Project was an innovative partnership between researchers and practitioners to assess the city's youth homicide problem and implement an intervention designed to have a substantial impact on the problem. The resulting intervention, known as Operation Ceasefire, focused on a small number of chronically offending gang-involved youth responsible for much of Boston's youth homicide problem. A rigorous impact evaluation revealed that this intervention was associated with a 63 percent reduction in youth homicide victimization and significant reductions in shots fired and gun assaults. The use of a multi-agency working group for information-based problem solving, which is at the core of the Boston success, has become a well-accepted approach for developing unique and effective solutions to local problems. While the Program in Criminal Justice continues to build on this work in other projects (Strategic Crime Prevention in Baltimore; Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative), jurisdictions around the country also are trying to replicate this work.

In looking at the work of the Program in Criminal Justice and the direction in which it points, it is clear that the word "community" is attached to several areas of practice. Starting with community policing, which redefines the philosophy and work of police to include problem-solving partnerships with the community, the Program has applied similar thinking to prosecution and public defense. Prosecutors and public defenders engaged these issues in separate Executive Sessions. Many prosecutors around the country are developing community-based strategies for organizing the work of their offices. Some public defenders are starting to rethink the strategies of their offices to broaden their role and provide more "holistic" services to their clients. These observations, along with other current conversations (e.g., about restorative justice), raise the question of whether the various practices might come together under the term "community justice." If so, over the course of twenty years, Program in Criminal Justice research has been helping to build the intellectual underpinnings of this concept.

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