Rehabilitation and behavior change focuses on research involving high-risk offenders and criminal behaviors that include criminal and violent offending, recidivism, delinquency, substance use, and HIV risk behaviors.
Funding Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI), Wayne Welsh, Jennifer Wood and Matthew Hiller
Description: A five-year multisite project to test implementation interventions to identify and reduce gaps in substance abuse services for adolescents under community juvenile justice supervision. The project involves a cluster randomized trial in 34 sites in 7 states. We are testing the impact of various interventions involving needs assessments, data-driven decision making, behavioral health training, and facilitated local change teams on organizational, staff, and youth outcomes.
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller
Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.
Funding Agency: Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko
Description: The goal of the PROSPER project, a collaboration between Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) and Temple University’s Department of Criminal Justice, is to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of integrating Peer Recovery Specialists (PRSs) in an adult drug treatment court. A growing body of research demonstrates that peer support can facilitate recovery and reduces health care costs, but to date the model has not been tested in criminal justice settings. This study will be the first in the U.S. to assess whether PRSs, working with the Philadelphia Treatment Court (PTC) staff and treatment providers, can help to promote retention, engagement, and ongoing recovery post-graduation. During the first project phase, focus groups and interviews will be conducted with key informants to provide insight into how PRSs can best support PTC clients. During the second project phase, 112 newly enrolled PTC clients will be recruited and randomly assigned to either be connected with a PRS or to receive treatment-as-usual (56 per each condition), and monitored for 9 months. Key indicators such as relapse, re-arrest, and drug court completion will help determine whether clients assigned a PRS have greater program success than those in the control condition. This study will answer important questions regarding how to successfully integrate peer staff into drug courts, and provide preliminary indications of the efficacy of adding PRSs to the treatment court process.
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh
Description: DVPP is a relatively new program being used to treat violent offenders who are eligible for parole. This specialized treatment program is designed to address cognitive distortions and aggressive behaviors in violent offenders to reduce the risk of future violence.
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman and Kate Auerhahn
Description: The data from the evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) are very complex and rich panel data that allow for the investigation of the dynamics of re-entry and the post incarceration experience. Released in 2011, these data are already the focus of a great deal of secondary analysis and are likely to continue as such. Missing data are a problem endemic to panel studies, and to research on offenders, ex-offenders, and other socially marginal populations. Given the theoretical and practical currency of reentry issues in criminal justice, and the importance of panel data to the study of these issues, Auerhahn is examining the theoretical underpinnings and subsequent consequences of different approaches to the handling of missing data. Research using the SVORI data to investigate the relationship between family support and recidivism reveals that analyses utilizing listwise deletion and multiple imputation are substantively quite similar. More specific comparisons of similarities and differences between these results are discussed along with implications for the interpretation of findings. Roman and colleagues are using the SVORI data to examine the relationship between prisoner debt, child support, employment and successful community reintegration. Recently published pieces include a descriptive analyses of child support debt and its relationship to service receipt post-incarceration (Criminal Justice Policy Review), and the longitudinal associations among child support debt, employment, and recidivism (Sociological Quarterly)
Affiliated Faculty: Kate Auerhahn
Description: Foucault’s genealogical method is combined with Donald Black’s framework of “pure sociology” to elucidate the relationship between social-structural inequality and the discursive environment of the courtroom. Rules governing the admissibility of evidence on grounds of relevance structure and limit the forms in which “truth” is constructed in court proceedings. The analysis demonstrates that the formalized discourse of the courts – with specific focus on the rules of evidence – constitutes and reproduces dynamics of structural inequality. Practices examined include the discourses surrounding admissibility and relevance, privilege exclusions, and the structure of ritualized courtroom operations and procedures such as arraignments, bail hearings, adjudication and sentencing. The analysis reveals the ways in which evidentiary discourse reflects and ultimately reproduces social-structural relations of power and inequality with respect to various bases of stratification such as social integration, cultural legitimacy, and socioeconomic status.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: Vîlcică, in collaboration with researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, will too use interrupted time series analyses to examine the impact of the marijuana decriminalization in Philadelphia on the state’s correctional institutions. For control purposes, the study will examine prison trends in: a) other drugs and non-drug related sentences; b) admissions and releases from prison pre- and post-intervention; and c) correctional institutions in the Philadelphia county and other comparable PA counties not undergoing similar interventions. Lastly, basic cost-savings analysis will also be conducted. The results should help inform current policy debate on marijuana decriminalization or legalization on a wider scale.
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman, Jerry Ratcliffe, Sharon Ostrow
Description:This project will examine how police and victim service system networks respond after violent street conflicts, and whether victims with offense/arrest histories are treated differently from victims who are not labeled as offenders.
Project Title: The Parole Decision as a Critical Liberty Decision and Its Implications for Justice
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: In a series of inter-related research drawing on data from a recent comprehensive review of parole and correctional processes in Pennsylvania, Vîlcică examines the nature of parole decisionmaking and factors that explain variation in the decision to grant release. One line of inquiry, for example, focuses on testing for punitive themes in parole decisionmaking (Vîlcică, 2016, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology) while another explores the role that visits to inmates who are serving their sentences have on parole decisions, a first attempt in the literature to link research on parole decision making with reentry research on prison visitation (Vîlcică, 2015, Journal of Criminal Justice). Both studies raise critical issues about the role of the parole decision in the overall justice process and concerns about fairness deriving from the discretionary nature of the decision. Future related work will examine variation in parole decisions due to decision maker and organizational attributes.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: Many defendants spend a significant amount of time in pretrial detention awaiting the adjudication of their cases only to have all charges against them dismissed. Considering that the main determinant of pretrial detention is the amount of cash bail assigned (i.e., many defendants cannot afford to post required bail), the pretrial detention of those defendants who do not get convicted of the crimes accused of raises serious questions of justice regarding the adjudication process. The goal of this study is to analyze the connection between the bail decision, the ensuing pretrial release/detention status, and the final case outcome. Using a sample of criminal defendants from Philadelphia, PA, predictive analyses will attempt to identify the factors predicting both the bail decision and the dismissal decision, and whether the pretrial detention/release status in itself plays a role in explaining case dismissal. Implications for policy will be addressed, particularly focusing on the use of pretrial detention as “punishment without conviction.”
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: Case attrition in criminal justice processing is a phenomenon that occurs in all criminal justice systems, regardless of their underlying legal foundations, yet no research has attempted to explain its variation from a comparative perspective. This study will fill in this gap. The analyses will draw on comparable available aggregate data and will emphasize the implications of case mortality for the achievement of shared justice goals in the two types of legal systems.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: In contrast to the United States, many European countries do not have separate, specialized courts dedicated to the processing of delinquent youth. However, reform efforts there, especially in the most recent EU country members, are considering experimenting with such courts. In efforts to contribute to such discussions, this research will critically compare the merits of adopting a dedicated juvenile court system in Romania (a recent EU member) versus maintaining processing in the mainstream courts, drawing on lessons from the relatively long history of the American juvenile court.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică and Jeff Ward
Description: In September 2008, then-Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell imposed a moratorium on all parole releases from the state’s correctional institutions, following several killings of police officers by parolees recently released from prison. The moratorium was lifted in stages, with the parole process being fully restored in Spring 2009. The moratorium had several wide-ranging unintended consequences for the parole and corrections systems in the state. In recent investigations, Vîlcică documents the impact of the moratorium on parole practices, correctional processes, inmates, and correctional staff, and ultimately on the legitimacy of the two agencies affected, the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole and the Department of Corrections (Vîlcică, 2016, European Journal on Criminal Policy & Research, and Corrections: Policy, Practice and Research). Ongoing investigations, in collaboration with the researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and University of Maryland, use the moratorium as a case study in procedural justice in corrections, with a focus on both inmate behavior (e.g., amplification of misconduct) and inmate perceptions of the moratorium’s impact on incarcerated individuals (collected through qualitative data during the moratorium period). This corrections-based research should add substantively to the current body of knowledge on procedural justice and system legitimacy, which so far has emphasized earlier contact between citizens and the justice system.
Official contact with the criminal justice system can have deleterious, unintended consequences as suggested by labeling theory. Research on the sanction-crime relationship has drawn increased attention to factors or conditions which affect the consequences of contact with the formal criminal justice system. Recent collaborative work with Dr. Megan Augustyn has illustrated that high perceptions of procedural justice can prevent deviance amplification among a sample of serious juvenile offenders (Augustyn & Ward, 2015, Journal of Criminal Justice). Increased attention to procedural justice is important because, unlike some moderating factors that have received attention in the literature like prior delinquency, sex, and race/ethnicity, treatment of offenders is within the purview of criminal justice system actors.
Affiliated Faculty: Kate Auerhahn
Description: Over the last three decades, the US prison population grew dramatically, largely fueled by the enforcement of policies associated with the War on Drugs. At the same time, the American economic system underwent radical transformation, characterized by growth in highly-skilled sector occupations and decline in unskilled jobs as a result of automation and foreign outsourcing, as well as declines in labor demand generally, as evidenced by three years of a “slack” labor market. Current trends in criminal justice, such as increased interest in reentry and in reducing rates of return for former prisoners, as well as the growing movement toward drug policy reform, if continued, will ultimately result in the decarceration and reintroduction of large numbers of men and women into the labor market, the vast majority of whom are qualified for (at best) unskilled occupations. These individuals are largely superfluous to the current economic system; given the cultural and social primacy of remunerative employment, the integration of these men and women into modern American society presents a significant social policy challenge. Because the American economy is unlikely to evolve in ways that will absorb these individuals, alternative approaches to addressing both the labor market discrepancy and the consequent implications for crime merit exploration. This project focuses on the idea of citizenship rights, and the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income, modeling a comparison of the costs of such a policy as compared to those of incarceration over the life course.
Funding Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI), Wayne Welsh, Jennifer Wood and Matthew Hiller
Description: This five-year multisite project tests implementation interventions to identify and reduce gaps in substance abuse services for adolescents under community juvenile justice supervision. The project involves a cluster randomized trial in 34 sites in 7 states. We are testing the impact of various interventions involving needs assessments, data-driven decision making, behavioral health training, and facilitated local change teams on organizational, staff, and youth outcomes.
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller
Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.
Funding Agency: Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko
Description: The goal of the PROSPER project, a collaboration between Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) and Temple University’s Department of Criminal Justice, is to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of integrating Peer Recovery Specialists (PRSs) in an adult drug treatment court. A growing body of research demonstrates that peer support can facilitate recovery and reduces health care costs, but to date the model has not been tested in criminal justice settings. This study will be the first in the U.S. to assess whether PRSs, working with the Philadelphia Treatment Court (PTC) staff and treatment providers, can help to promote retention, engagement, and ongoing recovery post-graduation. During the first project phase, focus groups and interviews will be conducted with key informants to provide insight into how PRSs can best support PTC clients. During the second project phase, 112 newly enrolled PTC clients will be recruited and randomly assigned to either be connected with a PRS or to receive treatment-as-usual (56 per each condition), and monitored for 9 months. Key indicators such as relapse, re-arrest, and drug court completion will help determine whether clients assigned a PRS have greater program success than those in the control condition. This study will answer important questions regarding how to successfully integrate peer staff into drug courts, and provide preliminary indications of the efficacy of adding PRSs to the treatment court process.
Funding Agency: National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute (NIH)
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman and Ralph Taylor (subcontractors to UCSD)
Description: The study evaluates a trans-disciplinary conceptual model of the relation of crime and crime-related perceptions to physical activity and other cardiovascular disease-related outcomes across the life span. Research activities include development of reliable measures of crime-related constructs that will be applicable across the life span.
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff and Ralph Taylor
Description: Neighborhood parks in urban areas are public spaces that provide a variety of recreational opportunities for residents in a natural environment. At the same time, they can become staging areas for illegal and disorderly activities. Systematic social observations describing park characteristics, US Census data quantifying neighborhood social composition, community surveys capturing social cohesion, and official crime data are analyzed using multilevel models to examine: 1) whether activity generating features of parks explain differences in crime levels across parks; 2) whether differences in parks’ neighborhood context explain differences in crime levels across parks; and 3) the extent to which park characteristics as opposed to neighborhood context explain differences in crime levels across parks. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of crime and place.
Affiliated Faculty: Jerry Ratcliffe and Ralph Taylor
Description: We used cutting-edge predictive policing software to plot locations of increased risk of violent and property crime. The Philadelphia Police Department then applied three different types of policing activity in these areas. Across five Philadelphia Police districts, officers were made aware of the predictive policing areas on roll-call. In five others, a dedicated police car patrolled the predictive grids. And in five other districts, an unmarked car patrolled the grids. The six remaining districts were used as control locations. The results of this NIJ-funded program are currently being analyzed.
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Alese Wooditch
Description: This NIJ-funded study seeks to advance the knowledge and utility of predictive policing by examining the strategy’s key components and processes. In collaboration with the Denver Police Department (DPD), this project evaluates available data sources for predictive analytics, and assesses a variety of predictive policing software programs to compare accuracy, reliability, and ease of use. The effectiveness of the best performing predictive policing software program will be conducted using a randomized control trial and the implementation of the predictive policing process by the DPD will be examined.
Affiliated Faculty: Jeffrey T. Ward
Description: With evidence for spatiotemporal patterning of crime mounting, there is a growing need to understand how neighborhood context impacts repeat/near repeat crime as well as crime that is not connected in space and time. This project has provided one of the first assessments of how social-structural and neighborhood design features similarly and differentially contribute to spatiotemporally related burglaries and spatiotemporally unrelated burglaries (Nobles, Ward, & Tillyer, in press, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency). Other crime types and additional sites beyond Jacksonville are now under study.
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor and Elizabeth R. Groff
Description: This NIJ-funded study examined connections between jurisdiction-level demographic structure, land use, street networks and changing violent and property crime rates in the first decade of the 21st Century in the nine county Philadelphia Metropolitan region. Results suggest increasing spatial inequality in violent crime across the region, and impacts of large scale commercial sites on property crime rates. Implications emerge for cross-jurisdictional police cooperation.
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor
Description: This review of almost 100 years of community patterns of crime and delinquency highlights four critical issues blocking further development in our understanding of the causes and consequences of crime and delinquency ecological patterns: temporal scaling, spatial scaling, ecological construct validation, and selection (NYU Press, 2015).
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: This study (2015, Criminal Justice & Behavior) examined neighborhood effects on defendant pretrial performance. Specifically, the study looked at whether there was neighborhood-level variation in defendants’ failure-to-appear for trial and pretrial criminal conduct and explored the impact on these outcomes of neighborhood structural conditions such as socioeconomic status, stability, and racial composition. Prior bail prediction research has relied only on individual-level attributes. This paper, therefore, for the first time provided a novel perspective in recognizing the role of community context in empirical prediction of bail outcomes. The findings have important implications for bail decisionmaking policy and are relevant for the validity of the contemporary theories that emphasize the community context of crime in shaping deviant behavior.
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance
Affiliated Faculty: Jerry Ratcliffe
Description: This BJA-funded project is designed to help Philadelphia Police commanders and crime analysts coordinate analysis and decision-making around numerous crime problems in the city. We are introducing a more scientific approach to the direction of crime analysis, and a more collaborative and community crime oriented response to the issues uncovered by the analysis.
Funding Agency: Subcontract to the Police Foundation (National Institute of Justice cooperative agreement)
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff
Description: For almost a decade research has shown that once a burglary occurs on a street, the homes on that street and on nearby streets are at a much higher risk of burglary over the next one to two weeks. But this research finding has not yet been translated into actionable crime prevention strategies for police agencies and tested in the United States using a randomized controlled experiment. This project aims to correct this deficiency by using the knowledge surrounding near repeat burglary to develop a crime prevention strategy.
Broadly speaking, the research seeks to determine if knowledge about near repeat patterns of burglary can actually be used for crime prevention purposes. Within this framework, we are attempting to determine if raising awareness about crime issues and crime prevention techniques with the residents near burglary locations can reduce further burglary in the area. The targeted department strategy we are suggesting is a one-page information-rich document (in English and Spanish) that would indicate that an incident has occurred and crime prevention efforts that can be undertaken by residents. We will also include in that document links to further information that will be available on line. A key feature of this experiment is the ability to get this information to all households within the defined area within 24 hours of a particular burglary incident (using community policing or patrol officers, auxiliary officers, or formal departmental volunteers).
At the end of the experiment, we will evaluate whether homes within the treatment areas were victimized less than those in the control areas. A random sample of residents will be surveyed to discover whether they received information and what actions they took in response. If a crime reduction occurs, a cost analysis will be conducted to discover whether the money saved through prevention offset the additional funds spent on notification.
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor
Description: Much has yet to be understood about the determinants of perceived police legitimacy and related topics such as confidence in the criminal justice system. Recent research examines variable connections between perceived fairness and effectiveness depending both on perceiver race and urban vs. suburban location (Taylor, Wyant, Lockwood, Social Science Research, 2014 online), and impacts of both perceived fairness and incivilities on police confidence across the commonwealth (Taylor and Lawton Police Quarterly 2012).
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader and Phil Harris (retired)
Description: The research will produce knowledge about how to prevent at-risk youth from joining gangs and reduce delinquency among active gang members. It will evaluate a modification of Functional Family Therapy (FFT), a model program from the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development initiative. This modification, FFT-G, was developed in an earlier phase of the research. A randomized trial testing this adaptation is currently underway with funding from Smith Richardson Foundation. The long-term goal is the designation of FFT-G as a national Blueprint Model Program for a new and especially high-risk population, members of street gangs, thus providing the first known evidence-based program (EBP) for such youth. In addition to scholarly articles and presentations about the project, this research will produce a program model that is ready for broad dissemination, an existing dissemination mechanism, and a model for how public agencies can fund EBPs using existing funding streams. Given recent estimates that more than 782,000 gang members reside in the U.S., this product is expected to have a large impact on community uptake of the model.
Approximately 200 adjudicated males age 11-17 who reside in inner city Philadelphia neighborhoods with high gang prevalence and are gang members or at high risk for joining a gang will be court-ordered to receive family therapy. These subjects are then randomly assigned to receive FFT-G (treatment) or another family therapy typically used by the court (control). Treatment lasts 5 to 6 months. Participating youths and their care-givers complete interviews prior to random assignment and at 6 months post-randomization, and data from court and public assistance records are obtained. Interviews assess criminal activity, involvement in gangs, and several targeted risk factors that contribute to these poor outcomes. A process evaluation documents program implementation as well as costs for both the FFT-G and control groups.
Funding Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman
Description: This two-site study, involving collaboration between Temple University and RAND, examines the factors that influence gang disengagement and crime desistance. The research team used social network methods to collect detailed data on 225 gang youth and their social relations in the Philadelphia and the District of Columbia.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: In contrast to the United States, many European countries do not have separate, specialized courts dedicated to the processing of delinquent youth. However, reform efforts there, especially in the most recent EU country members, are considering experimenting with such courts. In efforts to contribute to such discussions, this research will critically compare the merits of adopting a dedicated juvenile court system in Romania (a recent EU member) versus maintaining processing in the mainstream courts, drawing on lessons from the relatively long history of the American juvenile court.
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff
Description: Agent-based modelling is a relatively new methodology that facilitates theory-testing and thought experiments when empirical testing is not an option. This typically arises when data are not available or when manipulation of the variables of interest is not ethical or too expensive. This paper conducts a systematic review of the use of agent-based modeling to model urban crime published prior to 2015. Three goals motivate the endeavor -- summarize the state of the art, identify areas where we have strong evidence and ascertain gaps that are limiting our ability to create and evaluate models of urban crime. A set of forward-looking suggestions are proposed.
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh , co-authored with Marc Riedel
Description: Describes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of violence that cuts across research and theories at the individual, group, organizational, community, and societal levels.
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader
Description: This community-based study uses participant observation and in-depth interviews with men aged 25-34 living in the Frankford section of the city. This neighborhood was selected because of its high crime rates, racial/ethnic diversity, concentration of halfway houses and drug treatment clinics, and disproportionate number of returning prisoners. The main part of the study focuses on whether and how crime plays a role in how men in this community make ends meet – that is, whether and how they have desisted from criminal activity. Extant theory suggests that men of this age should exhibit stability in terms of employment, housing, and social ties. However, the characteristics of the neighborhood would suggest that legitimate opportunities may be scarce and their lives may be characterized by less stability and less desistance from offending than traditional life course theory would predict for men of this age. Close attention is paid to how they construct masculinity in a social context in which mainstream markers of manhood are difficult to attain. A secondary study in this community involves regularly attending community meetings and documenting the way in which residents frame the problem of crime and its solutions.
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader
Description: This research projects comprises an active offender study of drug sellers in Philadelphia. Interviews were conducted 2009-2012 and are being used to explore (1) how family criminal capital (i.e., criminal family networks) reduces the risks and potential costs of apprehension; (2) the relationship between legal and illegal employment, including drug sellers’ perceptions of whether drug dealing can be a long-term career; and (3) whether specific criminal justice sanctions (e.g., arrest, drug crackdowns) lead to adjustments in the strategies and techniques used to avoid apprehension.
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh and Phil Harris (retired)
Description: This book, now in its 5th edition, by Wayne Welsh and Philip Harris (Routledge/Anderson, 2016), presents a comprehensive and structured account of the process of administering planned change in the criminal justice system. A simple yet sophisticated seven-stage model offers a full account of program and policy development from beginning to end.
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller
Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff and Jennifer Wood
Description: This research evaluates a pilot deployment of body worn cameras in the Philadelphia Police Department. We conduct focus groups pre and post deployment, administer a survey to BWC officers to gain knowledge regarding their day-to-day experiences wearing cameras, and use a quasi-experimental design to determine whether the BWC officers’ behavior is different than other officers in the same district who did not wear cameras. We rely on official data sources to examine the effect of BWCs on officer behavior. We compare the activity of the 41 officers who volunteered to wear a camera with that of the 218 other officers in the 22nd district. We examine proactive officer actions as measured by arrests, car and pedestrian stops, and live stops. We also consider negative outcomes from police-citizen interactions such as use of force incidents and citizen complaints.
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader
Description: The research will produce knowledge about how to prevent at-risk youth from joining gangs and reduce delinquency among active gang members. It will evaluate a modification of Functional Family Therapy (FFT), a model program from the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development initiative. This modification, FFT-G, was developed in an earlier phase of the research. A randomized trial testing this adaptation is currently underway with funding from Smith Richardson Foundation. The long-term goal is the designation of FFT-G as a national Blueprint Model Program for a new and especially high-risk population, members of street gangs, thus providing the first known evidence-based program (EBP) for such youth. In addition to scholarly articles and presentations about the project, this research will produce a program model that is ready for broad dissemination, an existing dissemination mechanism, and a model for how public agencies can fund EBPs using existing funding streams. Given recent estimates that more than 782,000 gang members reside in the U.S., this product is expected to have a large impact on community uptake of the model.
Approximately 200 adjudicated males age 11-17 who reside in inner city Philadelphia neighborhoods with high gang prevalence and are gang members or at high risk for joining a gang will be court-ordered to receive family therapy. These subjects are then randomly assigned to receive FFT-G (treatment) or another family therapy typically used by the court (control). Treatment lasts 5 to 6 months. Participating youths and their care-givers complete interviews prior to random assignment and at 6 months post-randomization, and data from court and public assistance records are obtained. Interviews assess criminal activity, involvement in gangs, and several targeted risk factors that contribute to these poor outcomes. A process evaluation documents program implementation as well as costs for both the FFT-G and control groups.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: Vîlcică, in collaboration with researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, will too use interrupted time series analyses to examine the impact of the marijuana decriminalization in Philadelphia on the state’s correctional institutions. For control purposes, the study will examine prison trends in: a) other drugs and non-drug related sentences; b) admissions and releases from prison pre- and post-intervention; and c) correctional institutions in the Philadelphia county and other comparable PA counties not undergoing similar interventions. Lastly, basic cost-savings analysis will also be conducted. The results should help inform current policy debate on marijuana decriminalization or legalization on a wider scale.
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman
Description: This project supports the creation and maintenance of an effective, long term, sustainable research partnership that facilitates an overall research and evaluation approach utilizing joint strategy planning and development around implementing a focused deterrence law enforcement initiative in the city of Philadelphia. Focused deterrence strategies target specific criminal behavior committed by a small number of chronic offenders (in this case gang or group-affiliated offenders) who are vulnerable to sanctions and punishment.
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică
Description: In September 2008, then-Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell imposed a moratorium on all parole releases from the state’s correctional institutions, following several killings of police officers by parolees recently released from prison. The moratorium was lifted in stages, with the parole process being fully restored in Spring 2009. The moratorium had several wide-ranging unintended consequences for the parole and corrections systems in the state. In recent investigations, Vîlcică documents the impact of the moratorium on parole practices, correctional processes, inmates, and correctional staff (Vîlcică, 2016, European Journal on Criminal Policy & Research, and Corrections: Policy, Practice and Research).
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman
Description: Housed in Temple University’s Center for Bioethics, Urban Health, and Policy at the Temple School of Medicine, Philadelphia CeaseFire is a gun violence reduction intervention that utilizes the Cure Violence public health model of stopping the spread of disease. Philadelphia CeaseFire works by detecting and interrupting potentially violent conflicts; identifying and treating the highest risk; and, mobilizing the community to change norms. The evaluation consists of three main tasks: Creating a support system for staff in the collection of performance measures that will aid monthly and quarterly reporting; the conduct of an implementation evaluation; and the conduct of a rigorous impact evaluation.
The research also includes an evaluation of an expansion of the model to a local high school where two outreach workers have been employed to work directly with students.
Affiliated Faculty: Matthew Hiller
Description: Despite the rapid proliferation of drug courts since their origin in the late 1980's, research into the variation of this type of program have been hampered by the lack of a common measurement tool to quantify this. Dr. Hiller’s research in this area examines implementation and outcomes of both adult and juvenile drug court programs. One particular area of this research is focused on the development, testing, and psychometric properties of a self-report instrument designed to measure the 10 key components of the drug court model.
With regard to DUI courts, research in this areas involves an outcome evaluation that compared an intent-to-treat sample (i.e., all participants admitted to the program regardless of their graduation status) of multiple DUI offenders to a wait-list comparison group comprised of individuals who had applied to be in the DUI court, but were unable to participate because of limited program capacity. Findings showed that DUI court participation was significantly associated with better outcomes, thus adding to the limited literature on DUI court effectiveness.
Affiliated Faculty: Jeffrey T. Ward
Description: Research on gangs has hit a coming of age. However, there are still a number of important questions that necessitate clearer answers. For instance, the gang-violence link provides strong evidence for an association. Due to the inability to utilize experimental methods for obvious ethical reasons, less clear is whether gang involvement causes increased delinquency and other non-criminal outcomes such as precocious transitions or whether these relationships are spurious. This project is seeking to better quantify the contemporaneous gang facilitation effect with longitudinal survey data by exploiting advanced statistical methods within a counterfactual framework. Beyond the immediate impacts of gangs, the longer term consequences of gang involvement are also critical to understand. Collaborative work has led to the identification of pathways that connect adolescent gang involvement with criminal and non-criminal outcomes in adulthood using structural equation models (Krohn, Ward, Thornberry, Lizotte, & Chu, 2011, Criminology).
Affiliated faculty: Kate Auerhahn
Description: Over the last three decades, the US prison population grew dramatically, largely fueled by the enforcement of policies associated with the War on Drugs. At the same time, the American economic system underwent radical transformation, characterized by growth in highly-skilled sector occupations and decline in unskilled jobs as a result of automation and foreign outsourcing, as well as declines in labor demand generally, as evidenced by three years of a “slack” labor market. Current trends in criminal justice, such as increased interest in reentry and in reducing rates of return for former prisoners, as well as the growing movement toward drug policy reform, if continued, will ultimately result in the decarceration and reintroduction of large numbers of men and women into the labor market, the vast majority of whom are qualified for (at best) unskilled occupations. These individuals are largely superfluous to the current economic system; given the cultural and social primacy of remunerative employment, the integration of these men and women into modern American society presents a significant social policy challenge. Because the American economy is unlikely to evolve in ways that will absorb these individuals, alternative approaches to addressing both the labor market discrepancy and the consequent implications for crime merit exploration. This project focuses on the idea of citizenship rights, and the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income, modeling a comparison of the costs of such a policy as compared to those of incarceration over the life course.
In addition to Temple-sponsored funding for research, many faculty and students also apply for external research funding. Major sources for Criminal Justice funding include, but are not limited to the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Justice, and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Please consult the websites of the specific agencies for current funding solicitations and deadlines.
The Criminal Justice Department’s Research Committee has put together a document to illuminate the process for applying here at Temple. View the ‘Mechanics of Submitting a Grant Proposal for External Funding’ (pdf) guide. This document should be viewed as a resource rather than the final word in how to apply.
The Criminal Justice Department is committed to the highest ethical standards when conducting research involving human subjects. We follow the guidelines set out by Temple University and the federal government. Visit the Temple Institutional Review Board home page.
Faculty in Criminal Justice endeavor to provide undergraduate students with ‘hands on’ class-related activities that often require them to do fieldwork or analyze data. Each faculty member is required to obtain approval from the IRB for these activities during the semester in which they are to be completed. The IRB Approval Guide for Undergraduate Classroom Activities document (under construction) provides details on the necessary paperwork to be filed by the faculty member. It also contains instructions for how undergraduate students should sign up and complete the undergraduate student version of the IRB training course.
Director
Jerry Ratcliffe
525 Gladfelter Hall
jhr@temple.edu
Jennifer Wood
548 Gladfelter Hall
woodj@temple.edu
Elizabeth Groff
531 Gladfelter Hall
groff@temple.edu
Ralph Taylor
537 Gladfelter Hall
rbrecken@temple.edu
