A lawyer and economist Megan Stevenson last year released an essay that was essentially “Nothing Works” 2.0. For those non-criminologists, “nothing works” was a report by Robert Martinson in the 1970’s that was critical of the literature on prisoner rehabilitation, and said to date that essentially all attempts at rehabilitation were ineffective.

Martinson was justified. With the benefit of hindsight, most of the studies Martinson critiques were poorly run (in terms of randomization, they almost all were observational self selected into treatment) and had very low statistical power to detect any benefits. (For people based experiments in CJ, think you typically need 1000+ participants, not a few dozen.)

Field experiments are hard and messy, and typically we are talking about “reducing crime by 20%” or “reducing recidivism by 10%” – they are not miracles. You can only actually know if they work using more rigorous designs that were not used at that point in social sciences.

Stevenson does not deny those minor benefits exist, but moves the goalposts to say CJ experiments to date have failed because they do not generate wide spread sweeping change in CJ systems. This is an impossible standard, and is an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good fallacy.

A recent piece by Brandon del Pozo and colleagues critiques Stevenson, which I agree with the majority of what Brandon says. Stevenson’s main critique are not actually with experiments, but more broadly organizational change (which del Pozo is doing various work in now).

Stevenson’s critique is broader than just policing, but I actually would argue that the proactive policing ideals of hotspots and focused deterrence have diffused into the field broadly enough that her points about systematic change are false (at least in those two examples). Those started out as individual projects though, and only diffused through repeated application in a slow process.

As I get older, am I actually more of the engineer mindset that Stevenson is critical of. As a single person, I cannot change the whole world. As a police officer or crime analyst or professor, you cannot change the larger organization you are a part of. You can however do one good thing at a time.

Even if that singular good thing you did is fleeting, it does not make it in vain.

References

• del Pozo, B., Belenko, S., Pivovarova, E., Ray, B., Martins, K. F., & Taxman, F. S. (2024). Using implementation science to improve evidence-based policing: An introduction for researchers and practitioners. Police Quarterly, Online First.

• del Pozo, B., Belenko, S., Taxman, F. S., Engel, R. S., Ratcliffe, J., Adams, I., & Piquero, A. R. (2024). Then a miracle occurs: cause, effect, and the heterogeneity of criminal justice research. Journal of Experimental Criminology, Online First

• Martinson, R. (1974). What works? Questions and answers about prison reform. The public interest, 35(2), 22-54.

• Stevenson, M. (2023) Cause, effect, and the structure of the social world. Boston University Law Review 103 (7), 2001-2047.