Prior to joining the faculty at George Mason, Laurie Robinson served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice. She spoke to the Center for Court Innovation about failure in the criminal justice system.
Is failure an important topic?
I think it’s a terrific thing to talk about. Everybody talks about their personal failings – their divorces, their diets, their sex lives – but nobody talks about their failures in professional life. It’s one of the few hidden topics in our culture. Yet we learn so much from failure. It’s an important lesson that I’ve learned from academia. I think of the old saw that Thomas Edison had 99 failures before he invented the light bulb. In the science world, that type of thinking is a given.
What impact does an unwillingness to talk about failure have on criminal justice?
We have no tolerance for failure, which makes it so difficult to innovate. It makes both political appointees and career public servants much too shy about taking risks and therefore, very unwilling to innovate in any area.
What role does government play in promoting a healthy conversation about failure?
When I was at the Department of Justice, we released a report prepared by Larry Sherman and his University of Maryland colleagues that summarized which crime prevention programs worked and which didn’t. It was 1997, several years after the Crime Bill passed, and we were putting out $4 billion a year in funding to states and localities. We knew it would create a lot of controversy, and we went over every word carefully. I remember it ruined my Christmas because we were working so hard on it! The report got a lot of attention, including the front page of the New York Times and as the headline subject of a series of appropriations committee hearings. It gave us a lot of guidance about what to fund and what not to fund, although there were recommendations in the report that we were unable to implement. It was very hard for people to admit that programs like D.A.R.E. and boot camps didn’t work. We used the report as a hammer to bring researchers and practitioners together to try and revise these models.
What have you learned about failure?
I’m surrounded by academics now, after a lifetime spent in Washington. The master’s program that I run at the University of Pennsylvania is designed to give leaders that kind of exposure early in their careers. My goal is to send them out into the world as change agents. We try to pay attention to teaching them how to learn from and manage failure.