Todd R. Clear is Dean at Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. He has published three recent books on the topic of community justice.
Why is failure so hard to talk about?
There is an enormous premium placed on avoiding bad failures at the individual case level. A program that works well can get defined by a handful of high-profile failures. I’ll give you an example. In the 1980s I worked on a project in Portland, Oregon with an innovative prosecutor willing to take a risk on diverting high-risk offenders into intensive probation supervision. We had a 75 percent revocation rate and the officers involved thought the program was a failure because they were constantly going back to court on these cases. Then we got re-arrest data on our comparison group, and we found that they were doing much, much worse. When we did the analysis, we found that the comparison group cost twice as much! But the advisory board on the project shut it down, because they had the feeling that the program was just awful. It’s a hard thing to balance, because the probation officers on the project were demoralized, but yet when you looked at the analysis, they were having a positive effect. Failure is a really complicated idea.
How do correctional officials live with the constant fear of high-profile failures?
Parole and probation live continuously with what FEMA has had to experience in the last few years. The challenge for people in the field is that you have sporadic failure without any capacity to provide positive feedback. People learn to be cynical and mistrusting of all research. At the individual professional level, people usually cope by not caring. At the executive level, administrators know they are constantly being asked to do the impossible. It takes a rare person who can make peace with the demands of the job, but they’re the type who can get great results. But everyone lives in fear of having a big case hit the newspaper.
What’s the best way that an official can respond to a negative story hitting the newspapers?
There’s no perfect answer, but my sense from people I know in the business is that you have to be able to make the case that you followed the policies and procedures that are in place. The thing they’re most vulnerable to is the idea that they really should have known or done something, but they didn’t. On the other hand, it’s very easy to make a policy look stupid in hindsight.
Do you think that reformers often commit the error of over-promising what they can deliver in terms of recidivism and cost reductions?
I think it’s often the case. Unless people promise a lot, it’s hard for people to get a program funded. There’s this weird dynamic when you start something new where you have to beat what people think the current practice is accomplishing, as opposed to what it’s actually accomplishing. For example, there’s some empirical evidence out there that at best, there’s no recidivism effect of going to prison and that it may very well actually reduce a person’s success rate. But people don’t think that way.
What do you see as the legacy of Robert Martinson’s famous declaration that “nothing works” to reduce offender rehabilitation? He never said “nothing works,” but that’s how people interpreted his written work. When he was traveling around making presentations and talking to the press, he was much more pessimistic about chances of success that he was in his official writings. I think his experience was colored by how he was treated by other researchers. For a long time, he could not get his research reviewed or released. I think what Martinson did for the field was good because he was calling attention to something that was important. He was a real thorn in the side of academics who wanted to ignore his findings. We live in a different world today. Nobody is arguing that parole boards should look at a guy and make a guess about whether or not to release him. As a partisan for rehabilitative programs, I think it’s important that we not make the same mistakes again. The research on reentry programs isn’t uniformly positive and we have to be careful to make sure that what we’re doing is working.