Content area
Full Text
Articles
It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.
Ethics of the Fathers (Part 2 Chapter 16)
We would like to thank the peer reviewers and the senior and student editors of the Israel Law Review for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the article, and Noam Haviv and Michael Wolfowicz for their assistance in preparing the manuscript. Our colleague Efrat Shoham has been an important partner more generally, both for the evaluation study described in this article, and the contribution to our thinking in this work. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to the Israel Prison Service for its financial support for the National Evaluation of Prison Rehabilitation Programs through a grant to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
1.
Introduction
Over the last decade, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of evidence-based policy in reaching decisions about criminal justice programmes and practices.1Indeed, it is reasonable to say that the idea of evidence-based decision making has become key not only to theory but also to practice. Evidence-based policy requires that decision making in criminal justice be strongly influenced by basic and applied research. For example, large-scale programmes would not be widely implemented without strong scientific evidence of programme success. In turn, programmes that are implemented would be evaluated and assessed on a regular basis to ensure that they are meeting the goals of the organisation.
The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), which is the main funder of criminal justice programmes in the United States (US), declares on its website that '[e]ncouraging the adoption of E[vidence] B[ased] P[ractices] is a key component of BJA's 2013-2016 strategic plan, which calls for the promotion and sharing of evidence-based and promising practices and programs'.2Even earlier than this, in 2004, the Community Corrections Division of the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) had already started working together with the Crime and Justice Institute to develop an 'integrated model' that 'emphasizes the importance of focusing equally on evidence-based practices, organisational development, and collaboration to achieve successful and lasting reform'.3
In some sense, it would seem intuitive that evidence-based policy is a useful tool for government. A recent report by the...