The impact of adult drug courts on crime and incarceration: findings from a multi-site quasi-experimental design

Objectives  

To test the impact of adult drug courts on future criminal behavior and sentence length on the precipitating criminal case; and to examine whether the magnitude of the drug court impact varies based on drug use or criminal history, social ties, mental health, or offender demographics.     

Linking program implementation and effectiveness: Lessons from a pooled sample of welfare‐to‐work experiments

This paper addresses the question: How does implementation influence the effectiveness of mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs? Data from three large‐scale, multi‐site random assignment experiments were pooled; quantitative measures of program implementation were constructed; and multilevel statistical modeling was used to examine the relationship between program implementation and effects on short‐term client earnings. Individual‐level data were analyzed for 69,399 sample members and group‐level implementation data were analyzed for 59 local programs. Findings indicate that, other things being equal, earnings effects are increased by: an emphasis on quick client employment, an emphasis on personalized client attention, staff caseloads that do not get too large, and limited use of basic education. Findings also show that mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs can be effective for many types of people, and that focusing on clients who are especially job‐ready (or not) does not have a consistent influence on a program's effectiveness. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Is a Refrigerator Good or Evil? The Moral Evaluation of Everyday Objects

Certain objects such as family heirlooms are often treated as if they have intrinsic moral qualities, including sacredness and infinite value. Other objects such as instruments of torture are often seen as inherently repellent. Do people also evaluate more mundane objects such as refrigerators as morally good or bad? Here we explore the nature and scope of moral object evaluation through two experiments that asked participants to rate how morally good or bad a large set of familiar objects were. We find that (a) everyday objects tend to be seen as morally positive and (b) unlike mere liking, the moral evaluation of objects is positively linked to the age and political conservatism of the participants. These findings are discussed in relation to research on automatic evaluation, mere exposure effects, and the relationship between affective states and moral judgments.     

The character of danger in psychiatric practice: are the mentally ill dangerous?

This paper explores the question of dangerousness and the mentally ill. Research for this paper was stimulated by the death by homicide of two psychiatrists in Oregon in 1985. The paper reviews three distinct areas in the psychiatric literature: the arrests of mental patients, assaults against psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, and assaultive behaviors exhibited by patients in hospitals and other psychiatric settings. The author concludes that the risks are real but are dependent, for the most part, on setting and the acuteness of illness. Realism in regard to risk is critical for the mentally ill, their families, professional caregivers, and society in general.     

After Oregon's insanity defense: : A comparison of conditional release and hospitalization

This paper is one in a series of reports on the characteristics of persons committed to the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB) and their treatment and disposition while subject to its jurisdiction. For the purpose of this discussion, we have focused on conditional release and attempt to answer a number of questions. How do the individuals who are placed in the community differ from those who remain hospitalized? Do the two mechanisms of conditional release in this system, by judges or the PSRB, differ in terms of the kinds of people that they are likely to release? Lastly, what features distinguish those individuals who manage to succeed in their release plans from those who do not?     

Science Use in Regulatory Impact Analysis: The Effects of Political Attention and Controversy

Scholars, policy makers, and research sponsors have long sought to understand the conditions under which scientific research is used in the policy‐making process. Recent research has identified a resource that can be used to trace the use of science across time and many policy domains. U.S. federal agencies are mandated by executive order to justify all economically significant regulations by regulatory impact analyses (RIAs), in which they present evidence of the scientific underpinnings and consequences of the proposed rule. To gain new insight into when and how regulators invoke science in their policy justifications, we ask: does the political attention and controversy surrounding a regulation affect the extent to which science is utilized in RIAs? We examine scientific citation activity in all 101 economically significant RIAs from 2008 to 2012 and evaluate the effects of attention—from the public, policy elites, and the media—on the degree of science use in RIAs. Our main finding is that regulators draw more heavily on scientific research when justifying rules subject to a high degree of attention from outside actors. These findings suggest that scientific research plays an important role in the justification of regulations, especially those that are highly salient to the public and other policy actors.