I conclude this book on what i believe is an optimistic note. as the preceding chapters suggest, there is much cause for concern about the lack of accountability in criminal justice, as reflected in the absence of any systematic empirical monitoring of even the most prominent policies. We also should be concerned about the lack of effective or efficient policies in criminal justice or, more precisely, the lack of evidence that existing policies are effective or efficient. That said, many opportunities exist for dramatically improving the situation at relatively little cost. In this chapter, I briefly restate the argument that more and better evaluation research is needed. I then describe a number of opportunities and strategies both for increasing the quantity and quality of criminal justice evaluation research and for integrating such research into policy making and everyday practice.

The Need for More and Better Criminal Justice Evaluation Research

As noted at the outset in Chapter 1, this book was written with several goals in mind. The first was to describe what an evaluation research approach is and how it can be used to inform criminal justice policy, including various laws, programs, rules, protocols, and practices that make up the criminal justice system. This goal was motivated by the observation that policy makers, criminal justice administrators and practitioners, and even researchers frequently do not know what evaluation research is or, by extension, that different types of evaluation can be conducted.