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Collaborative effort evaluation U.S. corrections policy

Projects:
Training Program in Politics, Economics, and Psychology
Institution:
University of California at Berkeley
Primary Strategic Goal:
Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Achievement/Results

In the Fall of 2009, Steven Raphael (IGERT PI) published an edited volume addressing the costs and benefits of the increase in U.S. incarceration rates since the late 1970s. Several IGERT faculty members from different disciplines contributed chapters as did one IGERT trainee. The purpose of the volume was to analyze the determinants of the 400 percent increase in incarceration, the benefits in terms of crime control, the costs in terms of fiscal impacts, costs on families, and impacts on former inmates, as well as provide a summative cost-benefit analysis of the change. The book has been well-received and read widely by policy makers and social scientists across the country.

Address Goals

The research used cutting edge empirical methodological techniques to provide a dispassionate assessment of a contentious issue. It drew on the philosophical disposition of our IGERT program, in that it incorporated a broad set of methods from economics, political science and psychology in the analysis.

Posted:
December 2, 2009