U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics

Performance Measure for the Criminal
Justice System

October 1993, NCJ 143505

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A Zip archive of the tables in this report in spreadsheet format.
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Lawrence A. Greenfeld 
Acting Director

Bureau of Justice Statistics -
Princeton University 
Study Group on Criminal Justice 
Performance Measures

The goal of the BJS-Princeton Project is to
engage the criminal justice community in a
rigorous debate regarding appropriate
measures and ways in which they can be 
effectively utilized by policymakers and
practitioners.

Papers were prepared for Study Group
review and dissemination by John J.
DiIulio, Jr. (project director), 
James Q. Wilson (project advisor), Mark
H. Moore, Joan Petersilia, Geoffrey P.
Alpert, George F. Cole, and Charles 
H. Logan.  The authors focus on selected
components of the criminal justice system
and the utility of performance measures 
for each.  Other members of the study 
group are Norman A. Carlson, University 
of Minnesota; Wayne Estelle, former warden, 
California Men's Colony; James Short, 
Washington State University; and Steven 
K. Smith (project monitor), BJS.

This project is supported by BJS grant
number 92-BJ-CX-0002 to Princeton
University.  The contents of this 
document do not necessarily reflect the
views or policies of the Bureau of 
Justice Statistics or the U.S. Department 
of Justice.

Contents

Lawrence A. Greenfeld   
Foreword

John J. DiIulio, Jr.
Rethinking the Criminal Justice
System: Toward a New Paradigm

Charles H. Logan  
Criminal Justice Performance
Measures for Prisons

Joan Petersilia
Measuring the Performance
of Community Corrections

George F. Cole
Performance Measures for the Trial
Courts, Prosecution, and Public 
Defense

Geoffrey Alpert  
Mark H. Moore 
Measuring Police Performance in 
the New Paradigm of Policing

John J. DiIulio, Jr.
Measuring Performance
When There Is No Bottom Line

James Q. Wilson
The Problem of Defining
Agency Success

Acknowledgments

A number of individuals actively contributed 
to the working group meetings, reviewed 
papers, and provided comments, including 
Pamela Casey and Sally Hillsman of the 
National Center for State Courts; James P. 
Lynch, American University; Elizabeth
McCaughey, Manhattan  Institute; Anne
Piehl, Harvard University; Allen J. Beck, 
Tom Hester, and John M. Dawson of BJS;
and Steven D. Dillingham, former director
of BJS and study group member. Production 
was administered by Marilyn Marbrook and 
Yvonne Boston of BJS.  
 
Foreword

Efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness are
central goals for the administration of
criminal justice in the United States. 
Efficiency means economically applying
available resources to accomplish statutory
goals as well as to improve public safety. 
Effectiveness refers to carrying out justice
system activities with proper regard for
equity, proportionality, constitutional
protections afforded defendants and
convicted offenders, and public safety. 
Assuring equal treatment and handling of
like offenders and giving equal weight to
legally relevant factors in sentencing
represent the types of concerns generally
expressed about the fairness of the
criminal justice system.  

Unanimous agreement exists that the
justice system ought to be efficient,
effective, and fair.  Less accord, 
however, exists about how best to secure 
these essential qualities or how to measure
whether they have been achieved. Apart
from the obvious problem of determining
the measurement criteria for a particular
performance expectation, there is a more
difficult subsequent problem of determining 
what weight to give to the findings and 
what changes need to be made to resolve 
the gap between expectation and performance. 
Unlike marks on a ruler, criminal justice 
measures are not neutral standards but are 
factors that enter into the processes being
analyzed--identifying relative degrees of
improvement in fairness in sentencing, for
example, would still indicate that the
sentencing process was giving weight to
information not legally relevant.

The essays in this volume take a new tack
as their authors address all three concerns. 
The participants in the Bureau of Justice
Statistics-Princeton Study Group focus
attention on the problem of measurement
with respect to these fundamental
expectations for the administration of
justice.  After years of observing the
justice system that they are now writing
about, the authors provide some new ideas
to consider for improving the justice
system.

In the first essay, the director of the study
group, John DiIulio, Jr., proposes a fresh
way to understand or interpret the familiar
elements in American criminal justice: 
prisons, community supervision, trial
courts, and police.  He establishes the
theme that there must be a full and realistic
accounting of the activities of criminal
justice agencies.  In calling for measures 
grounded in civic ideals, DiIulio also 
initiates the refrain that underlines the 
involvement of citizens in the work of those 
agencies.

Before the discussion curves back to
DiIulio's and James Wilson's thoughts
about the challenge of measuring
performance in public organizations, the
individual essays both widen the argument,
taking in broader intellectual concepts, 
and narrow it, listing specific performance
measures.  In some cases, as in George
Cole's presentation of measures for trial
courts, the basic outlines of the activities
remain untouched, while in other cases, as
in Mark Moore's and Geoffrey Alpert's
consideration of measures for police, the
authors urge a departure from the familiar. 
In probation and parole, the rapid growth
in the community supervision population,
according to Joan Petersilia, has forced
control out of the hands of corrections
professionals.  She believes that one way
administrators can regain the operational
levers is to define a mission and to
measure clearly how well the agencies are
achieving their goals. 

BJS data:  Delineating and testing
performance measures

The participants in the BJS-Princeton
Study Group reached their conclusions
with few direct references to the basic
numbers and statistics that BJS has
reported over the past 20 years. Their 
task was to start hammering out an 
institutional template of concepts. As 
more persons enter the discussions about 
evaluating the administration of justice, 
however, increased attention will have to 
be paid to existing data and the need for 
new data.

A commonly held view, for example, is that 
the criminal justice system is chaotic and 
rather poorly administers the statutory
expectations placed upon it. BJS data
reveal that there may be more coherence
between law and practice than is generally
assumed: 

Example: Over the last decade, States
have reformed many of their criminal
sentencing laws, largely aiming to increase
the likelihood of a prison sentence. BJS
data reveal that what the State and Federal
lawmakers sought in these reforms has
been achieved -- the odds of imprisonment
given conviction for most crimes has increased.  
The reforms effectively brought about three 
record high rates in the prison population:  
per capita, per reported crime, and per arrest. 
 
Example:  Over the last decade, as well, a
"War on Drugs" was waged, and BJS data
show that drug offenses now account for a
larger share of convictions and imprisonment 
than ever before.  BJS data tell us, in other 
words, that the public's legislative agenda 
produced the results that were being sought.

The criminal justice system is busy, with
many millions of transactions taking place
annually.  Spending for criminal justice
activities accounts for just over 3 cents of
every dollar in public spending (about $74
billion) -- less than 1% of Federal spending, 
more than 6% of spending by the States, and 
nearly 7% of local spending.  Overall spending 
at all levels of government for justice 
activities is about equal to spending on 
transportation and just below that spent by 
government on hospitals and health.  

The annual total for State and local justice
translates into about $300 per capita of the
nearly $9,000 annual per capita spent by
government.  While municipal and county
governments accounted for 53% of all justice 
spending, the States accounted for 34%, and 
the Federal government just under 13%.  

From 1985 to 1990, corrections spending has 
grown faster and spending on police has 
grown slower than any other components of 
the justice system.  The following compare 
the increases in per capita spending (in 
constant dollars)occurring between 1985 
and 1990 to the increases in workload:

*  Spending on police protection grew 8%,
the number of Index crimes reported by
law enforcement agencies increased 16%,
and the number of arrests grew 19% 

*  Spending on corrections grew 48%, the
overall corrections population increased
45%.

Example:  Besides delivering what the
public and their legislators demanded,
criminal justice agencies have maintained
the quality of services provided.  Between
1984 and 1990, BJS data on State prisons
show --

*  about a 2% reduction in the average
amount of housing space per inmate (from
57 square feet to 56 square feet) 

*  about a 4% improvement in staffing per
inmate (from 2.8 inmates per staff member
to 2.7 inmates per staff member) u the same 
percentage of prisons under court order to 
improve conditions of confinement or 
practices within the facility (24% of all 
prisons in both years) 

*  about twice the percentage of inmates
involved in drug, alcohol, and personal
counseling programs (14% versus 30%)and 
nearly 4 times the number of inmates in 
such programs on a single day (53,000
versus 193,000).  

Example:  BJS data can be used to evaluate 
the fairness with which the system is 
operating.  Surveys conducted among 
representative samples of State prisoners 
in 1979, 1986, and 1991 reveal that while 
the offense composition has changed, with 
drug offenses accounting for more than twice 
the percentage of inmates in 1991 compared 
to earlier surveys, little has changed in the 
criminal histories of those confined. In all 
three surveys well over 9 out of 10 prisoners 
were either violent offenders or recidivists 
with prior sentences to confinement facilities 
or probation.  

Research using a variety of sources including 
the National Crime Victimization Survey, the 
FBI data on arrests, and national prisoner 
surveys, has revealed that for personal contact 
crimes, the racial composition of offenders as
identified by victims closely parallels the
racial distribution of those arrested and
sentenced to prison for the same crimes.

Data from recent national polls indicate
that our citizens hold the criminal justice
system in much lower esteem than they do
most other public institutions.  To operate
a justice system that is effective, efficient,
and fair challenges us to think anew, examine, 
debate, and continuously measure and evaluate 
its practices.  In the final analysis, how 
these measures are used to reduce the disparity 
between expectation and practice is fundamental 
to the credibility given to our collective 
ideal of justice.  

Lawrence A. Greenfeld 
Acting Director         

Rethinking the Criminal
Justice System: Toward a New
Paradigm

By John J. DiIulio, Jr.

Overview:  Beyond crime rates and
recidivism rates

Rates of crime and recidivism have long
served as critical measures for the
performance of the Nation's criminal justice 
system.  These measures represent the basic 
goals of public safety to which all 
components of the criminal justice system 
contribute.  At the same time, however, rates 
of crime and recidivism are not the only, or 
necessarily the best, measures of what 
criminal justice institutions do.

Few police officers believe that their work
solely determines crime rates in their
jurisdiction.  Few corrections officials
believe that what they do chiefly
determines recidivism rates.  Likewise,
most criminal court judges, prosecutors,
public defenders, and other justice practi-
tioners know from experience that the
prevalence and severity of crime depend
mainly on factors affecting individuals
long before most are taken into custody.
Most justice practitioners understand that
they can rarely do for their clients what
parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, 
clergy, biogenetic inheritances, or
economic opportunities may have failed to
do.***Footnote 1: As James Q. Wilson and
Richard J. Hernstein have observed, a keen
knowledge of the constitutional and social
factors that have been found to be associated
with criminal behavior "rivet(s) our 
attention on the earliest stages of the
life cycle, and reveals that "after all
is said and done, the most serious 
offenders are boys who begin their 
delinquent careers at a very early age";
see Wilson and Hernstein, Crime and 
Human nature (New York: Simon and Shuster,
1985), pp. 508-509.***

Still, crime rates and recidivism rates are
meaningful overall measures of the system's
performance in protecting public safety,
and what justice practitioners do
undoubtedly affects crime and recidivism
rates.  For example, a National Academy
of Sciences panel concluded that rising
imprisonment rates may have reduced
crime rates in the Nation by 10% to 
20%.***Footnote 2: Alfred Blumstein, et 
al., eds., Criminal Careers and "Career 
Criminals" (Washington, D.C.: National 
Academy Press, 1986), p. 6.***  Furthermore, 
numerous studies refute the once-fashionable 
idea that "nothing works" in the 
rehabilitation of criminals, showing that, 
other things being equal, offenders who 
participate in certain types of institutional 
or community-based treatment programs are 
less likely to be repeat offenders than the 
nonparticipants.***Footnote 3: For an overview,
see John J. DiIuIio, Jr., No Escape: The
future of American Corrections (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), chapter 3.***  While no 
evidence indicates that mere increases in 
police on auto patrol cut crime rates, a 
growing body of evidence establishes that 
crime and disorder are less common in 
neighborhoods where police get out of their 
cars and into regular contact with 
citizens.***Footnote 4: For an overview, see
Robert C. Trajanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux,
Community Policing: A contemporary Perspective
(Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Publishing Company,
1990), and the monographs produced by Mark H.
Moore of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy
School of Government, Program in Criminal
Justice, Perspectives on Policing (Washington,
D.C.: National Institute of Justice, June and
November 1988), especially nos. 2,3,4,5, and 
9.***

Unquestionably, the justice system affects
crime and recidivism rates.  As James Q.
Wilson has commented, given "the
elasticity of crime or recidivism rates to
feasible changes in police or correctional
practices, how much of a change in these
rates can be obtained at a given cost in
money, liberty, etc.?  Surely the answer is
some number greater than zero.  If it were
zero, then we could abolish arrests and
prisons with no adverse effects on society. 
Clearly, that is not something we would be
inclined to try.  It is true that the
prevalence and severity of crime in society
do not depend mainly on what justice
practitioners do.  But the real question is: 
What feasible changes in what institutions
and practices will make the largest
marginal changes in crime rates?  Judged
that way, it may turn out that arrest or
imprisonment rates have bigger effects on
marginal rates than any feasible change in
family or school practices, because what
one can feasible change in family or
school practices turns out to be pretty
trivial."***Footnote 5: James Q. Wilson,
commentary on the draft of the first BJS-
Princeton Discussion paper.***

Toward a new paradigm

To evaluate the performance of police
departments, correctional agencies, and
other key components of the justice system
exclusively in terms of crime rates and
recidivism rates may cause observers to
overlook other important contributions of
the system's day-to-day performance and
can obscure the role that average citizens
play in promoting secure communities.  A
wide gap often exists between the general
public's expectations for the justice system
and what most justice practitioners
recognize as the system's actual capacity
to protect public well-being.  This paper
sketches an outline of a new paradigm
encompassing the criminal justice system's 
history, vision, purposes, and measures.  
Four points of qualification, however, are 
in order.***Footnote 6: The preliminary
ideas for these sections were presented by
several members of the Study Group at the
BJS/Justice Research Statistics Association
(JRSA) 1992 National Conference held in New
Orleans, Louisiana, September 23-25, 1992.
The Study Group wishes to thank those BJS/
JSRA conference participants who identified
the need for the points of clarification and
qualification that follow, especially Dr.
Timothy Car of the Georgia Department of
Corrections, Professor George Cole of the
University of Connecticut; Professor Robert
Friedmann of Georgia State University;
Professor Graeme Newman of the State
University of New York at Albany; Dr. Sally
Hillsman of the National Center for State
Courts; and Professor Charles W. Thomas of
the University of Florida. The Study Group's
formal advisor, Professor James Q. Wilson
of the university of California at Los
Angeles, provided invaluable criticism of
an earlier draft of this paper.***   

First, this call for a new paradigm is not
motivated by a desire to design performance 
measures that guarantee justice agency 
success.  Rather, it represents an attempt 
to develop realistic intermediate and long-
range measures.  Realistic measures account 
for the daily activities of justice agencies 
and for the constraints under which they 
normally operate.  Realistic, however, does 
not mean easy to achieve.  Indeed, the
alternate measures presented in subsequent
papers in this volume are measures
according to which many justice institutions, 
programs, and practices now fail.

Second, better performance measures do
not act like magnets for better ways of
meeting goals.  All performance measures
have their limitations and may invite
perverse and unintended administrative
consequences.  Still, justice practitioners
probably can learn something about how to
fashion and implement effective performance 
measures from the experiences of other 
organizations, public and private.

Third, a paradigm is broader than a theory. 
A theory is a statement about the 
relationship between two or more variables 
that is supposed to hold under specified 
conditions.***Footnote 7: For a brief
discussion of theory, see DiIuIio, No Escape,
pp. 213-225.***  A new paradigm orients
general understanding to historical, empirical, 
or normative realities that a prevailing 
paradigm has arguably deemphasized, devalued, 
or simply ignored. In essence, to call for 
a new paradigm is to appeal for new concepts
and categories of thinking about a given
subject.

Fourth, crime rates and recidivism rates
are indeed important measures of the
system's performance, which ought to be
continually used and refined. Even so, all
citizens in a democracy are responsible to
some degree for the way in which society
addresses the problem of crime. In addition, 
justice agencies serve the public in myriad 
ways that are indirectly related to crime 
control goals, and society should devise 
and implement performance measures that 
respect this reality.

History:  Multiple, vague, and
contradictory purposes

The history of the American criminal
justice system is a history of swings in
public mood.  Americans have long been
ambivalent about the purposes of criminal
justice.***Footnote 8: Portions of this
section are drawn from John J. DiIuIio, Jr,
"Crime," in Henry J. Aaron and Charles
Schultze, eds., Setting Domestic Priorities:
What Can Government Do? (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution, 1992), chapter 4.***
Among other things, they have wanted a criminal 
justice system that apprehends and visits harm 
upon the guilty (punishment); makes offenders 
more virtuous, or at least  more law abiding
(rehabilitation); dissuades would-be
offenders from criminal pursuits (deterrence); 
protects innocent citizens from being victimized 
by convicted criminals (incapacitation); and 
enables most criminals to return as productive
citizens to the bosom of the free community 
(reintegration).  They have wanted the system  
to achieve these contradictory public goals 
without violating the public conscience (humane
treatment), jeopardizing the public law
(constitutional rights), emptying the public
purse (cost containment), or weakening the
tradition of  State and local public
administration (federalism).

Because the competing public expectations
cannot be easily met all at once, first one
and then another dominate public attention.  
Justice policymakers and practitioners 
have generally allowed the institutional
and programmatic pendulum to swing with
the public mood between different
approaches to crime prevention and
control.***Footnote 9: As William G. Mayer
has shown, between 1960 and 1965, public
opinion on crime and punishment became
more liberal, and between 1965 and 1988
it became increasingly conservative; see
Mayer, "Shifting Sands of Public Opinion: 
Is Liberalism Back?," The Public Interest,
no. 107 (Spring 1992), pp. 3-17.  Mayer's
analysis concurs well with trends in
criminal justice program administration 
such as the rise, decline, and, in many 
jurisdictions, official or de facto abolition 
of paroling authorities. On parole, see 
Edward E. Rhine, William R. Smith, and Ronald 
W. Jackson, Paroling authorities: Recent 
History and Current Practice (Laurel, MD: 
American Correctional Association, 1991).***  

For example, between 1967 and 1992, the
Federal Government fought two very
different wars on crime. The first war
(1967-80) was against poverty; the second
(1980-92) was against criminals.  In the
first war the social and economic "root
causes" of crime were attacked; in the
second war the likelihood that criminals
would be detected, arrested, prosecuted,
convicted, and incarcerated was increased. 
The chief strategists in the first war were
persons who believed that the Federal
Government should play a central role in
crime control.  They emphasized the goals
of offender rehabilitation, reintegration,
humane treatment, and constitutional
rights.  The chief strategists in the 
second war were persons who believed that 
law enforcement was primarily a State and
local responsibility.  They emphasized the
goals of punishment, deterrence, cost
containment, and federalism.  

Some justice practitioners have coped
fairly successfully with such shifts in
public sentiment, but many have not.

Despite the conflicting and changeful
public demands on them, some police
commissioners have been able to "make
themselves accountable to the public by
defining their purposes in broad terms and
then by trying to keep their own actions,
and the actions of their organizations,
consistent with these broad 
purposes."***Footnote 10: Mark H. Moore,
"Police Leadership: The Impossible Dream,"
in Erwin C. Hargrove and John C. Glidewell,
eds., Impossible Jobs in Public Management
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
1990) p. 98.***  Similarly, some corrections 
commissioners have coped well by means of 
"a creative capacity to translate broad 
societal expectations and policy decrees 
into administrative action."***Footnote 
11: John J. DiIuIio, Jr., "Managing a
Barbed-Wire Bureaucracy: The Impossible
Job of the Corrections Commissioner," in
Hargrove and Glidewell, Impossible Jobs,
p. 67.***  Yet, the fact remains that these 
swings in public mood and policy have 
fostered administrative instability, 
frustrated long-term planning, and bred 
bureaucratic norms that insulate practitioners 
from what they sometimes view as a fickle, 
generally unappreciative, and often hostile 
public.

Democratic vision:  Citizens 
as co-producers of justice

In the light of this history, a moderating,
democratic vision of the justice system's
public purposes and limitations is both
necessary and desirable.  Such a vision
emerges from the realization that all
citizens have the right and the responsibility 
to participate in the system. Citizens are 
co-producers of justice.***Footnote 12: The
phrase was suggested by the Study Group's
Professor Mark H. Moore of the Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University.***  The
ability of justice practitioners to do their
daily work depends on the cooperation and
support of citizens who are formally
"outside" the system -- a citizen willing to
testify against a violent drug dealer; a
community group that trusts and assists the
police; relatives, friends, and employers
who help to keep a community-based
offender on the straight-and-narrow. 
Citizens, not judges, prosecutors, law
enforcement officers, or corrections
officials, are primarily responsible for 
the quality of life in their communities,
including the prevalence and severity of
crime within them.  

As many honest friends of democracy have
argued down through the ages, democratic
citizens are wont to hold everyone but
themselves accountable for public
problems and to become impatient when
facile solutions do not produce immediate
results.***Footnote 13: For example, see
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
ed. Phillips Bradley, vol. 2 (New York:
Vintage Books, 1945), and Walter Lippmann,
Essays on The Public Philosophy (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1955).***  Citizens 
in a democracy must begin by holding themselves 
and their neighbors accountable for public
affairs.  A democratic vision of the justice
system, therefore, is anything but a sop to
public frustrations with crime and disorder.  
Citizens who expect judges, police, and other 
justice officials to solve society's crime 
problems are unrealistic; citizens should not 
expect the officials to succeed without the 
active cooperation and support of the community. 

Criminal-justice purposes: Four
civic ideals

This democratic vision supplies a rationale
for identifying the major purposes of the
system in terms of four civic ideals:
 
(1) Doing justice, 
(2) Promoting secure communities, 
(3) Restoring crime victims, and
(4) Promoting noncriminal options.

Justice can be defined as the quality of
treating individuals according to their civic
rights and in ways that they deserve to be
treated by virtue of relevant conduct. 
Criminal justice is rights-respecting
treatment that is deserved by virtue of
criminal conduct as judged by the rule of
law.***Footnote 14: This definition of
criminal justice was suggested by the
Study Group's Professor Charles H. Logan
of the University of Connecticut.***  Thus, 
doing justice implies at least four things:  
hold offenders fully accountable for their 
offenses, protect offenders' constitutional 
and legal rights, treat like offenses alike, 
and take into account relevant differences 
among offenders and offenses.  

Promoting secure communities means more than 
to achieve low crime rates. Rather, it means 
providing the security to life, liberty, and 
property that is necessary for communities to 
flourish.  It means enabling citizens to 
pursue their collective life as they see fit 
without undue fear of having that life 
disrupted or destroyed.  It means securing 
communities against criminals who assault, 
rape, rob, defraud, deal drugs, burglarize, 
extort, and murder, but it also means securing 
them against the community-sapping disorders 
that are commonly associated with crime and 
the fear of crime -- disorders such as petty
crime, public drunkenness, aggressive
panhandling, loitering, graffiti, abandoned
cars, broken windows, and abandoned
buildings.***Footnote 15: A fine treatment
of the relationship between disorder, crime,
and the fear of crime can be found in Wesley
G. Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and 
the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods
(Berkeley and Los Angles: University of
California Press, 1990).  Also see the
following: George L. Kelling, "Measuring
What Matters," The City Journal, Spring 1992:
21-33; James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling,
"Police and neighborhood Safety: Broken
Window," Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, pp. 
29-38; and James Q. Wilson and John J. 
DiIulio, Jr., "Crackdown: Saving the Next
Generation From the Drug-and-Crime Epidemic,"
New Republic, July 10, 1989, pp. 21-25.***
    
Restoring victims means to honor the community's 
obligation to make victims of crime and disorder 
whole again.  The victims' rights organizations, 
manifestos, and laws that have proliferated over 
the last decade or so generally reflect and embody 
this long-overlooked goal.***Footnote 16: Knowledge
about the physical pains, psychological traumas,
and economic losses suffered by victims of 
crime, their families and friends, and the public
remains shallow but is increasing.  For a serviceable
overview, see Albert R. Roberts, ed., Helping Crime
Victims: Research, Policy, and Practice (Newbury Park,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990).***  
Victims of crime have a special claim
upon the criminal- justice system's human
and financial resources.  Whatever else it
may achieve, no system that dishonors that
claim can be considered legitimate. 

Finally, promoting noncriminal options
means that punishment for criminal
behavior should interfere as little as
possible with the pursuit of noncriminal
behavior.  Even  in prison, offenders
should have at least some opportunity to
engage in meaningful, constructive, and
legitimate activities.  Nor should
government impose arbitrary restrictions
on employment or other legitimate
activities by convicted offenders except
where justified as a form of punishment 
or where public safety is at risk.  This is
not to say that society has any greater
obligation toward the betterment 
of offenders than it owes to nonoffenders. 
It is not even to say that government has
an obligation toward the betterment of
offenders and nonoffenders alike.  But one
function of government is to promote (not
necessarily to provide) legitimate
opportunities and to facilitate (not
necessarily to require or directly to
reward) their pursuit.  

Realistic performance measures

These four civic purposes point beyond
crime rates and recidivism rates and
toward more realistic ways of measuring
the performance of justice institutions,
programs, and practices.  By no means is
this the first call for such measures. 
During both of the Federal wars on crime 
from the 1960s through the 1980s, a
number of well-intentioned efforts were
made to rethink the measures commonly
used to evaluate the system's performance. 
(See Selected sources of measurement 
topics, p. 17.)  Few of these efforts moved
much beyond a rehashing of such concepts
as crime rates and recidivism rates, and
none had a wide or lasting impact on the
field.  In conjunction with his work on the
Study Group, Logan has developed a set of
performance measures for secure
correctional institutions. 
 
The measures Logan proposes for prisons
and jails have the virtue of not asking
criminal justice institutions to do what
other social institutions are more
responsible for doing and in many cases
what other social institutions have failed 
to do.  They do not, for example, ask our
corrections officials to somehow "correct
the incorrigible, rehabilitate the wretched,
deter the determined, restrain the dangerous, 
and punish the wicked."***Footnote 17: Charles
H. Logan,"Criminal Justice Performance
Measures For Prisons," Performance Measures
for the Criminal Justice System, BJS-
Princeton Discussion Papers, p. 23.*** But
they do demand that, with the human and
financial resources that society has
provided, and with the requisite support of
other social institutions, the officials must
"keep prisoners -- keep them in, keep them
safe, keep them in line, keep them healthy,
and keep them busy -- and do it with
fairness, without undue suffering, and as
efficiently as possible."***Footnote 18: Logan,
"Criminal Justice Performance Measure," p.25.***
That alone is asking a great deal, but it is 
not asking too much.

By the same token, it makes little sense to
measure police performance in terms of
crime or arrest rates.  Geoffrey P. Alpert
and Mark H. Moore have developed an
expanded range of policing measures.  In
anticipation of their contribution, it is
worth highlighting George L. Kelling's 
recent article, "Measuring What Matters:
A New Way of Thinking About Crime and 
Public Order." After documenting that the 
New York City Police Department has been 
doing quite well in relation to such 
conventional measures as crime rates,
arrest rates, emergency response times,
and incidence of corruption, Kelling
keenly observes: 

But New Yorkers are not the least bit
reassured by these statistical and relative
achievements.... These formal measures of
police work have little to do with
community needs.... [A] significant 
reason disorder has been ignored is that
professional criminal justice ideology
narrowly defines the appropriate business
of police and criminal justice agencies as
dealing with serious crime -- that is, index
crimes.  Crime response, and arrest
statistics, form a pillar of that ideology. 
Disorder does not appear in any FBI 
index; therefore, it has not been a 
priority.***Footnote 19: Kelling, 
"Measuring What Matters, pp. 21-22.***

Conclusion: Toward a new paradigm?

Is it possible for justice officials to
develop, implement, and organize
themselves around performance measures
that go beyond conventional measures
such as rates of crime and recidivism? 
And can this be done for all components 
of the system -- courts, prosecutors' 
offices, police departments, institutional
corrections, community-based corrections?

The papers that follow in this compendium
will tackle these questions and offer
specific, detailed proposals for new
measures consistent with the historical
understanding, democratic vision, and
civic purposes outlined above. In addition,
they spell out the practical and policy
implications of adopting the new paradigm
and spotlight its implications for how
agencies allocate resources, conduct
program evaluations, and so on.

It is worth noting that many of the most
successful major corporations use multiple
performance measures that give  weight to
"soft" indicators along with sales reports,
inventory records, and other "hard"
financial data.  For example, McDonald's
Corporation has measured performance not
simply by the conventional bottom line of
profits, but by a dozen or so measures that
roving teams of inspectors apply -- Are the
floors clean? Are the salt shakers full? Are
the cashiers greeting customers and
wearing their uniforms correctly? and so
on. McDonald's recognized that the profits 
made by their stores were conditioned by 
economic and other factors over which their 
franchisees had little or no direct control.  
But the store owners, managers, and staff 
could be and are held strictly accountable 
for other factors that might affect 
business.***Footnote 20: David C. Rickert,
McDonald's Corporation (condensed), Harvard
Business School, revised February 1982.***

Likewise, over the last decade, the United
States military has made great strides in
developing reasonable and realistic
measures of combat readiness and combat
effectiveness.  Prodded by government and
private studies that found a need for
improvements in military planning, and in
the areas of weapons acquisition, combat
training, and force deployment, each
branch of the military responded by
revamping certain of its strategic doctrines
and practices, and by getting away from
simple "bean- counting" measures.  While
many improvements have yet to be made,
the military has begun to think about new 
and better ways of linking its national
security mission to meaningful performance 
standards and objectives.***Footnote 21: For
interesting examples that related to defense
acquisition programs, see Glenn A. Kent, A
Framework for Defense Planning (Santa Monica,
Calif.: Rand, August 1989), and Glenn A. Kent
and William E. Simons, A Framework for
Enhancing Operational Capabilities (Santa
Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1991).***
 
The performance measurement lesson that
much of  corporate America and the
American military have learned is one that
the American justice system can also
apply. Crime rates, recidivism rates, and
other conventional bottom-line measures
must have better grounding in community 
needs and must be joined to a realistic set 
of performance standards. The Study Group 
hopes to provide a gentle, democratic shove 
in that direction, and to get policymakers, 
practitioners, analysts, activists, and 
interested citizens thinking and debating 
toward a new paradigm of the American justice 
system.

About the author

John J. DiIulio, Jr., is Professor of Politics
and Public Affairs at Princeton University
and nonresident Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution.  He served as
founding director of Princeton's Center of
Domestic and Comparative Policy Studies. 
He is a member of the National Commission 
on State and Local Public Service and 
served as an advisor to the National 
Performance Review.  His most recent 
book is Improving Government Performance: 
An Owner's Manual (Brookings, 1993). 

Selected sources of measurement 
topics

Gordon P. Whitaker, Stephen Mastrofski,
Elinor Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, and
Stephen L. Percy,  Basic Issues in 
Police Performance, National Institute 
of Justice, July 1982.

Joan E. Jacoby, Basic Issues in
Prosecution and Public Defender
Performance, National Institute 
of Justice, July 1982.

Thomas J. Cook and Ronald W. Johnson,
with Ellen Fried, John Gross, Mary
Wagner, and James Eisenstein, Basic
Issues in Courts Performance, National
Institute of Justice, July 1982.

Gloria Grizzle, Jeffrey S. Bass, J. 
Thomas McEwen, Deborah M. Galvin, Ann 
G. Jones, Harriet D. Mowitt, and Ann D.
Witte, Basic Issues in Corrections
Performance, National Institute of 
Justice, July 1982.

Martha R. Burt, Measuring Prison
Results:  Ways to Monitor and Evaluate
Corrections Performance, National
Institute of Justice, June 1981.

Sorrel Wildhorn, Marvin Lavin, and
Anthony Pascal, Indicators of Justice: 
Measuring the Performance of Prosecution, 
Defense, and Court Agencies Involved in 
Felony Proceedings; A Guide to 
Practitioners, National Institute of Law
Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration,
U.S. Department of Justice, May 1977.

Sorrel Wildhorn, Marvin Lavin, Anthony
Pascal, Sandra Berry, and Stephen Klein, 
Indicators of Justice:  Measuring the
Performance of Prosecution, Defense, 
and Court Agencies Involved in Felony
Proceedings; Analysis and Demonstration,
National Institute of Law Enforcement 
and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration, U.S.
Department of Justice, May 1977.

Jack D. Reynolds, Performance
Measurement in  Probation and Parole,
Washington, D.C.: University Research
Corporation, 1979.

Benjamin H. Renshaw, A Recommended
Set of Indicators  for Evaluating the
Performance of the Philadelphia Criminal
Justice System. Philadelphia: Government
Studies & Systems, Inc., 1971.  

Criminal Justice Performance
Measures for Prisons

by Charles H. Logan

This is the second in a series of papers on
how to measure and evaluate the performance 
of various agencies within the American 
criminal justice system.  The first paper 
argued the need for new criminal justice 
performance measures in addition to such 
conventional ones as crime rates, arrest 
rates, and recidivism rates.***Footnote 
1: John J. DiIulio, Jr., Rethinking the
Criminal Justice system: toward a New
Paradigm, BJS Discussion Paper, NCJ-
139670 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice
of Justice Statistics, 1993).***  This 
paper extends that argument and applies 
it to prisons.  It starts with a very brief 
and general definition of criminal justice 
from a retributive (or "just deserts") 
perspective.  Such a perspective is rights-
based rather than utilitarian, which implies 
that evaluative indicators and measures of 
criminal justice should focus more on the 
satisfaction of certain standards, values, 
and constraints than on the production of 
particular consequences. In Herbert Packer's 
terms, they should focus more on the "Due-
Process Model" than on the "Crime Control 
Model" of criminal justice.***Footnote 2:
Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the
Criminal Sanction (Sanford University
Press, 1968).  The paper will then 
outline the "confinement model" of 
imprisonment, which rests on a normative 
statement of mission for a prison or 
prison system. Finally, the paper will 
offer a set of empirical indicators that 
can be used as performance measures for 
prisons and that concentrate on the 
competent, fair, and efficient administration 
of confinement as a form of deserved 
punishment.  While based on the deserts 
theory of criminal justice, these measures 
will be seen to be at least somewhat 
sensitive also to such goal-based concerns 
as rehabilitation of inmates and protection 
of society, albeit for reasons independent 
of those utilitarian justifications of 
imprisonment.

What is criminal justice?

Justice is the quality of treating individuals
according to their rights and in ways that
they deserve to be treated by virtue of
relevant conduct. Criminal justice is
rights- respecting treatment that is
deserved by virtue of criminal conduct.  

This definition of justice is rights-based,
rather than utilitarian or consequentialist. 
A rights-based theory of justice gives a
central role to punishment as a morally
necessary response to the violation of
rights. To believe in rights is to believe 
in duties; those are alternative statements 
of the same concept. To believe in duties is
to accept, implicitly but of logical
necessity, the corollary of punishment. 
When we say that people have a duty  
to refrain from violating the rights of
others, we are saying that there must be
some sanction if they fail to meet that
duty. Duties are given meaning by the
consequences that attach to their
nonfulfillment. Thus, the meaning of a
duty, like that of any other norm, must be
socially constructed through the attachment 
of sanctions to behavior. A norm (a rule, 
a law, a duty, a right) that had no sanction 
attached to its violation would be empty and 
without meaning.

Justice by this definition is backward-
looking.  It requires that we treat
people according to what they have done,
not what they (or others!) might do in the
future as a result of how we treat them
now.  Justice requires that all persons,
including offenders, be treated as
autonomous and responsible actors and as
ends in themselves, not as means to social
ends.

Finally, a rights-based theory sees justice
as a process, an ongoing property of
criminal sanctioning as it occurs, not as 
an expected outcome.  Criminal justice is 
thus a value in itself and not merely useful 
as a means to some other end. Sanctioning 
that is evaluated as to its justice or 
injustice may, in addition, be evaluated 
in terms of its consequences for other 
values, such as freedom, order, happiness, 
wealth, or welfare, but those are separate 
concerns. This means that questions about 
the effectiveness or efficiency of the 
criminal justice system in achieving 
various "goals" or "purposes" should be 
kept separate from, and secondary to, an 
evaluation of the performance of the 
justice system in its most basic mission: 
doing justice.***Footnote 3: Again, however,
the measures of justice to be derived here
from a normative and nonutilitarian model
will be seen to overlap considerable with
measures that might be derived independently
from a utilitarian model.***  
 
The nonutilitarian concept 
of prison performance

To date, most evaluation research on prisons 
has focused on utilitarian questions.  What 
are the goals of imprisonment? To what extent 
and at what cost are they achieved?  How does
imprisonment compare to alternatives in these 
respects? If we want evaluations of prison 
performance that are based on a normative 
rather than a utilitarian view of criminal 
justice, we need to reframe our question. We 
might ask, for example, "To what values do 
prisons commit themselves in their mission 
statements, and how well do they live up to 
those values?" 

Social scientists are not comfortable with
the idea of applying the tools of
measurement directly to questions of
value.  That's why criminologists are
attracted to utilitarianism, because it
allows them to treat evaluative research 
on prisons as if it were a purely objective,
scientific enterprise.  In contrast, a
court-appointed special master, who is
usually a lawyer rather than a social
scientist, evaluates a prison mostly from a
formalistic rather than a utilitarian
perspective.  That is, the prison and its
activities are examined not as means to an
end (rehabilitation or crime control) but in
terms of standards and criteria of "proper"
performance, or conduct in fulfillment of
duty. Consider this statement by aprominent 
prison master:***Footnote 4: Vincent M.
Nathan, "Correctional Health Care: The
Perspective of a Special master, "The Prison
Journal, vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring-Summer, 1985),
pp. 73-82, at p. 76.***

In summary, the ideal prison provides
basic human services in a decent and
healthful physical environment.  Such a
prison abjures idleness and its consequent
human deterioration by offering constructive 
employment, programming, and recreational 
activities to the greatest extent possible; 
it addresses the human needs of prisoners 
for self-expression, faith, and maintenance 
of ties of importance to all human beings; 
it ensures safety from random violence, rape, 
and exploitation of the weak by the strong; 
it insulates decisions affecting the lives of
prisoners from arbitrary chaos by adhering
to due process of law; and it infuses the
institutional environment with constructive
expectations through use of positive 
incentives for hard work and good behavior.

That is not a bad statement of the mission
of a prison, and it is probably one with
which most correctional officials could
agree. The most important point to note
here is that it does not focus on ultimate
goals, such as treatment or punishment,
but on a set of abstract values and
normative criteria against which to
evaluate the day-to-day operation of a
prison.  

A prison mission statement 
under the confinement model

We ask an awful lot of our prisons.  We
ask them to correct the incorrigible,
rehabilitate the wretched, deter the
determined, restrain the dangerous, and
punish the wicked. We ask them to take
over where other institutions of society
have failed and to reinforce norms that
have been violated and rejected.  We ask
them to pursue so many different and often
incompatible goals that they seem virtually
doomed to fail.  Moreover, when we lay
upon prisons the utilitarian goals of
rehabilitation, deterrence, and 
incapacitation, we ask them to achieve 
results primarily outside of prison, rather 
than inside.***Footnote 5: For each of these
three goals, the principal measure of its
achievement is the number of crimes avoided
in the general community.  This is true even
of incapacitation, because that refers not
to maintaining order within prisons but to
avoiding the crimes that current prisoners
might have continued to commit if they were
not in custody.  Incapacitation thus reflects
much more the performance of the police,
prosecutors, and judges who catch, select
and send offenders to prison than it does 
the performance of those who simply hold 
them there.***  By focusing on external 
measures, we set prisons up to be judged 
on matters well beyond their direct sphere 
of influence.

If we do not want to set them up for
failure, we must assign to prisons a
function and a mission that we might
reasonably expect them to fulfill. This
mission ought to be fairly narrow and
consistent in scope, and it ought to be
special to prisons, rather than conflated
with the functions of other social
institutions such as schools or welfare
agencies. It also ought to be achievable
and measurable mostly within the prison
itself.***Footnote 6: This last requirement
pretty much rules out crime control and 
rehabilitation, at least a criteria for 
evaluation the performance of particular, at
least a criteria for evaluating the performance
of particular prisons, if not as goals of
imprisonment generally.***  Finally, a prison's 
mission ought to have intrinsic, and not just 
instrumental, value. That is, it should identify 
activities that have value in themselves, when 
they meet certain standards and criteria of
performance, not activities that have value
only if, when, and because they are
effective in achieving some further goal.

The prison mission statement proposed
here is based on  just deserts theory of
criminal justice, one that calls for a
punitive and purely retributive (that is, 
a non-utilitarian) response to criminal
conduct.  Punishment under such a theory
does not need to take the form of 
incarceration, but since this paper is 
about prison performance measures, I will
narrow the theory down to what I call the
confinement model of imprisonment.

Under the confinement model, the essential 
purpose of imprisonment is to punish 
offenders -- fairly and justly --through 
lengths of confinement proportionate to the 
gravity of their crimes. Thus the term, 
"confinement model," may be thought of as a 
shortened version of a clumsier but more 
explicit label: the "doing justice through 
confinement as a form of punishment model." 

The mission of a prison under the
confinement model can be summarized
quite succinctly:  

The mission of a prison is to keep
prisoners -- to keep them in, keep them
safe, keep them in line, keep them healthy,
and keep them busy -- and to do it with
fairness, without undue suffering, and as
efficiently as possible.

The confinement mission of prisons is not
as narrow as it may seem at first, nor is 
it necessarily harsh or insensitive to the
welfare of prisoners. It should be noted
that under the confinement model offenders 
are sent to prison as punishment, not for 
punishment. It is not within the legitimate 
mission of a prison to attempt to add to 
(any more than to avoid or to compensate 
for) the pain and suffering inherent in 
being forcibly separated from civil 
society.  Stated more positively,
coercive confinement carries with it an
obligation to meet the basic needs of
prisoners at a reasonable standard of
decency. Thus,  measures of health care,
safety, sanitation, nutrition, and other
aspects of basic living conditions are
relevant.  Furthermore, confinement must
meet constitutional  standards of fairness
and due process, so it is not just the
effectiveness and efficiency, but also the
procedural justice with which confinement
is imposed that is important.  In addition, 
programmatic activities like education, 
recreation, and work can be seen as part of 
the conditions of confinement, regardless 
of their alleged effects on rehabilitation.  
In short, confinement is much more than just
warehousing.

Under the confinement model, a prison does 
not have to justify itself as a tool of
rehabilitation or crime control or any other
instrumental purpose at which an army of
critics will forever claim it to be a failure. 
It proclaims itself to be, first and foremost,
an agent of justice, and not necessarily an
agent of either individual or social change. 
It asks to be judged only on its performance 
in carrying out the sanction of confinement-
as-punishment; the effectiveness of that 
sanction may be a valid and important question, 
but it is not relevant to the measurement of 
prison performance under the confinement model.

What, then, are the relevant criteria?  

Prison performance criteria 
under the confinement model

It might seem that measuring prison
performance within a confinement model
would be fairly simple -- and indeed it 
is more straightforward than attempting to
measure the success of rehabilitation,
deterrence, or incapacitation (let alone 
the net effects of imprisonment on all three 
of these in combination) -- but it is by no
means easy. Still, the confinement model
does facilitate performance measurement,
because it focuses less on the achievement
of ultimate and abstract goals and more on
the fulfillment  of delimited and immediate
tasks. It shifts our attention away from
hard-to-determine outcomes and toward
more directly observable processes and
adherence to measurable standards.

The confinement mission of a prison, as
stated above, identifies eight distinct
dimensions for prison performance measures: 
Security, Safety, Order, Care, Activity, 
Justice, Conditions, and Management. Each 
of these dimensions will be discussed 
briefly.

1. Security ("keep them in"). A secure
facility is one that is impervious in either
direction, outward or inward.  Escapes are
an obvious indicator of a lack of security,
but inward penetration, of drugs or other
contraband, also represents a breakdown of
external security.  Internal security would
include control over movement of prisoners 
within the prison and control over internal 
movement of contraband, such as food or 
silverware from the dining hall, drugs from 
the infirmary, or tools from workshops.

2. Safety ("keep them safe"). Inmates and
staff need to be kept safe, not only from
each other but from various environmental
hazards as well. Thus, measures of safety
would include assault statistics, safety
inspection results, and accidental injury
reports.

3. Order ("keep them in line").  Prisons
run on rules, and the ability of prison
administrators to enforce compliance is
central to prison performance.  Allowing
for variation in the nature of their
populations, it seems proper to evaluate
prisons according to their ability to 
prevent disturbances, minimize inmate
misconduct, and otherwise preserve order
inside their walls.

4. Care ("keep them healthy"). I use the
term "care" rather than "service" to cover
the ministrations of such personnel as
doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, psychologists, 
and dieticians. The distinction is primarily 
one of degree and entitlement.  Convicts are 
entitled only to a very basic, minimal level 
of personal care consistent with the principle 
that it is not the purpose of imprisonment 
to inflict physical suffering. At a minimum, 
prisons have an obligation to try to prevent
suicide, malnutrition, exposure to the
elements, and the spread of contagious
diseases. Beyond the level of very basic
care, however, the simple fact of confinement 
does not entitle convicts to levels of service 
or to degrees of personal welfare that exceed 
what they are able to obtain with their own 
resources. Therefore, when rating prisons on 
this dimension an evaluator might choose not 
to make distinctions beyond a certain level.

5. Activity ("keep them busy").  When
evaluating prisons under a rehabilitation
model, heavy emphasis is usually given to
inmate programs; under a confinement
model, programs are still relevant, but on a
different basis.  Programs can be classified
into five different types: work, training,
education, recreation, and therapy.  All
five types are relevant under a confinement 
model but in each case any rehabilitative 
effect a program might have is not directly 
relevant to its evaluation. Therapeutic 
programs are so closely associated with the 
rehabilitative ideal that they are difficult 
to recast in terms of the confinement model.  
They can, however, be offered as a form of 
"care," and evaluated according to the 
principles discussed under that dimension.  
Programs of the other three types should be 
judged according to how much opportunity they
provide inmates to engage in constructive
activity or enterprise.  

"Constructive" activity is not defined here
as "contributing to the betterment of
inmates" but as activity that is, on its face,
consistent with the orderly, safe, secure,
and humane operation of a prison. Idleness 
and boredom can be seen as wrong in themselves, 
from a work ethic standpoint, or as so 
fundamentally related to mischief as to be 
undesirable for that reason.  Either way, 
prison programs of work, training, and 
education should be evaluated under the 
confinement model as forms of constructive 
activity and as antidotes to idleness, not 
as methods of rehabilitation.***Footnote 7: 
While a confinement model may sometimes be
in conflict with a rehabilitation model, it
is not necessarily so. In the confinement
model, it is desirable to keep inmates
constructively busy, quite apart from the
question of whether that does them any
rehabilitative good. That does not mean,
however, that it does not matter from 
some other perspective whether the 
programs have any rehabilitative effect.
It would very nice if the prison programs
had rehabilitative effects.  However,
when we say that the primary purpose of
prison is to punish through confinement,
we become more interested in the operation
of these programs inside the prison gates
and less concerned about their effects
beyond.***

Under a rehabilitation model, work, 
education, and training are seen as 
benefits that are offered to prisoners, or 
even forced upon them, in the hope that this 
will make them better and more law-abiding
citizens.  Under the confinement model,
work, education, and training are not
benefits; they are opportunities, available
to prisoners who are willing to make
productive use of them. Ideally, prisons
would have, or would fit into, an economy
in which inmates could earn money by
producing goods and performing services
having real value. Inmates might then
seek education and training, not to impress
a parole board or a prison counselor, but 
to be able to perform a more valuable and
higher paying job. 

The availability of opportunities for
education and employment should offset
some of the austerity of a prison organized
around a strict confinement model. However, 
amenities, privileges, and benefits that 
might be justified under a rehabilitation 
model as a worthwhile investment of taxpayers' 
money should not be provided free to prisoners 
under a confinement model. Any social benefits
that are guaranteed to all citizens should be
provided to prisoners as well (within limits
imposed by security needs), but beyond
that prisoners would have to earn or purchase 
them at their own expense. Examples would 
include higher education, entertainment, and 
medical, dental, or psycho- logical services 
beyond the minimal levels entailed in the 
confinement model.

Some people believe that constructive
activity should be more than just an
opportunity available to inmates; it should
be a prisoners obligation as well. 
Offenders, in this view, should be held
financially as well as morally responsible
for their crimes and their imprisonment. 
Thus, prisoners should be required to
work, to make restitution to their victims,
to support their families, and to pay
something toward the cost of their
incarceration.  Financial responsibility 
is not inconsistent with the confinement
model, and could therefore be included
under the dimension of activity.  However,
it is independent of, rather than integral 
to, a prison's primary mission of
confinement-as-punishment.

 6. Justice ("do it with fairness"). In
measuring the performance of justice
within prisons, the propriety of the
sentence may be taken for granted; what
remains to be judged is the fairness with
which the sentence is administered.  Stated 
more broadly, governing with justice
requires adherence to the rule of law inside
prisons just as it does on the outside. 
Rules ("laws") must be clear, sanctions for
their violation must be specified in
advance and applied consistently, enforcement 
and adjudication must follow due process, and 
there should be provisions for independent 
review of decisions.  Relevant to this 
dimension would be procedures and practices 
in imposing discipline and allocating good
time, grievance procedures, availability of
and access to legal resources, and inmate
perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy
of rules and their enforcement.

7. Conditions ("without undue suffering").  
A confinement model obviously requires some 
evaluation of the conditions of confinement.  
This broad term would include such things as
population density, food, clothing, bedding, 
noise, light, air circulation and quality, 
temperature, sanitation, recreation, visitation, 
and communication with the outside.  As with 
the dimension of "care," evaluation of living 
conditions and quality of life should not be 
completely linear (the more the better, 
without limits). In principle, this 
dimension is curved, so that differences 
imply improvements at the lower end but 
have declining or even negative merit 
("too good for them")above some higher 
point. Most prisons today, however, 
probably lie along the middle range of 
this dimension, where comparison can be 
linear.

8. Management ("as efficiently as possible").  
Quality of management is probably the single 
most important source of variation in the 
first 7 dimensions of quality of confinement.  
As such, there may be some redundancy in 
evaluating management as, itself, a separate
component of prison performance. However, it 
is better to over-measure than to under-measure, 
and many management variables bear a strong 
enough presumptive relationship to overall 
quality of institutional operation that they 
can be used as indicators of otherwise hard 
to measure concepts.  

For example, such management-related 
variables as staff morale, absenteeism, and
turnover are visible reflections of 
institutional stress and tension. Training 
levels may be both a cause of quality (through
increased staff competence) and a result of
quality (as a product of institutional
concern with proper procedure in treatment 
and discipline of inmates). Thus, various 
sorts of management information can be used 
as a measure as well as an explanation of 
confinement quality. Good management is also 
a legitimate end in itself. The public has 
an interest in seeing that the money it spends
on imprisonment is not wasted, through over-
staffing, high turnover, or other management-
related problems.

These eight dimensions -- security, safety,
order, care, activity, justice, conditions,
and management -- are appropriate concerns 
of prison professionals under the confinement 
model of imprisonment, and therefore 
constitute relevant focal points when 
measuring prison performance. Moreover, 
they are relatively precise concepts 
susceptible to operationalization and 
empirical measurement.  First, however, 
each dimension must be divided into its 
component parts, or subdimensions.

Subdimensions and empirical
indicators

The eight dimensions of prison
performance described above are not
directly measurable in themselves.  As
abstract concepts, they must eventually 
be linked to more concrete and observable
indicators before they can be transformed
into performance measures.  A first step 
in that direction is to break each of the 
eight general concepts down into an 
associated set of more specific 
subdimensions, as shown in Figure 1. These 
subdimensions can be defined operationally 
by linking them to relevant empirical 
indicators drawn from two types and sources 
of data: institutional records and surveys of 
staff and inmates.***Footnote 8: Field 
observations would be a third type and source
of data.  They are not discussed here because
they are better suited to an intensive case
study than to the systematic, comparative style
of performance evaluation contemplated in this
essay.***

Figure 1.  Prison performance measures
based on staff and inmate surveys and
institutional records

Security
Security procedures
Drug use
Significant incidents
Community exposure
Freedom of movement
Staffing adequacy 

Safety
Safety of inmates
Safety of staff
Dangerousness of inmates
Safety of environment
Staffing adequacy 

Order
Inmate misconduct
Staff use of force
Perceived control
Strictness of enforcement 

Care
Stress and illness
Health care delivered
Dental care
Counseling
Staffing for programs
and services 

Activity
Involvement in and 
evaluation of:
Work and industry
Education and training
Recreation
Religious services

Justice
Staff fairness
Limited use of force
Grievances, number and type
The grievance process
The discipline process
Legal resources and access
Justice delays

Conditions
Space in living areas
Social density and privacy
Internal freedom 
of movement
Facilities and maintenance
Sanitation
Noise
Food
Commissary
Visitation
Community access

Management
Job satisfaction
Stress and burn-out
Staff turnover
Staff and management 
relations
Staff experience
Education
Training
Salary and overtime
Staffing efficiency

Institutional records data can be drawn
from such sources as the following:

Significant incident logs
Disciplinary logs and files
Grievance logs and files
Inmate employment records 
Education records
Health clinic logs
Psychologist logs
Personnel records

Most prisons maintain records like these
and should be able to retrieve and calculate
summary information from them on a periodic 
basis.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics 
conducts a complete, nationwide census of 
all prisons and jails every 5 years. The 
form used for this census requests information 
on facility characteristics, court orders or 
consent decrees, inmate population size and
characteristics, housing confinement space, 
inmate education and work assignments, 
counseling and other programs, furloughs, 
staff characteristics by function and payroll 
category, inmate medical facilities and HIV 
testing, inmate deaths, and major incidents 
during the last year.  For the 1990 prison 
census there was an additional set of 
questions on inmate drug use, interdiction 
methods such as drug screening for inmates 
and staff, and treatment programs. Ideally, 
the data collected through these censuses
would allow researchers to construct
performance measures for comparing prisons 
both cross-sectionally and through time.  
Unfortunately, respondent burden makes it 
difficult to expand the BJS census forms to 
address more of these issues in depth, at 
least as the forms are administered to all 
facilities. It might be feasible, however, 
to extend the data collection effort for a 
limited sample of prisons.  Examples of 
performance measures based on institutional 
records are offered in an appendix to this 
paper.  Many of them could be derived directly 
from questions already included on the BJS
census form while others would require 
collecting additional data.

Surveys of staff and inmates can be more
costly than a census of facilities, but they
have the advantage of being able to generate 
a far greater range of performance measures.  
Since the Bureau of Justice Statistics also 
does national surveys of prison and jail 
inmates, in addition to the facility census, 
it might be feasible for those surveys to 
include questions aimed at constructing 
performance measures. The Bureau of Prisons 
has developed what it calls the Prison Social
Climate Survey (PSCS) to gather information 
useful in the management of its facilities.  
This survey is administered to staff at half
of the Bureau's prisons every 6 months and 
there is a parallel version of the survey for 
inmates, though it is rarely used. The PSCS 
includes questions in four areas: 

1.  Personal safety and security, which
asks about the safety of staff and inmates;
incidence of assaults, gang activity, and
use of weapons; dangerousness of inmates;
use of force; security procedures; and
degrees of control 
on different shifts.

2.  Quality of life, which asks about
sanitation, crowding, turnover, privacy,
noise, and grievance procedures.

3.  Personal well-being, which asks about
emotional and physical health and symptoms 
of stress.

4.  Work environment, which includes
questions on management effectiveness,
job satisfaction, employee morale,
adequacy of staff training, and relations
with inmates. 

The inmate version of the PSCS also covers 
the first three areas, but in place of
Work environment it has a Services and
programs section asking about medical
care, counseling, education, recreation,
work, and religious programs.  Elsewhere,
it has questions on staff competence,
attitudes, and interactions; on the
discipline process; and on aspects of 
living conditions beyond those asked 
also of staff.  

Most questions in the PSCS ask the respondent 
to answer in terms of conditions prevailing 
during the last 6 months, so that repeated 
surveys can be used to map changes through 
time. The numerous questions cover all of 
the dimensions of prison performance and
quality identified in this paper, albeit 
some dimensions more thoroughly than others. 
Many of the survey-based indicators listed
in the appendix are taken from the staff
and inmate versions of the PSCS.

Significantly, this paper's eight conceptual
dimensions of prison performance, and the
prison mission statement that underlies
them, were inspired in major part by
analyzing the management concerns of the
Bureau of Prisons as revealed in its Prison
Social Climate Survey.  That the dimensions 
and measures of prison performance recommended 
here should come from observing the self-
imposed tasks, standards, and evaluation 
criteria of a well-regarded prison system is 
consistent with the primary theme of this 
essay: Prisons should be evaluated according 
to that which it is reasonable and realistic 
to regard as being within their sphere of
influence, competence, and accountability.

Introducing an instrument for prison
performance measurement

The final section of this paper is the
Appendix, p. 42. It presents an organized
set of empirical indicators that could be
used as performance measures for prisons. 
These indicators are grouped into the eight
dimensions that have been identified as
relevant to prison performance and quality
under a confinement model of imprisonment.  
Within each dimension, the indicators are 
further organized according to subdimensions, 
and the indicators based on official records 
are distinguished visually (by the use of 
italics) from those that are based on survey 
instruments. This set of performance measures 
has not been tested for validity, reliability, 
internal consistency, scalability, predictive
weighting, discrimination, or other statistical 
properties, and has been used, in its current 
form, in only one study.***Footnote 9: Charles
H. Logan, Well kept: Comparing Quality of
Confinement in a Public and Private Prison
(Washington, D.C.: National Institute of 
Justice, 1991). The Prison Social Climate 
Survey, on the other hand, has been tested
for statistical qualities, refined, and used
in various research projects conducted by the
Office of Research and Evaluation of the
Federal Bureau of Prisons.***  What the 
indicators have to recommend them for
further study is not so much their current
methodological quality as the fact that they
are based on a clear conceptual model.

In concluding this paper, a few caveats on
the application of these measures may be
in order. First, the indicators are offered
here without any instructions for coding,
scoring, combining into scales, or
interpreting results.  The intent of this 
paper is to offer some grounded and
specific criteria and empirical indicators
for evaluating prison performance, but not 
to prejudge the question of just what 
standards should differentiate good, fair, 
or poor performance. Indeed, such standards 
probably cannot be articulated in abstract 
or absolute terms.  Rather, prison performance 
should generally be viewed as a relative or 
comparative matter, and preferably within 
contexts that hold constant or adjust for 
such factors as the population type, security 
level, or other characteristics of the prisons 
being compared.  In any case, the most 
important thing in developing performance 
measures is not the choice of cutting points 
to use as standards (such as 60 versus 
58 square feet per cell), but the choice of
the criteria themselves (such as space per
inmate in living areas).  It is by choosing 
the criteria for evaluating performance that 
we structure incentives and thus shape the 
behavior we wish to evaluate and, ultimately,
improve.

Second, as suggested by the large number of 
indicators in the Appendix, the concept 
of prison performance is complex and
multi-dimensional.  No single indicator,
nor even any small subset of indicators,
should be taken too seriously by itself. 
Multiple indicators are required to capture
the many tradeoffs that must be made between 
the various and sometimes conflicting 
criteria of quality in the operation of a 
prison. Since no organization can maximize 
all values at once, the more criteria and 
indicators we use, the more accurately we 
can reflect the total pattern of an 
institution's strengths and weaknesses.  
Moreover, some indicators must be viewed in 
conjunction with others in order to be 
interpreted fully. For example, data on 
the frequency of shakedowns must be 
combined with measures of inmate grievances, 
drug use, and amounts of contraband found, 
in order to say whether those shakedowns 
amount to harassing inmates, engaging in 
needless ritualism, or doing what is 
necessary to interdict illicit traffic. 
Indicators taken separately will always 
produce errors of measurement and 
interpretation.  Using large numbers of 
indicators helps to smooth out and 
counterbalance these errors, so that an 
overall pattern of findings will be more 
reliable and meaningful than the results 
of any of the individual indicators alone.

Third, note that some indicators are used
multiple times, to measure different 
concepts, sometimes with conflicting results.  
For example, freedom of movement for inmates 
is a negative indicator on the dimension of
Security, but a positive indicator on the 
dimension of Conditions.  That sort of 
ambiguity is a fact of life, so it is valid 
to include measures that are scored both 
positively and negatively, on different 
dimensions. More troublesome are indicators 
that can be interpreted either positively or
negatively within the same dimension.
Many potential indicators were discarded
during the process of constructing the set
of measures found in the Appendix because 
opposing interpretations seemed equally 
plausible. Even after that culling
process, however, some of the remaining
indicators can be interpreted, at least
arguably, in either a positive or a negative
direction.  There is no way to avoid that
problem completely. To restrict oneself 
to indicators that are absolutely clear and
unambiguous would produce very limited
and uninteresting reports. A better
solution is to report findings in detail, 
thus allowing others to make differing
interpretations, and to search for patterns
rather than relying very much on single
indicators.

Finally, it may be noted that some of the
indicators are "harder" and some "softer"
than others.  Most of the indicators based
on official records produce relatively
objective, factual, and verifiable data,
while the indicators based on inmate and
staff surveys are more subjective and
perceptual.  Researchers should be
sensitive to the need to look for 
conflicting results (for example, between 
staff and inmate perceptions), should try 
to use the "harder" indicators to 
corroborate the "softer" indicators, and 
may wish to consider weighting some 
indicators more heavily than others.

Appendix

Criminal Justice Performance Measures 
for Prisons

Italicized items are based on official
records. Others are based on surveys of
staff or inmates (or both, in which case the
staff and inmate means are counted as
separate indicators). "Rate per capita-6"
means "divided by total number of inmates
resident at some time during a 6-month
reference period."  Scale values are
omitted for all scale items ("rating of ...,"
"perception of ...," etc.).

Survey and official record measures of
prison performance

Dimension 1:  Security ("keep them in")

A. General
1. Rating of how the building design
   affects surveillance of inmates

B. Security procedures (6-month period)
1. Perceived frequency of shakedowns in
   the living area
2. Perceived frequency of body searches
3. Proportion of staff who have observed:
   a.  Any consequential problems within the 
       institution 
   b.  Lax security 
   c.  Poor assignment of staff
   d.  Inmate security violations
   e.  Staff ignoring inmate misconduct
   f.  Staff ignoring disturbances 
   g.  Other problems  

4. Number of cell or bunk area shakedowns 
   conducted in a 1-month period 
   a.  Rate per inmate
   b.  Proportion finding contraband
5. Number of urinalysis tests based on
   suspicion in a 1-month period
   a.  Rate per inmate
   b.  Proportion testing positive for
       opiates

C. Drug use (6-month period)
   1. Drug-related incidents, number
      and rate per capita-6
   2. Discipline reports related to drugs
      or contraband, number and rate per 
      capita-6

D. Significant incidents (6-month period)
   1. Significant incidents, total and
      rate per capita-6
   a. Proportion of 6-month population
      involved in any incidents
   2. Escapes, number and rate per capita-6

E. Community exposure (6-month period)
   1. Furloughs, number and rate per
      capita-6

F. Freedom of movement
   1. Perceived freedom of movement
      for inmates: Day/Evening/Night

G.    Staffing
   1. Ratio of resident population to
      security staff

Dimension 2: Safety ("keep them safe")

A.    Inmate safety (6-month period)
   1. Perceived likelihood of an inmate
      being assaulted in his living area
   2. Estimated rate (per 100 population) 
      of armed assaults involving inmates
   3. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of 
      assaults against inmates without a weapon
   4. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of sexual
      assaults upon inmates 
   5. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of instances 
      inmate has been pressured for sex
   6. Inmates' perceived danger of being:  
      a. killed or injured
      b. punched or assaulted
   7. Proportion of inmates who say they have been 
      physically assaulted by another inmate in a
      6-month period
   8. Proportion of inmates who say they 
      have been physically assaulted by 
      staff in a 6-month period
   9. Discipline reports that involved
      fighting or assault, number and rate per
      capita-6
  10. Significant incidents involving inmate injury,
      number and rate per capita-6

B.    Staff safety (6-month period)
   1. Rating of how the building design
      affects staff safety
   2. Perceived danger to male staff
   3. Perceived danger to female staff
   4. Rating of how often inmates use
      physical force against staff
   5. Perceived likelihood that a staff
      member would be assaulted
   6. Proportion of staff who say they
      have been assaulted by an inmate in 
      a 6-month period
   7. Significant incidents involving
      staff injury, number and rate per capita-6

C.    Dangerousness of inmates
   1. Proportion of inmates perceived to
      be extremely dangerous      
   2. Proportion of inmates perceived to
      be somewhat dangerous
   3. Perceived frequency of inmate
      possession of weapons in living quarters

D. Safety of environment (6-month period)
   1. Perceived frequency of accidents: 
      Housing Units /Dining Hall/Work Environment
   2. Perceived occurrence in housing
      units of clutter that could feed a fire

E. Staffing adequacy
   1. Proportion of staff and inmates
      who feel there are enough staff to 
      provide for safety of inmates: 
      Day/Evening/Night
   2. Proportion of staff who feel there
      are enough staff to provide for their 
      own safety: 
      Day/Evening/Night

Dimension 3: Order ("keep them in line")

A. Inmate misconduct (6-month period)
   1. Perceived frequency of physical
      force by inmates against staff
   2. Perceived security of inmate
      personal property
   3. Proportion of inmates who report
      being punished in the last 6 months:
      a. with a major sanction
      b. with a lesser sanction 
   4. Number of inmates written up, as
      proportion of 6-month population
   5. Discipline reports, total and rate
      per capita-6       
      a. Reports per inmate among those
      written up
   6. Significant incidents of disturbance or 
      incitement to riot, number and rate per
      capita-6

B.    Staff use of force (6-month period)
   1. Perceived frequency that staff have used force 
      against inmates over a 6-month period 
   2. Significant incidents in which force was used, 
      number and rate per capita-6
   3. Significant incidents in which restraint was 
      used, number and rate per capita-6

C. Perceived control
   1. Agreement that staff know what goes on among 
      inmates
   2. Agreement that staff have caught
      and punished the "real troublemakers" 
   3. Perceptions of how much control
      inmates have over other inmates: 
      Day/Evening /Night
   4. Perceptions of how much control
      staff have over inmates: Day/Evening/Night

D.  Strictness of enforcement (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of discipline reports
      that were:
        a. Dismissed
        b. Guilty of a minor report
        c. Guilty of a major report
   2. Proportion of minor report convictions that 
      received a sanction of:
        a. Warning/reprimand
        b. 5-10 extra hours of duty
        c. 15-20 extra hours of duty
        d. 25-30 extra hours of duty
   3. Proportion of major report convictions that 
      received a sanction of:
        a. Segregation only
        b. Loss of goodtime only
        c. Segregation and loss of goodtime
   4. Average number of goodtime days
      taken away
   5. Average number of days to be
      spent in segregation
   6. Proportion of major report sanctions
        a. Suspended at committee level
        b. Modified by warden

Dimension 4:  Care ("keep them healthy")

A. Stress and illness (6-month period)
   1. Inmate stress scale: average of 9
      items reporting feelings of mental, 
      physical, and emotional strain
   2. Average number of days an inmate
      was ill or injured  
   3. Average number of days an inmate
      was seriously ill enough that medical 
      help was needed but did not go to sick 
      call
   4. Significant incidents involving suicide 
      attempts or self-injury, number and rate 
      per capita-6
   5. Significant incidents requiring first aid 
      or infirmary visit, number and rate per 
      capita-6

B. Health care delivered (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of inmates who used medical 
      facilities other than for emergency 
      problems
       a. Proportion of those who used
           the facilities who felt the 
           problem was properly taken care of
   2. Proportion of inmates who reported having had 
      emergency medical treatment
        a. Proportion of those who
           received emergency medical 
           treatment who felt that it was 
           adequately  handled
   3. Clinical contacts, total and rate per 
      capita-6
   4. Sick calls, number and rate per capita-6
   5. Medical appointments, number and rate per 
      capita-6
   6. Physicals and TB tests, number and rate per 
      capita-6
   7. Lab appointments, number and rate per 
      capita-6
   8. Miscellaneous clinic visits, number and rate 
      per capita-6

C.  Dental care (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of inmates who
      received dental treatment
        a. Proportion of those receiving
           dental treatment who felt it 
           was adequately handled
   2. Dental visits, number and rate per
      capita-6

D.    Counseling (6-month period)
   1. The alcohol and drug counseling
       services have been 
       satisfactory (agree/disagree)
   2.  Other counseling services have
       been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
 
   3.  Proportion of inmates who report
       having participated in some kind of
       counseling:
          a. Drug/alcohol counseling 
          b. Therapy
   4.  Psychologist contact cases per
       capita for 1 month
   5.  Number of contact hours per
       contact case for 1 month
   6.  Proportion of inmates who were
       involved in the following programs:
          a. Psychology/psychiatric;
             includes substance abuse
          b. Employment and pre-release
            counseling
   7.  Psychiatric visits (over a 6-month
       period), number and rate per capita-6

E. Staffing for programs and services
   1. Number of program or services
      delivery staff (FTE):
          a. Medical clinicians 
          b. Education/work 
          c. Psychology/counseling 
          d. TOTAL
   2. Number of inmates (average daily
      resident population) per FTE staff position
      in programs or services:
          a. Per medical clinician 
          b. Per education/work staff 
          c. Per psychologist/counselor
          d. Per total program/service staff
   3. Program or services delivery staff
      as a proportion of total staff

Dimension 5: Activity ("keep them busy")

A. General
   1. Inmates usually have things to do
      to keep them busy

B. Work and industry involvement
   (6-month period)
   1. Involvement in prison industry,
      work release, or institutional jobs:
         a. Proportion of population
            eligible
         b. Proportion working
   2. Among eligible inmates, proportion involved 
      in:
         a. Prison industry 
         b. Work release 
         c. Institutional jobs
   3. Average work hours per week among employed 
      inmates

C.  Work and industry evaluation
    (6-month period)
   1. The work training program has
      been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
   2. Have the vocational training
      courses provided skills that are useful?
         a. Perceived importance of
            learning the information presented 
            in class
         b. Perceived understanding of the
            information presented in class
   3. Grievances that involved problems
      with work, number and rate per capita-6

D. Education and training involvement
    (6-month period)
   1.  Proportion of inmates who report
       having participated in some educational 
       program
         a. Educational
         b. Social
      education/pre-release skills
   2. Enrollment in education or
      vocational training classes:
         a. Proportion of population
            eligible
         b. Proportion enrolled
   3. Among eligible inmates,
      proportion involved in the 
      following programs:
         a. Adult basic education 
         b. Secondary education 
         c. College education courses 
         d. Vocational training
   4. Average class hours per week
      among those in education or vocational 
      training programs

E.  Education and training evaluation (6-month 
    period)
   1. The general education program has been 
      satisfactory (agree/disagree)
   2. Have the academic courses
      provided useful skills?
         a. Perceived understanding of the
            information presented in class
         b. Perceived importance of the
            information presented in class

F. Recreation (6-month period)
   1. Recreational activities are satisfactory 
      (agree/disagree)
   2. Rating of how often prison
      recreational facilities are used 
   3. Rating of how often inmates are
      unable to use the recreational facilities 

G. Religious services (6-month period)
   1. Religious services have been
      satisfactory (agree/disagree)
   2. Rating of how often inmates attend
      religious services 

Dimension 6: Justice ("do it fairly")

A. Staff fairness
   1. Questions on aspects of staff
      fairness (agree/disagree)
         a. Staff let inmates know what is
            expected of them
         b. Staff are fair and honest
         c. Inmates are written up without
            cause
   2. Staff are too involved in their own
      interests to care about inmate needs
      (agree/disagree)
 
B.  Limited use of force (6-month period)
   1. Staff use force only when
      necessary (agree/disagree)
   2. Perceived frequency with which
      staff have used force against inmates
   3. Significant incidents in which
      force was used, number and rate per capita-6
   4. Significant incidents in which
      restraints were used, number and rate 
      per capita-6

C. Grievance volume (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of staff reporting
      having a grievance filed 
      against them in last 6 months
   2. Proportion of inmates who
      reported filing a grievance against 
      staff or management
   3. Inmates filing grievances, number
      and proportion of 6-month population
   4. Grievances filed, total and rate
      per capita-6
   5. Number of grievances directed at
      individual staff
         a. Proportion of all grievances
         b. Rate per capita-6

D. The grievance process (6-month
   period)
   1. Perceived effectiveness of the
      grievance procedure
   2. Perceived benefits of the grievance
      procedure
   3. Perceived effect of grievance
      procedure on the quality of life
   4. Proportion of inmate grievants
      who report their grievance was taken 
      care of:
         a. Completely
         b. Partially
         c. Not at all
   5. Proportion of inmates who did not
      file a grievance, who cite the following 
      reasons:
         a. They never had any major
            complaint
         b. The problem was solved
            informally
         c. They thought it would be
            useless
         d. They were afraid of negative
            consequences
         e. Other reasons
 
   6. Proportion of all grievances that
      were appealed

E. The discipline process (6-month
   period)
   1. Proportion of inmates receiving a
      major sanction who felt it was a fair 
      punishment
   2. Proportion of inmates receiving a
      lesser sanction who felt it was a 
      fair punishment
   3. Perception of how many maximum security 
      inmates really belong there
   4. Proportion of discipline guilty
      verdicts that were appealed
          a. Minor reports
          b. Major reports
   5. Proportion of major report
      sanctions
          a. Suspended at committee level
          b. Modified by warden

F.  Legal resources and legal access
    (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of inmates who have
      used the law library 
   2. Proportion of inmates who feel the
      law library has supplied adequate information
   3. Proportion of inmates who feel the
      law library has not supplied adequate information.
   4. Grievances that involved legal
      resources or access, number and rate per 
      capita-6

G. Justice delayed (6-month period)
   1. Average number of days from the
      date of the discipline report until 
      the hearing 
   2. Proportion of minor reports with
      hearings beyond 7-day limit
   3. From date of grievance report
      until resolved by grievance officer:
          a. Average number of days
          b. Proportion beyond 20 days
   4. From date of grievance report until resolution 
      approved by warden:
          a. Average number of days
          b. Proportion beyond 27 days
Dimension 7:  Conditions ("without undue suffering")

A. General
   1. The administration is doing its best to provide 
       good living conditions (agree/disagree)

B. Crowding (6-month period)
   1. Average resident population as percentage 
      of capacity
   2. Proportion of 6-month period in which capacity 
      was exceeded
   3. Average number of sq. ft. per inmate in 
      housing units 
   4. Perceived occurrence of crowding in the housing 
      units
   5. Perceived occurrence of crowding
      outside the housing units

C. Social density and privacy
   1. Proportion of inmates who were confined in:
          a. Single-occupancy units of 60 sq.
             ft. or more
          b. Multiple-occupancy units with
             60 sq. ft. or more per inmate 
          c. Multiple-occupancy units with
             less than 60 sq. ft. per inmate
   2. Perceived amount of privacy within the sleeping 
      area
   3. Perceived amount of privacy in the
      shower and toilet area

D. Internal freedom of movement
   1. Perceived freedom of movement for inmates: 
      Day/Evening/Night
   2. Proportion of inmates who were confined to 
      housing units for over 10 hours per day

E. Facilities and maintenance (6-month period)
   1. Residents vs. conveniences in living areas
          a. Inmates per shower
          b. Inmates per sink
          c. Inmates per toilet
          d. Inmates per telephone
          e. Inmates per television
   2. Grievances about maintenance, number and rate 
      per capita-6

F. Sanitation (6-month period)
   1. Perceived occurence of insects, rodents, or dirt 
      in the housing units
   2. Perceived occurence of insects,
      rodents, or dirt in the dining hall
   3. Perceived occurence of a bad odor or poor air 
      circulation in the housing units

G. Noise (6-month period)
   1. Perceived noise level in the evening hours 
   2. Perceived noise level in the
      sleeping hours

H. Food (6-month period)
   1. Quality of food at the institution 
   2. Variety of the food at the institution 
   3. Proportion of inmates who feel
      enough food is served for the main course
   4. Proportion of inmates who feel the
      appearance of the food is appealing
   5. Grievances involving food complaints, number 
      and rate per capita-6
 
I. Commissary (6-month period)
   1. There is an adequate commissary selection 
      (agree/disagree)
   2. Proportion of inmates who reported:
          a. No errors in their commissary
             account 
          b. Errors that were corrected
          c. Errors that were not corrected

J. Visitation (6-month period)
   1. Proportion of inmates who find it hard to 
      arrange visits with family and friends 
 
   2. Proportion of inmates reporting family and 
      friends who find it hard to arrange visits 
   3. Average number of visitors reported by inmates 
   4. Rating of the quality of visits 
   5. Perceived occurrence of too many people in the 
      visiting area
   6. Rating of how often it is hard to talk to a 
      visitor because of noise in the visiting
      area 
   7. Proportion of inmates who feel the
      visiting room has enough furniture
   8. Proportion of inmates who feel the
      visiting room has enough vending machines
   9. Grievances involving visitation and mail 
      problems, number and rate per capita-6

K. Community access (6-month period)
   1. Furloughs, number and rate per capita-6

Dimension 8: Management ("as efficiently as possible")

A. Job satisfaction (6-month period)
   1. Institution satisfaction index: average across 
      3 items expressing positive feelings
      toward the institution 
   2. Proportion of staff who reported filing a 
      grievance against management 
   3. Proportion of staff who have not filed a grievance, 
      who cite the following reason:
          a. Never had a major complaint 
          b. Problem was taken care of informally 
          c. Thought it would be useless 
          d. Afraid of negative consequences 
          e. Other reason

B. Stress and burn-out
   1. Job stress index: average across 5 items 
      regarding how often staff experience 
      stress on the job
   2. Hardening-toward-inmates index: average 
      across 3 items regarding how often staff
      feel indifferent or harsh toward inmates
   3. Relating-to-inmates index: average across 
      7 items regarding how often staff feel
      positive about the way they work with inmates 

C. Staff turnover
   1. Staff on reference date divided into:
          a. Vacancies on reference date
          b. Terminations during previous 6 months
   2. Termination rate divided by relevant BOP 
      tenure-specific rate

D. Staff and management relations
   1. Management and communication index: average 
      across 10 items expressing positive appraisals 
      of the organization and authority of management
   2. Relationship-with-supervisor index: average 
      across 6 items regarding how positive
      staff feel toward their supervisor 
   3. Rating of how the building design
      affects communication among line staff
   4. Rating of how the building design
      affects communication between line staff
      and supervisors

E. Staff experience
   1. Average number of years worked at this  
      institution
   2. Average number of other facilities
      worked in prior to this facility
   3. Average years in corrections
          a. Total staff, minus services staff
          b. Custody staff
          c. Top administrators

F. Education
  1. Average years of education (excluding services 
     staff) 

G. Training
   1. Training index: average across 5 items regarding 
      the effectiveness and quality of the
      training program

H. Salary and overtime (6-month period)
   1. Average salary (in $1,000's)
          a. Total, minus services staff
          b. Custody staff
          c. Top administrators
   2. Average number of overtime hours worked in a week
   3. Average proportion of overtime compensated by: 
          a. Extra pay 
          b. Compensatory time 
          c. No compensation

I. Staffing efficiency
   1. Number of resident inmates per FTE staff member

This paper is based on research conducted
by the author with support from several
agencies of the U. S. Department of
Justice: the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(grant no. 92-BJ-CX-0001), the National
Institute of Justice (grant no. 86-IJ-CX-
0062-S1), the National Institute of Corrections, 
and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.  The views 
are those of the author and do not necessarily 
reflect Department of Justice policy.

About the author

Dr. Charles H. Logan is a Professor and
Associate Head of Sociology at the University 
of Connecticut, where he has taught since
1970. He has published widely on many
criminal justice issues, including the
deterrent effects of arrest and imprisonment, 
evaluation of correctional programs, the 
effects of parole, juvenile justice, jury 
selection, prison performance measures, and 
the privatization of prisons. His major 
work in the latter area is Private Prisons:  
Cons and Pros (Oxford University Press, 
1990). In 1987-88 he served as a professional 
staff member for the President's Commission 
on Privatization and has been a Visiting 
Fellow to several agencies of the U.S. 
Department of Justice -- including the 
National Institute of Justice, the Bureau 
of Prisons, and the Bureau of Justice 
Statistics. He is a member of the Corrections 
and Sentencing Committee of the American Bar 
Association's Criminal Justice Section.

Measuring the Performance 
of Community Corrections

by Joan Petersilia

Introduction

The 1980's saw tremendous growth in
community corrections' populations --
from about 1.4 million persons at the start
of the decade to 3.2 million by 1990 -- a
more than 130% increase. This increase
was larger than that experienced by either
prisons or jails over the same time period
(Hindelang et al., 1981; Jankowski, 1992). 
Today, 3 out of every 4 persons under 
correctional supervision in the United 
States are on some form of community-based 
custody -- mostly probation or parole --
although community corrections also 
includes halfway houses, residential 
centers, work furlough, and all other 
programs for managing the offender in 
the community.***Footnote 1: Probation
is often confused with parole. Probation
is a sentence the offender serves in the
community while under supervision; parole
is the conditional release of an inmate 
from incarceration under supervision after
a portion of the prison sentence has been
served.***
 
Despite its wide usage, community
corrections is often the subject of intense
criticism.  Probation and parole suffer
from a "soft on crime" image and, as a
result, maintain little public support.  
Their poor (and some believe, misunderstood) 
public image leaves them unable to compete 
effectively for scarce public funds. 
Nationally, community corrections receives 
less than 10% of State and local government 
expenditures for correctional services, which 
includes jails and prisons (Flanagan and
Maguire, 1992).  And their budgets are
declining at a faster rate when compared
to other criminal justice components. 
Over the last decade in Los Angeles, for
example, the county Superior Court budget
grew more than 200%, the sheriffs' and
district attorneys' budgets grew about
50%, while that of probation grew by a
mere 10% -- even though probation
populations more than doubled over this
time period.

It is also true that those offenders being
sentenced to probation and parole are more 
serious than in the past -- in terms of
their crimes, prior criminal records, and
substance abuse histories (Petersilia and
Turner, 1990). In New York, for example,
77% of probationers are felons (not
misdemeanants), and fully a third of 
active cases are people who have been 
found guilty of violent crimes -- yet 
these persons are supervised on caseloads 
of several hundred persons (Los Angeles
Times, February 7, 1993:A20). The Los 
Angeles situation is even more critical.  
The L.A. County Probation Department, the 
largest in the world, supervises 90,000 
adult offenders -- 80% of all those 
convicted in the county.  But three-quarters 
of those offenders are monitored only by 
computer, by probation officers with 
caseloads of about 1,000 each. As a result, 
Chief Probation Officer Barry Nidorf 
estimates that his deputies have, on average, 
only 1 hour and 47 minutes per year to devote 
to each probationer (Los Angeles Times,
February 8, 1993:A12).

Why does community corrections fare so
poorly? It is not that its services are 
undervalued. Quite the contrary: every 
national study and commission beginning 
with the President's Commission on Law 
Enforcement and Administration of Justice 
(1967) up to the more recent President's 
National Drug Control Strategy (1990)has 
recommended expanding community corrections.  
In fact, the National Advisory Commission 
on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals
(1973:311) referred to community corrections 
as the justice system's "brightest hope." 
Public opinion polls also show wide support 
for community-based sentencing for nonviolent 
offenders (Doble, 1987; Jacoby and Dunn, 
1987).

But while there is general support for the
concept of community sanctions, current
programs are seen as inadequate. Most of
the commissions that endorse community
corrections go on to state that current
programs are unable to provide effective
offender supervision or rehabilitation. 
Furthermore, their minimal supervision is
not seen as adequate punishment for most
serious crimes. As DiIulio notes in No
Escape: The Future of American Corrections 
(1991:68),

Most Americans think that criminal
sanctions that make little or no use of
incarceration fail to protect the public
adequately, to deter would-be criminals,
and to prevent convicted offenders from
finding new victims.  Further- more, they
simply do not feel that alternatives to
incarceration are an adequate moral 
response to the pain and suffering imposed 
upon innocent victims by often calculating 
and remorseless victimizers.

In their defense, "community corrections"
remains an ambiguous concept. It is a legal 
status, an alternative to incarceration, a 
service-delivery mechanism, and an  
organizational entity.  As an organizational
entity, it has objectives and performs a
wide range of activities -- some totally
unrelated to offender supervision and/or
treatment.  One survey found that
probation departments were responsible
for more than 50 different activities,
including court-related civil functions 
(for example, step-parent adoption
investigations, minority age marriage
investigations)(Fitzharris, 1979). The
time-worn controversy over whether
community corrections (particularly
probation)is punishment, treatment, or 
an amalgam of both further confuses
discussions of its mission.  As David 
Fogel (1984) observed: "probation lacks 
a forceful imagery that other occupations 
in criminal justice can claim: police 
catch criminals, prosecutors try to get 
them locked up, judges put them in 
prisons, wardens keep them there, but what 
do probation officers do?"

So while it is true that study panels
continually endorse the expansion of
community corrections, none has specified
exactly what functions it should perform,
or when and how it should be used. Having 
been founded more than 150 years ago, 
community corrections still has an unclear 
primary mission, with confusion about what 
activities contribute to that mission and 
how best to assess their performance. Many 
observers have urged community corrections 
to quantify what they do, with whom, and to 
what benefit (Cochran et al., 1991; 
Petersilia et al., 1985; Clear and O'Leary, 
1983; McAnany et al., 1984; Blair et al., 
1987).

Without a clear public mandate or an effective 
constituency, community corrections has been 
vulnerable to political pressures. It has 
fallen prey to the weakness described by the 
adage: "If you don't stand for something, 
you'll fall for anything." In the 1970's, 
when rehabilitation was in favor, it promised 
to rehabilitate.  In the 1980's, when the 
public mood turned tough-on-crime, it promised 
toughness. But with budget cuts, observers 
have noted that community corrections ends 
up promising much but being able to deliver
very little (Clear and Byrne, 1992). 

As DiIulio (1992) points out, to some
extent these problems are endemic to all
public agencies.  However, they seem
particularly problematic in community
corrections agencies for two reasons. 
First, there is a serious lack of 
consensus  - and in fact, widespread 
disagreement -- among community 
corrections staff as to goals and mission.  
The leadership, as well as line staff, 
differ -- both within and among 
departments -- as to the importance
of the surveillance/control model versus
the treatment/service model.  Of course,
supervision usually combines elements of
both, but studies have shown that
supervision activities do differ
significantly depending on which model
the staff endorses (Ellsworth,1992). The
controversy over whether community
corrections is punishment, treatment, 
or both has now been enlivened.  A number 
of large community corrections agencies 
(for example, Los Angeles) have now openly
embraced a surveillance model -- quite
different from the meshing of the two
major goals in previous years.  

Thus, there is a major disagreement within
the leadership of community corrections
about what the primary mission of their
agencies is. 

The second major difficulty -- closely
related to the first -- is that community
corrections has, by and large, never been
able to show that it "works."  Historically,
recidivism rates -- an offender's return to
crime after some intervention -- have been
the gauge by which community corrections
has been evaluated.  And after hundreds of
research studies (most poorly done), the
weight of evidence shows that community
corrections programs have not been able to
reduce recidivism (Lipton et al., 1975;
Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1980;
Petersilia and Turner, 1993).  A recent
report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics
revealed that 43% of felons on State
probation were rearrested for another
felony within 3 years (Langan and
Cunniff, 1992).

After a long history of being unable to
affect recidivism significantly, probation
and parole leaders have begun to question 
the outcome measure itself  -not whether 
recidivism should be included at all, but
whether it should be the sole or primary
measure of their performance. They note
that crime is the result of a long line of
social ills-- dysfunctional families,
economic and educational deprivation,
and so on -- and these social problems are
clearly beyond the direct influence of
probation/parole agencies. As the
BJS/Princeton Study Group concludes
(1992):

to evaluate the system's performance
chiefly in terms of recidivism measures 
is to exaggerate the system's ability to 
affect the prevalence and severity of crime 
in society, to miss other important measures 
of the system' day-to-day performance, and 
to obscure the role that citizens can and 
should play in promoting secure communities 
(DiIulio, 1992).

Corrections officials also argue persuasively 
that recidivism rates measure just one function, 
while ignoring other critical probation/parole 
tasks, such as preparing pre-sentence 
investigations, collecting fines and fees, 
monitoring community service, and so on. 
Adequate performance indicators should reflect 
the multitude of an agency's goals and 
activities.

The American Probation and Parole
Association (1992) has recently called for
including other intermediate outcomes in
program evaluations. These would measure 
the offenders' activities while on
probation or parole supervision (for
example, rates of employment, drug use,
participation in work and education).  
The association argues that programs do 
affect offender behavior, and that the 
effects would be shown if these mediating
outcomes were measured.  

Corrections practitioners also question
whether their performance should be
judged by how the offender behaves once
he is off formal probation/parole
supervision. After all, other components
of the justice system are not judged by
their ability to affect the future criminal
behavior of offenders, and corrections 
should not be either.  Charles Logan (1992) 
agrees and writes:

The police, prosecutor, and courts are
judged by more proximate outcomes (such
as arrest and conviction rates). It is only
when the system switches to corrections,
that changing the offenders' crime
behavior becomes the primary measure of
success.

An additional difficulty has recently
emerged regarding the recidivism measure.
Specifically, even if one accepts that
recidivism is a useful measure of success,
it is not clear which direction indicates
success. If one believes that the major
mission of community corrections is to
protect the public -- emphasizing the
surveillance function -- then perhaps
increasing recidivism rates (for example,
returns to prison) is a positive -- not
negative -- performance indicator. If
offenders are convicted of a crime and
incarcerated, then public safety is being
served. But if rehabilitation is the
primary goal, as it has historically been,
then decreasing recidivism indicates
success.  For example, a recent evaluation
of intensive probation/parole supervision
programs found that closer supervision
increased technical violations and returns
to jail and prison.  The Los Angeles Times
called the probation program a "dismal
failure" since it failed to decrease
recidivism.  Barry Nidorf, Chief Probation 
Officer in Los Angeles County, used the 
higher recidivism figures to argue that 
the ISP program had succeeded. He wrote:

Reducing recidivism was not listed as the
highest priority...holding offenders 
accountable was of primary importance...given 
the stated project goal of protecting the
community, a significantly lower recidivism 
rate was not expected.
   
For years, probation has been measured
only by recidivism rate....In today's
environment, with over 70% of the
probation caseload consisting of felony
offenders, is it still realistic to use 
only this one criterion?  Why is 
revocation and sentencing of a probation 
violator not considered a "success"?  I 
believe it should be...(Nidorf, 1991a).

Without consensus about whether the major 
criminal justice outcome  - recidivism -- 
should be increasing or decreasing as a 
result of interventions, the research field 
is likely to become even more muddled.

It does appear that community corrections,
more than other public agencies, has had
difficulty articulating its mission and
reaching agreement as to appropriate
performance indicators.  But as budgets
shrink, public stakeholders will be
increasingly asking what they are getting
-- in objective, measurable terms -- for
their dollar.  Within this context, 
probation and parole will become increasingly
vulnerable to budget cuts if they cannot
clearly articulate what they do, with
whom, and to what effect.

This paper is designed to address that
need. Specifically, it attempts to  

1) articulate a mission statement for
   community corrections
2) identify the goals contained within the
   mission statement
3) specify methods or activities that
   address each goal 
4) identify measurable performance
   indicators for each goal.

This paper is clearly just a first step 
and is meant to stimulate discussion and 
further work.  Other goals could be added 
to the mission statement (for example, 
educate the public, prevent crime), and 
additional (or different) methods and 
performance indicators could be substituted 
for those indicated. Community corrections
agencies should customize their mission
statement, methods, and performance 
indicators so that they reflect local 
resources and priorities.

Step 1: Specify a mission statement
for community corrections

A necessary first step toward developing
performance indicators is to articulate the
organization's goals and mission.  As
Peters and Waterman, authors of In Search
of Excellence, put it: "Figure out what your
value system is.  Decide what your company 
stands for..."(1982: 227).  The same principle 
applies to social, nonprofit organizations.  
Before community corrections agencies can
evaluate their performance, they must first
define what they are attempting to
accomplish. 

As noted above, probation and parole have
historically had difficulty defining their 
mission (McAnany et al., 1984; Petersilia et 
al., 1985).  Different goals are often given 
by administrators and staff within the same
department.  And sometimes the same person 
gives different messages to different 
audiences, depending on his or her perception 
of their support for rehabilitation versus 
enforcement activities.  In some instances, 
agencies adopt a mission or goal statement 
that they think will sell their services to 
the external community, but that staff do 
not sincerely support. And the goals of the 
staff might not be shared by their principal 
sponsors or customers (the judiciary, county 
funders, and the public, in the case of 
community corrections).  The result is that 
the mission statements of many agencies 
become public relations gimmicks as opposed 
to working statements that assist internal
agency operations.

DiIulio (1991) advises criminal justice
agencies to develop mission statements
that --   

1) include only activities that the agency
   can reasonably and realistically be 
   expected to fulfill 
2) are fairly narrow and consistent in
   scope 
3) contain activities that are unique to the
   justice agency, rather than conflated with 
   functions of other social institutions 
   such as schools and welfare agencies.  

His major message is that the mission
statement should not ask the agency to 
"do the impossible" and it should contain
activities over which it has direct control,
rather than seek the achievement of more
distant ends. 

Nidorf (1991b) adds an additional
requirement:  mission statements must be
responsive to expectations held by the
community and by other justice agencies.
He argues persuasively that community
corrections operates within the justice
system, not independent from it, and that
its goals and activities -- and eventual 
survival  - depend heavily on how well 
it meets the expectations of the public 
and peer agencies (police, courts). 

Several attempts have been made to
develop mission statements for community 
corrections, most recently by the American 
Correctional Association (1986) and the 
California Corrections Policy Project 
(1992).  These statements, as well as those 
of earlier years (see Fitzharris, 1979; 
McAnany, 1984; Clear and O'Leary, 1983), 
all embrace the notions of public protection 
and offender rehabilitation.  For instance, 
the California Corrections Policy Projects'
statement is:

The mission of community corrections is to 
protect the community; support the rights of
victims; enforce court-ordered sanctions; and 
assist offenders to change (CCPP, 1992).

The statement of the American Correctional 
Association (ACA)is broader, simply stating 
that the community corrections mission as 
sanction is to "enhance social order and 
public safety" (1986:58). 

The American Probation and Parole
Association(APPA)(1992) says that the
goals of community corrections are to: 
"protect the community; deter criminal 
and drug activity; punish and rehabilitate
offenders."

In fact, all of the mission statements
identified were quite similar in their
mention of public protection and offender
rehabilitation.  Some also included
assisting the court in sentencing 
decisions, public education, and aiding 
victims(Fitzharris, 1979)

For purposes of this paper, the author
adopts the following mission statement,
which comes from reviewing the literature
as well as talking with the leadership of
the APPA, National Association of
Probation Executives (NAPE), and the
California Probation/Parole and
Correctional Association (CPPCA).

The mission of community corrections is to 
assist the court and/or parole board in 
assessing candidates' suitability for 
community placement; and once offenders are 
placed in the community, to enforce the 
court-ordered sanctions, protect the community, 
assist offenders to change, and support the 
rights of their victims.

Step 2: Identify methods designed to
accomplish each identified goal

The major objective in developing a clear
mission or goal statement is that it defines
what the agency is about, what it hopes to
achieve.  This makes the next step possible:  
specifying the agency activities that are
designed to achieve (or move toward
achieving) the various goals.  The table on 
pp. 78-79 takes the mission statement adopted 
for this paper, breaks it down into individual 
goals, and then identifies specific community 
corrections methods or activities that are 
designed to accomplish each goal.  For 
example, the first goal pertains to
advising the court about an offender's
suitability for community placement. 
Community corrections staff do this in two
principal ways: conducting presentence
investigations, and conducting investigations 
of parole or probation violations.  Methods 
are linked to each of the five major goals 
contained in the study group's original 
mission statement. 

Step 3: Specify performance indicators 
for each method or activity 

Once the agency has identified its goals
and the methods it uses to address each
goal, it can specify objective (measur-
able) performance criteria that determine
the extent to which the activities are being
performed and the goals are being achieved.

Identifying indicators of probation and
parole success is not as easy as it sounds.
As Clear and O'Leary (1983:67) note, many 
probation and parole staff are like
social-service workers and tend to frame the
substance of their work in terms of broad
attitudinal or otherwise nonspecific
changes.  Officers frequently identify the
outcomes interms of changes in the client
-- but in often vague or ambiguous terms 
such as "ability to deal with authority," 
or "improved self-image." These broad 
changes are difficult to define operationally 
because they are subject to individual 
judgment -- one officer's definition of 
progress might be quite different from 
another's -- and because there are few 
objective measures for determining whether 
the goal has been met.  For purposes of 
performance measurement, we need objective,
measurable outcome statements that are tied 
to specific targeted activities that are
believed to be related to the mission.

Column 3 of Table 1 ("Performance Indicators") 
specifies performance indicators for each of 
the major goals in the mission statement.  For 
example, one of the major goals of community 
corrections is to protect the public. This is 
done by monitoring the offender's behavior 
(through officer contacts), drug and alcohol 
testing, and so forth.  To objectively 
measure whether these activities protect 
the public, one would record the number 
and types of arrests that occur during 
supervision and the number of offenders 
who abscond during supervision. Likewise, 
one goal is to "assist the offender to 
change."  "Success" in achieving this 
goal might be measured by the number of 
drug-free or alcohol-free days, number of 
times attending treatment, and objective 
tests of attitude change.

It is important to mention two things at
this point:  

1) the performance indicators listed in Table 
   1 are quite different from those currently 
   used and include much more than recidivism, 
   and 
2) the measurements (including recidivism) reflect 
   only activities that occur while the offender 
   is formally on community corrections status, 
   not beyond.  

It may be quite interesting to track offenders for 
some time period after their supervision has ended 
and record their recidivism, but those rates should 
not be used, as they have historically, as the
primary measure of probation and parole effectiveness.  
Criminal behavior is motivated by social and other 
factors over which the justice system has little, 
if any, direct control.  Hawkins and Alpert (1989)
suggest that to ask the justice system to assume
responsibility for post-program behavior is akin to 
asking high schools to assume responsibility for 
post-graduation employment.  Success in high school 
is defined as completing the course of study
(not dropping out) and attaining some level of 
knowledge and skills assessed by grades and 
standardized tests. Schools do not follow up 
their graduates to see if they slip back into 
ignorance or fail to hold a job after leaving 
school.  But corrections programs are judged not 
on their immediate impact but on their long-term 
effects: does the person refrain from crime
after formal supervision has ended?

It is the belief of the BJS/Princeton Study Group 
that the performance of community corrections 
agencies ought not to be evaluated mainly or 
exclusively in terms of their effects on 
recidivism rates, and that the success of 
community corrections should not be based on 
some postprogram assessment of behavior.

Why bother with performance indicators?

Community corrections agencies do not
currently collect information on most of
the performance indicators listed in the 
table on pp. 78-79.  To do so, agencies 
would first need to define their mission, 
identify activities related to that
mission, and collect relevant performance
indicators.  Given their current budget
woes, why would they want to take on this 
additional task? 

There are a number of reasons. Completing such 
an exercise would assist them in prioritizing
activities and allocating resources.  When the 
agency implemented a new program or policy,
data would be readily available to monitor 
(or even project) the program's impact. 
Collecting data on the performance indicators 
on pp. 78-79 should also increase staff morale, 
since these indicators measure activities they 
do control and will likely show some success.  
Also, going through the exercise of defining 
mission, activities, and performance indicators
helps the organization -- top management
and field staff -- reach consensus on key
issues.  It also helps identify those priority
areas that have few related program activities.  
The most important reason, however, for 
completing this exercise and collecting the 
necessary data is a practical one: without 
such information, community corrections remains
vulnerable to continued budget cuts. It has 
been shown that those who can quantify what 
they do, with whom, and to what effect have 
a strong competitive advantage in budget 
negotiations. 

Donald Cochran, Commissioner of Probation in 
Massachusetts (1991:38), articulates the 
practical advantages of engaging in such an 
exercise:

Probation managers need to use information to 
accurately determine what work needs to be 
done, the out-comes the agency will produce 
if resources are added, or likely program 
outcomes and organizational practices if 
resources continue to be reduced...information 
and knowledge driven probation programs can
and will be funded (Cochran, 1991:36,
underline in original).
   
Ronald Corbett (1991) expands by noting:

in a time when agencies are increasingly
called to define their existence, the
absence of a clearly articulated philosophy
will leave agencies vulnerable, unable to
offer a compelling vision of their
contribution to the common good in a
manner that justifies continued
existence...an agency that cannot offer a
clear and convincing statement of its
reason for being will not survive the rough
and tumble of competition for shrinking
tax dollars.

When public agencies fail to define their
mission internally, political influences are
more apt to define it for them.  And when 
they fail to articulate how they should 
be evaluated, outcome measurements such
as recidivism rates will likely be imposed
upon them.

Over time, community corrections policy
has become heavily influenced, not by
those practitioners who are most 
knowledgeable about it, but instead by
public opinion, fear, and political hype. 
One of the biggest challenges now facing
community corrections is to regain control
of its profession.  One direct and effective
way to do this is by defining a mission and
showing -- in measurable terms -- that the
agency is achieving it.  With more solid
information, community corrections should 
again be able to inspire the confidence of 
policymakers and the public, and ultimately 
secure the dollars necessary to perform 
adequately the activities that help 
accomplish their mission.   

Community corrections: Goals, methods, and 
performance indicators

Goals
              
1. Assess offender's suitability for
placement: Community corrections advises
the court and/or parole board on suitability
of community placement.

Methods/activities

Conduct presentence investigations 
(PSI)Conduct investigations of 
violation reports

Performance indicators

Accuracy and completeness of PSI
Timeliness of revocation and 
termination hearings Validity 
of classification/prediction 
instrument Percent of offender 
receiving recommended sentence or 
violation act Percent of offenders 
recommended for community who 
violate

Goals

2. Enforce court-ordered sanctions:
The court permits the offender to remain 
in the community if he/she adheres to 
certain conditions, which always include 
no new crime and may include financial 
obligations and prohibitions on alcohol/
drug use, peer associations, unemployment, 
etc.

Methods/activities

Monitor police arrest and investigation 
reports Monitor victim restitution and 
court fees Monitor community service

Conduct personal contacts and other 
monitoring (such as electronic) 
verify employment, school performance 
peer associations Test for drug and 
alcohol use

Performance  indicators

Number of arrests and technical violation 
during supervision Percent of ordered 
payments collected Number of hours/days 
performed community service Number of 
favorable discharges

Number of days employed, in vocational 
education or school Drug-free and/or 
alcohol-free days during supervision

Goals

3. Protect the community:  Offenders are                        
to be closely observed so that violations
are noted, and if serious enough , result
in the offender's being removed  from
the community.

Methods/activities

Risk/needs instrument to assign
classification  status  of violation                            
Conduct personal contact with offender
Conduct telephone contacts and
collateral  contacts Limit offender 
freedom/mobility (e.g., curfews)
Conduct drug and alcohol testing
Coordinate with police on investigations/
warrants Monitor arrest records Restrict 
offender travel outside designated community

Performance indicators

Number and type of supervision contacts

Number and type of arrest during supervision
Number of absconders during supervision

Goals

4. Assist offenders to change:                        
Offenders should be given the opportunity      
to participate in activities designed to                                       
reduce their long-term return to crime. 

Methods/activities

Refer to educational/vocational 
activities

Refer to drug/alcohol treatment.
 
Refer or conduct personal counseling

Performance indicators

Number of times attending treatment/
work programming Employment during 
supervision Number of arrests and/or 
technical violations during supervision
Number drug-free and/or alcohol-free 
days during supervision Attitude 
change

Goals

5. Restore crime victims:                                                     
Crime victims have a right to be involved                                      
in the justice system, provided necessary                                      
financial support and social services, and        
protected from harm and intimidation.

Methods/activities

Monitor restitution payment inform victim
of potential contact/danger Inform victims 
of services for them

Performance indicators

Payment of restitution Extent of victim 
satisfaction with services and department

References

American Correctional Association (1986). 
Public Policy for Corrections.  College
Park, Md.: American Correctional
Association.

References

American Probation and Parole
Association (1992).  Working 
Draft on Intensive Supervision
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Blair, Louis H., Harry P. Hatry, Karan
Bunn et al. (1971). Monitoring the
Impacts of Prison and Parole Services:  
An Initial Examination. Washington,
D.C.: The Urban Institute.

California Corrections Policy Project
(1991).  California Corrections Policies
for the Future: Mission and Policy
Statement. Sacramento: California
Corrections Policy Project.

Clear, Todd R., and James M. Byrne
(1992).  "The Future of Intermediate
Sanctions:  Questions to Consider,"
in James M. Byrne, Arthur J. Lurigio, and
Joan Petersilia (eds.), Smart Sentencing: 
The Emergence of Intermediate Sanctions. 
Newbury Park, Calif.:  Sage Publications.

Clear, Todd R., and Vincent O'Leary
(1981).  Controlling the Offender in 
the Community.  Lexington, Mass.:  
Lexington Books.

Cochran, Donald (1991). "Classification/
Information Systems" in Donald Cochran et 
al., Managing Probation with Scarce
Resources: Obstacles and Opportunities. 
Washington, D.C.:  National Institute of
Corrections.

Cochran, Donald et al. (1991).  Managing
Probation with Scarce Resources: Obstacles 
and Opportunities.  Washington, D.C.: 
National Institute of Corrections.

Corbett, Ronald P., Jr. (1991). "How Did
We Get in this Mess?" in Donald Cochran
et al., Managing Probation with Scarce
Resources: Obstacles and Opportunities. 
Washington, D.C.: National Institute of
Corrections.

DiIulio, John J., Jr. (1991). No Escape: 
The Future of American Corrections.  New
York: Basic Books, Inc.

-- (1992).  Rethinking the Criminal Justice
System: Toward a New Paradigm.  Washington,
D.C.:  U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau 
of Justice Statistics.

Doble, John (1987). Crime and Punishment:  
The Public's View. New York: Public Agenda 
Foundation.

Ellsworth, Thomas (1992). "The Goal
Orientation of Adult Probation
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Contemporary Community Corrections.  
Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc.

Fitzharris, Timothy L. (1979).  Probation
in an Era of Diminishing Resources. The 
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Maguire (eds.)(1992).  Sourcebook of
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Probation as a Profession in the Service 
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David Fogel (eds.), Probation and Justice:  
Reconsideration of Mission. Cambridge, 
Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain. 

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Don M.
Gottfredson (1980).  Decisionmaking in
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Ballinger.

Hawkins, Richard, and Geoffrey P. Alpert
(1989).  American Prison Systems: 
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Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R.
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Jacoby, Joseph E., and Christopher S.
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Unpublished paper.  Bowling Green 
State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.

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Populations in the United States, 1990.  
Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Department of 
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Langan, Patrick A., and Mark A. Cunniff
(1992), Recidivism of Felons on Probation,
1986-89, Special Report.  Washington,
D.C.:  U.S. Department of Justice, 
Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Lipton, D., R. Martinson, and J. Wilks
(1975). The Effectiveness of Correctional 
Treatment and What Works: A Survey of 
Treatment Evaluation Studies. New York:  
Praeger Publishers.

Logan, Charles H. (1992). "Criminal
Justice Performance Measures for
Prisons," Performance Measures for the
Criminal Justice System.  Washington,
D.C.:  U.S. Department of Justice, 
Bureau of Justice Statistics.

McAnany, Patrick, Doug Thomson, and
David Fogel (1984).  Probation and
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Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn
and Hain.

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Criminal Justice Standards and Goals 
(1973). Report on Corrections.  
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Nidorf, Barry (1991a).  "Nothing Works'
Revisited," Perspectives, Vol. 15, No. 
3, pp. 12-13.

-- (1991b).  "External Relations," in
Donald Cochran et al., Managing Probation 
with Scarce Resources: Obstacles and 
Opportunities. Washington, D.C.: National 
Institute of Corrections.

Peters, Thomas, and Robert Waterman, Jr.
(1982). In Search of Excellence. New York: 
Harper & Row.

Petersilia, Joan, and Susan Turner (1990). 
Intensive Supervision Probation for High-Risk
Offenders: Findings from Three California 
Experiments. R-3936-NIJ/BJA. Santa Monica, 
Calif.: RAND.

-- (1993). "Intensive Probation and Parole
Supervision:  Research Findings and
Policy Implications," in Michael Tonry
(ed.), Crime and Justice, Vol. 17. 
Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Petersilia, Joan, Susan Turner, James
Kahan, Joyce Peterson (1985). Granting 
Felons Probation: Public Risks and 
Alternatives. R-3186-NIJ. Santa Monica, 
Calif.: RAND.

President of the United States (1990). 
National Drug Control Strategy. Washington, 
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. 
Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Government Printing 
Office.

About the author

Joan Petersilia is director of RAND's
Criminal Justice Program and Associate
Professor in the Department of
Criminology, Law and Society, School of
Social Ecology, University of California,
Irvine.  She has directed major studies in
policing, sentencing, career criminals,
corrections, and racial discrimination. 
For the past several years, her work has
focused on the effectiveness of probation
and parole.  

Dr. Petersilia has served as president of the
American Society of Criminology and of the 
Association for Criminal Justice Research in 
California.  She is a fellow of both the 
American Society of Criminology and the 
Western Society of Criminology and has 
received awards from the American Probation 
and Parole Association and the California 
Probation, Parole, and Corrections Association.  

She is coauthor of Smart Sentencing: The
Emergence of Intermediate Sanctions
(1992).  Her latest major publications
include Intensive Probation and Parole
(1993); Crime and Punishment in
California: Full Cells, Empty Pockets,
and Questionable Benefits (1992);
Intensive Supervision for High-Risk
Probationers:  Findings from Three
California Experiments (1990); Expanding
Options for Criminal Sentencing (1987);
Police Performance and Case Attrition
(1987); and The Influence of Criminal
Justice Research (1987).

Performance Measures for the Trial 
Courts, Prosecution, and Public 
Defense

by George F. Cole

Introduction

Thurman Arnold has argued that the central 
ideals of every Western government are 
symbolized in its judicial system: In 
particular, that the criminal trial
"overshadows all other ceremonies as a
dramatization of the values of our spiritual
government, representing the dignity of
the State as an enforcer of law, and at the
same time the dignity of the individual
when he is an avowed opponent of the
State, a dissenter, a radical, or even a 
criminal."***Footnote 1: Thurman Arnold, The 
Symbols of Government (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1962), pp. 128-130.*** 

Although most Americans never visit the
criminal courts, those with firsthand
experience -- defendants, witnesses, jurors
-- and those who learn about court
processes and trials through the media are
greatly influenced by their perceptions of
the quality of justice.  Their observations
would contribute to citizen education
about the role of law  in society, the
legitimacy of the criminal justice system,
and ultimately to citizen willingness to
abide by the law.

Adjudication -- prosecution, defense, and
courts -- is the subsystem of criminal
justice that perhaps more than either law
enforcement or corrections is the
component that the public expects to
allocate justice.  Judges, prosecutors, and
defenders are all attorneys who have sworn
to uphold the ideals of justice and to act
according to the canons of the legal
profession.  Judicial decisions are more
visible than actions in police stations,
probation offices, or prisons; hence, the
work of the courts is more open to public
scrutiny.  Not only do courts make
decisions in individual cases according to
the concept of due process but judges are
charged with ensuring that the other
components of the system operate
according to the law.  Thus, as Herbert
Packer has emphasized, it is not enough
that the law be fair; it must be seen to be
fair.***Footnote 2: Herbert L. Packer,
The Limits of the Criminal Sanction
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1968) p. 69.***

How should the performance of the agencies 
of adjudication be measured?  What should 
be the standards expected of trial courts, 
prosecution and defense offices, and the 
individuals who work in them? These are 
enduring questions and have been raised 
about American trial courts throughout 
this century.

Beginning in the 1970's, a series of federally 
funded studies addressed the issue of 
performance indicators. To varying degrees, 
the studies stressed measures emphasizing 
process rather than results, efficiency rather 
than effectiveness, and program outcomes rather 
than policy outcomes.***Footnote 3: See Sorrel
Wildhorn, Marvin Lavin, and Anthony Pascal,
Indicators of Justice (Lexington, Mass.:
Lexington Books, 1977); Joan E. Jacoby, Basic
Issues in Prosecution and Public Defender
Performance (Washington, D.C.: National 
Institute of Justice, 1982); Thomas J. Cook
and Ronald W. Johnson, with Ellen fried, John 
Mary Wagner, and James Eisenstein, Basic
Issues in Courts performance (Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice, 1982).  See
also National District Attorneys Association,
1991); Robert Rovner-Pieczenik, Alan Rapoport,
and Martha Lane, Evaluation Design for Public
Defender Offices (Washington, D.C.: National
Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal 
Justice, 19977).***  Gross,  As a consequence, 
we know a lot about conviction rates, numbers 
of dismissals, percentages of guilty pleas, 
case processing times, and the use of various
sentencing options -- yardsticks that say
little about the quality of justice. Few
offices of prosecution, indigent defense, 
or courts have developed and incorporated
performance assessments to evaluate the
quality of the behavior of officials as they
interact with citizens -- be they defendants,
victims, jurors, or the general public. 

Since 1987 the National Center for State
Courts has been working on the development 
and implementation of measurable performance 
standards to be used in general jurisdiction 
State trial courts.  The center's goal 
has been not measures of structure
and process but of performance, "what
courts actually do with the means at their
disposal."***Footnote 4: National Center 
for State Courts, Commission on Trial Court
Performance Standards, Trial Court Performance
Standards (Williamsburg, Va.: National Center
for State Courts, 1990), p. 1.***  This 
paper first traces the court reform movement 
so as to describe the assumptions that have
guided trial court evaluation for the past
half century and then fully explores the
performance standards developed by the
center. It is not the intention to ignore
efforts to measure prosecutor and indigent
defense performance but, rather, to use the
experience of the courts as a demonstration 
of the types of standards and measures that 
could be adopted by other agencies in the
adjudication subsystem of criminal justice.

Reforming the courts

The 1906 speech by Roscoe Pound to the
American Bar Association, entitled "The
Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the
Administration of Justice," has been
referred to as "the spark that kindled the
white flame of progress."***Footnote 5: 
Roscoe Pound, "The Cause of Popular 
Dissatisfaction with the Administration of
Justice," reprinted in Journal of the 
American Judicature Society, 20 (1937): 
178-187; John H. Wigmore, "Roscoe Pound's St.
Paul Address of 1906," Journal of the American
Judicature Society; 20 (1937): 136.***  
Pound pointed to organizational inadequacies 
of the judicial system and asserted that there
were too many courts and, in consequence,
duplication and inefficiency; further, that
there was a great waste of judicial power
because of rigid jurisdictional boundaries,
poor use of resources, and the frequent granting 
of new trials.***Footnote 6: See also Roscoe
Pound, "Organization of Courts," Judicature,
11 (1927): 69; Pound, "Principles and Outline
of a Modern Unified Court Organization,"
Judicature, 23 (1940): 225.***

Pound's call to action fell on sympathetic ears 
among the reformers of the Progressive Era, who
thought that structural changes would lead to a 
more efficient and equitable administration of 
justice.  The American Bar Association and the 
American Judicature Society set out to press the
States to remove party politics from judicial 
selection, increase funding for the courts, 
consolidate and simplify court structures, and 
create a force of professional administrators.  
Proponents of the reforms emphasized that their 
adoption would "serve the court's basic task of
determining cases justly, promptly, and
economically."***Footnote 7: American Bar
Association, Commission on Standards of Judicial
Administration, Standards, Relating to Court
Organization (Chicago: American Bar Association,
1974) p. 1.***  Referred to as the "conventional 
wisdom of State court administration" by later 
scholars, the thrust of this orientation became 
"the accepted theory of State court organization 
and administration for almost 70 years."***Footnote 
8: Geoff Gallas, "The Conventional Wisdom of State 
Court Administration: A Critical Assessment and an 
Alternative Approach," Justice System Journal 2 
(Spring 1976): 35-55. Gallas cites as examples of 
the conventional wisdom such reports as American Bar 
Association Commission on Standards of Judicial 
Administration, Standards Relating to Court 
Organization (Chicago: American Bar Association,
1974) and National Advisory Commission on Criminal 
Justice Standards and Goals, Courts (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973).***

Among the problems affecting the judiciary, case-
processing delay in the criminal trial courts has 
been a continuing focus for concern and reform.  
The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution mandates
a speedy trial, yet throughout this century
there is much evidence that the processing
of some cases can take months, even years. 
The voluminous literature on delay underscores 
that case-processing time beyond that which is 
necessary for a fair resolution of the issues 
greatly undercuts the quality of justice. It 
is argued that "justice delayed is justice 
denied"because witnesses may move or die, 
memories may fade, and the accused incurs 
costs because of pretrial restrictions on 
freedom, loss of income, and expenses run up 
in mounting a defense. The accumulation of case
delay is seen as producing backlogs that "waste 
court resources, needlessly increase lawyer 
fees, and create confusion and conflict in 
allocating judges' time."***Footnote 9: American
Bar Association, National Conference of State
Trial Judges, Standards Relating to Court Delay
Reduction (Chicago: American Bar Association, 
1984), p.5 (commentary to Sec. 2.50 of the
standards Relating to Trial courts as amended
in 1984). Cited in Barry Mohoney et al., 
Changing Times in Trial Courts (Williamsburg,
Va.: National Center for State Courts, 1988), 
p.2.***

Case-processing time has become one of
the major criteria of trial court
performance, akin to the use of arrest and
recidivism rates in evaluating the police
and corrections. The speed with which
cases are processed has been viewed as
having a determinative impact on numbers
of cases handled, amount and types of
resources required, and quality of justice
allocated.  Attacking trial court delay 
has thus been a focus of reformers and
researchers.  Goerdt notes that since 1976
there have been at least eight national
research projects and a number of smaller
studies that have examined the pace of
litigation.***Footnote 10: John Goerdt,
Examining Court Delay: The Pace of Litigation
in 26 Urban Trial Courts, 1987 (Williamsburg,
Va.: National Center for State Courts, 1989),
p. 4.***  Attention to the problem has led to 
the adoption of disposition-time standards by 
the American Bar Association, the Conference 
of Chief Justices, and the Conference of State 
Court Administrators.

In keeping with the conventional wisdom
that the inadequacies of courts are related
to their structure, efforts were advanced
during the past quarter century to reduce
delay through unification of court systems,
centralization of management, and expansion 
of resources.  However, by the late 1970's 
research conducted by the National Center 
for State Courts began to challenge the 
assumptions that delay could be explained 
by such factors as court structure, size, 
caseload per judge, and the type of case 
calendaring.***Footnote 11: Goerdt, Examining
Court Delay, p. 4.***  For example, as noted 
by one major study of the effect of structure 
on trial court operations, "Unification may 
provide the framework in which the quality 
of justice can be enhanced, but it seems 
doubtful that unification has a direct 
impact upon quality.***Footnote 12: Thomas
A. Henderson et al., The significance of
Judicial Structure: The Effect of Unification
on Court Operations (Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice, 1984) p. 
175.***   

The fact that "the link between a court's
effectiveness and its pace of litigation is
taken as faith" was addressed by Gallas,
who argued that judicial leadership must
be considered as a factor influencing
performance.***Footnote 13: Geoff Gallas,
"Judicial Leadership Excellence: A Research
Perspective," Justice System Journal, 12
(Spring 1987): 48.***  Other researchers 
argued that delay-reduction efforts should 
focus on such factors as "more effective 
court leadership, commitment to achievement
of disposition time goals, early and
continuous court control over caseload,
and increased judicial accountability for
case processing."***Footnote 14: Henderson,
The Significance of Judicial Structure, p.
175. See Thomas W. Church Jr., "The Old and
New' Conventional Wisdom of Court Delay,"
Justice System Journal, 7 (1982): 395; Barry
Mahoney and Dale Anne Sipes, "Toward Better
Management of Criminal Litigation," Judicature,
72 (1988): 29.***  Delay continued to be a 
primary measure of trial court performance, but 
explanations for its existence and methods 
for its reduction shifted. 

Nonstructural influences on court
performance

Recognition that court performance is
related to factors other than structure has
emerged through research completed
during the past two decades.  Even with
the overall similarity of organizational
structures and formal processes of
adjudication, differences among the trial
courts are discernible to anyone who has
visited American courthouses.  Some
courts sentence offenders to longer terms
than do others.  Delay and tight pretrial
release policies keep some accused in jail
awaiting trial, whereas in other
jurisdictions similar defendants are out on
bail or have their cases expeditiously
resolved.  Guilty pleas make up 90% of
dispositions in some communities but only
60% in others.  Researchers have found
that there are differences in the processes
and outputs of courts among various cities
and among courtrooms in the same city
even when the formal structures, laws, and
procedures are the same.  The concepts of 
"local legal culture" and "courtroom 
workgroup" have been particularly useful 
in helping to understand these variations.                   

The concept of local legal culture -- norms
shared by members of a particular court
community (judges, attorneys, clerks,
bailiffs, and others) as to case handling
and participants' behavior in the judicial
process -- has been shown to have a
decided impact on court processes and
outcomes.***Footnote 15: Thomas W. Church Jr.
"Examining Local Legal Culture," American
Bar Foundation Research Journal (Summer 1985),
p. 49.***  Through the local legal culture 
informal rules and practices arise within 
particular settings, and the "way things are 
done" differs from place to place.  The 
customs and traditions of each jurisdiction 
seem to vary because local practices are 
affected by such factors as size, politics, 
and population characteristics.***Footnote 16: 
For a study that analyzes the role of local 
legal culture of nine communities, see: James 
Eisenstein, Roy B. Flemming, and Peter F. 
Nardulli, The contours of Justice: Communities 
and Their Courts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).***
 
Adjudication is also influenced by the fact
that courtroom participants are organized
as a workgroup.***Footnote 17: James Eisenstein 
and Herbert Jacob, Felony Justice (Boston: 
Little, Brown, 1977).*** From this perspective,
the reciprocal relationships of the judge,
prosecutor, and defense attorney, along
with those of the supporting cast (clerk,
reporter, and bailiff), are necessary to
complete the group's basic task:  the
disposition of cases within the context of
the laws and the concept of justice.  As
pointed out by Nardulli, the "courtroom
elite" controls the operations of the court
and, hence, most directly bears upon court
performance.***Footnote 18: Peter F. Nardulli,
The Courtroom Elite: An Organizational
Perspective on Criminal Justice (Cambridge,
Mass.: Ballinger, 1978).***  Research has 
shown that the outputs of courtroom workgroups
differ, not because of the formal structure
and procedures but because of level of
cohesiveness, the influence of participants'
sponsoring organizations (prosecution,
judiciary, public defense), and the nature
of the leadership of the group.  In essence,
the workgroup operates in an environment
in which the local legal culture, recruitment 
and selection processes, cases, and the 
socioeconomic, political, and legal structures 
of the broader community are conceived as 
having an impact on decisionmaking.
*** Footnote 19: See Thomas J. Cook, Ronald W.
Johnson et al., Basic Issues in Courts 
Performance (Washington, D.C.: National Institute
of Justice, 1982), p. 38.***  Court performance 
is thus greatly influenced by these factors. 

How should trial courts be measured?

By the mid-1980's it was apparent to judicial 
administrators, judges, and scholars that the 
longtime focus on the structure of the courts 
and processing times and assumptions about 
ways that performance should be looked at had
collided with research depictions of court
operations as much under the sway of the
local legal culture, inter-organizational
links, and the interactions among members
of the courtroom workgroup.  In addition,
critics argued that a concern for efficiency
in case processing can lead to injustice and
undermine the judiciary's institutional
integrity.***Footnote 20: Judith Rensink,
"Managerial Judges and Court Delay: The 
Unproven Assumptions, 23 Judges' Journal, 8
(1984); H. Lee Sarokin, "Justice Rushed Is
Justice Ruined, "38 Rutgers Law Review, 431
(1986).***

At a 1986 international conference on judicial 
administration, calls were made for greater 
attention to performance measures.  Gallas 
declared that beyond the goal of reforming 
organizational structure is the need for 
effective leadership.***Footnote 21: Geoff
Gallas, "Judicial Leadership Excellence: A
Research Prospectus," Justice System Journal,
12 (1987), p. 54.***  He argued that evaluating 
trial courts requires examination of the links 
between judicial leadership and court performance.  
To differentiate successful from unsuccessful
courts, he and others argued, it is necessary 
to go beyond disposition times to overall 
performance.  Feeney emphasized that evaluating 
performance incorporates a clear definition of 
goals, adequate evaluative information, and
meaningful standards for judging performance.  
"About the only thing that is clear is that if 
the courts are to improve during the next thirty 
years everyone associated with the courts -- 
managers, judges, researchers, and others -- must
radically increase the attention to evaluation of 
performance."***Footnote 22: Floyd Feeney, 
"Evaluating Trial Court Performance," Justice
System Journal, 12 (1987) p. 167.***

Developing new measures of trial court 
performance

In their insightful book, Reinventing Government, 
Osborne and Gaebler describe some of the problems 
of measuring the performance of public
organizations.***Footnote 23: Daivd Osborne and
Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (New York:
Praeger, 1992); see especially Appendix B. There
is a large literature in public administration on
the measurement of public goods and service. See,
for example, Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout,
and Robert Warren, "The Organization of Government
in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,"
American Political Science Review, 55 (December 
1991): pp. 831-842.***  They note that unlike 
private businesses, government agencies seldom 
focus on outcomes because assessment is so 
difficult.  Developing suitable measures may take 
years; they may be appropriate to outputs but not 
outcomes; they may define outcomes too narrowly, 
so that employees concentrate on only a few goals; 
or they may be so numerous that employees do not 
know what to concentrate on.  

Citing the experience of the National Center for 
State Courts, Osborne and Gaebler say that public 
organizations that have tried to measure performance 
have learned that there is (l) a vast difference
between measuring process and measuring results; 
(2)a vast difference between measuring efficiency 
and measuring effectiveness; and (3) an important
difference between "program outcomes" and broader 
"policy outcomes."  They also describe the 
difficulties of developing acceptable performance 
standards and measurement tools and the resistance 
of public service providers to new approaches.

In 1987 the National Center for State Courts 
initiated the Trial Court Performance Standards 
Project to develop measurable performance 
standards for the State trial courts of general 
jurisdiction.  The project was begun after 
researchers at the center recognized the 
shortcomings of the focus on the structure and
machinery of trial courts and moved on to
questions relating to the goals of trial courts.  
What is it that courts are trying to do?  What 
should courts be trying to accomplish with the 
resources at their disposal?  What is the role 
of judicial leadership in improving the trial 
courts?  How do we identify courts that are 
doing well?  

With funding from the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, the center created the Commission 
on Trial Court Performance Standards, which 
took on the arduous task of redirecting 
research attention to the outcome aspect -- 
what trial courts actually accomplish --
and to developing tools to assess outcomes
according to acceptable criteria.  The 
commission focused solely on institutional 
rather than individual performance and promoted 
the approach as a self-assessment tool for the 
trial courts.***Footnote 24: The evaluation of
the performance of individual judges has been
ongoing in many States for nearly two decades.
Much of this effort has been spearheaded by
the American Bar Association Special Committee
on Evaluation of Judicial Performance and the
Judicial Performance Evaluation Project of the
National Center for State Courts. See Susan
Keilitz and Judith White McBride, "Judicial
Performance Evaluation Comes of Age," State
Court Journal (Winter 1992): 4-13.*** 

Over a 3-year period the commission and center 
staff developed a set of 22 standards in 5 areas 
to measure trial court performance, developed a
comprehensive measurement system, field-tested 
the standards and the system, and gained acceptance 
of the new criteria by key judicial organizations 
and several States.***Footnote 25: National Center
for State Courts, commission on Trial Court
Performance Standards, Trial Court Performance
Standards (Williamsburg, Va.: National Center for
State Courts, 1990).***   

Let us examine the five performance areas as they 
relate to the key concepts suggested by the call in
the first paper in this compendium for a new 
paradigm by which to understand and measure the 
criminal justice system.  The paradigm emphasizes 
the important role played by citizens as co-
producers of justice. It recognizes that police, 
courts, and corrections require the cooperation
and support of citizens if they are going to
be successful at their jobs.  The paradigm also 
recognizes that like successful private 
organizations, criminal justice agencies need to 
be measured according to "soft" performance
indicators:  how citizens are treated, how
they evaluate performance, and the level of
trust and confidence of citizens in their
institutions.   
                     
The five performance areas for State trial
courts decided upon are: 
*  Access to justice 
*  Expeditiousness and timeliness 
*  Equality, fairness, and integrity 
*  Independence and accountability
*  Public trust and confidence.  

As noted by the commission, the groupings 
represent alternative ways of viewing the 
fundamental purposes of trial courts as they 
allocate justice in individual cases, resolve 
disputes, uphold and promote the rule of law, 
protect individuals from the arbitrary use of
governmental power, and encourage behavior 
that adheres to societal norms as expressed in 
statutes and regulations. Most people probably 
would agree that these are the things that trial 
courts do and that the five areas summarize 
public expectations of court performance.  But 
as the commission discovered, it is one thing
to agree on designation of performance areas in 
the abstract but it is another thing to develop 
and define specific, measurable standards. Each 
of the five performance areas is summarized below 
and the specific standards associated with them 
are listed.***Footnote 27: See the appendix of
the commission's report for a listing of each
performance measure, the data collection methods,
and the personnel to be included in the evaluation.*** 

Standard 1.  Access to justice

In a democracy courts must be open and accessible.  
The concept of accessibility refers not only to 
physical structure but also to the procedures and the
responsiveness of personnel to members of the public:

Standard l.l  Public proceedings The trial 
court conducts its proceedings and other 
public business openly.

Standard 1.2  Safety, accessibility, and
convenience The trial court facilities are 
safe, accessible, and convenient to use.

Standard l.3  Effective participation All 
who appear before the trial court are
given the opportunity to participate
effectively, without undue hardship or
inconvenience.

Standard 1.4  Courtesy, responsiveness,
and respect Judges and other trial court 
personnel are courteous and responsive to 
the public and accord respect to all with 
whom they come in contact. 

Standard 1.5  Affordable costs of access  
The costs of access to the trial court's
proceedings and records -- whether
measured in terms of money, time, or
procedures that must be followed -- are
reasonable, fair, and affordable.

Standard 2.  Expeditiousness and timeliness

The trial court should meet its responsibilities 
to all persons and agencies affected by its actions 
and activities in an expeditious and timely manner. 
Unnecessary delay causes injustice and hardship, 
and in turn diminished public trust and confidence 
in the court.

Standard 2.1  Case processing 
The trial court establishes and complies
with recognized guidelines for timely case
processing while at the same time keeping
current with its incoming caseload.
   
Standard 2.2  Compliance with schedules 
The trial court disburses funds promptly,
provides reports and information according 
to schedules, and responds to requests for 
information and other services on an 
established schedule that assures their 
effective use.

Standard 2.3  Prompt implementation of
law and procedure The trial court promptly 
implements changes in law and procedure.

Standard 3.  Equality, fairness, and integrity

The trial court should provide due process
and equal protection of the law to all who
have business before it. Equality and
fairness demand equal justice under law. 
Integrity should characterize the nature
and substance of the trial court's procedures 
and decisions and the consequences of the
decisions.

Standard 3.1  Fair and reliable judicial
process 
Trial court procedures faithfully 
adhere to relevant laws, procedural rules, 
and established policies.

Standard 3.2  Juries 
Jury lists are representative of the
jurisdiction from which they are drawn.

Standard 3.3  Court decisions and actions
The trial court gives individual attention to
cases, deciding them without undue disparity 
among like cases and upon legally relevant 
factors.

Standard 3.4  Clarity  
Decisions of the trial court unambiguously
address the issues presented to it and make
clear how compliance can be achieved.
   
Standard 3.5  Responsibility for enforcement  
The trial court takes appropriate
responsibility for the enforcement of its 
orders.

Standard 3.6  Production and preservation 
of records  
Records of all relevant trial court decisions
and actions are accurate and properly
preserved.
  
Standard 4. Independence and accountability

The judiciary must assert and maintain its
distinctiveness as a separate branch of
government.  Within the organizational
structure of the judicial branch, the trial
court must establish its legal and organizational 
boundaries, monitor and control its operations, 
and account publicly for its performance.

Standard 4.1  Independence and comity  
The trial court maintains its institutional
integrity and observes the principle of
comity in its governmental relations.

Standard 4.2  Accountability for public
resources  
The trial court responsibly seeks, uses, 
and accounts for its public resources.

Standard 4.3  Personnel practices and
decisions  
The trial court uses fair employment
practices.

Standard 4.4  Public education  
The trial court informs the community 
of its programs. 

Standard 4.5  Response to change
The trial court anticipates new conditions
or emergent events and adjusts its
operations as necessary.

Standard 5.  Public trust and confidence

The public's compliance with the law is
dependent to some degree upon its respect
for the courts. Ideally, public trust and
confidence in trial courts stem from the
many contacts citizens have with the
courts.

Standard 5.1  Accessibility 
The trial court and the justice it delivers
are perceived by the public as accessible.

Standard 5.2  Expeditious, fair, and
reliable court functions  
The public has trust and confidence that
the basic trial court functions are
conducted expeditiously and fairly and that
its decisions have integrity.

Standard 5.3  Judicial independence 
and accountability 
The trial court is perceived to be
independent, not unduly influenced by 
other components of government, and 
accountable.

Implementing trial court performance 
evaluation

From its inception the commission recognized 
that trial court performance evaluation would 
require -- 
*  a statement of goals or general principles 
according to which trial courts operate (or 
should operate) 
*  standards by which to assess trial courts' 
performance against those principles 
*  indicators or measures tied to the
performance standards 
*  procedures to link the indicators to the
standards and goals 
*  availability of data concerning performance.

Having promulgated the goals and standards, as 
outlined above, the commission next addressed 
the tasks of developing measures of performance,
outlining procedures for data collection, field 
testing the procedures, and implementing the new 
approach in trial court demonstration sites.

The commission and its staff spent many
hours wrestling with the operational
definition of the standards so that
measurement criteria could be developed
and data collection procedures generated. 
It was recognized that both quantitative
and qualitative measures would be used
and that data collection efforts had to be
feasible, given consideration of costs and
the availability of data needed for specific
measures.  Questions of implementing the
process colored these discussions.  The
Appendix provides examples of the measures, 
data collection methods, and the persons to 
be used as evaluators.  As can be seen, not 
only are members of the judicial staff involved 
in the evaluation of a court's performance but 
qualitative data are gathered from the consumers 
of justice -- attorneys, jurors, litigants, 
witnesses, and community leaders.

With distribution of copies of the Trial
Court Performance Standards in November 1990, 
the commission sought and gained endorsement 
of the standards by judicial and court management
professional organizations, began training
programs for persons who would conduct the 
evaluations, and launched a series of 
demonstrations in New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, 
and Washington.  Not unexpectedly, implementing 
the standards in the demonstration States brought 
out the need to revise several of the measurement
methods.   

It is well recognized that instituting 
change in organizations can be difficult.
***Footnote 28: Osborne and Gaebler, 
Reinventing Government, pp. 355-359,
summarize the "received wisdom" of experts 
in the performance measurement filed with
regard to implementations.*** Personnel are 
especially resistant when new standards are 
instituted and when measurement bears directly 
on their performance. One way to deal with the
resistance of individual service providers
is involve them in development of the
measures and to couch incorporation of the
performance evaluation as part of an ongoing 
self-assessment.  The experience of the 
commission's work in the demonstration States 
should assist others with the implementation of
performance measures.

Summary

The work of the Commission on Trial Court 
Performance Standards of the National Center 
for State Courts serves as a useful illustration 
of the development of goals and evaluation 
methods more in keeping with a criminal justice 
paradigm that emphasizes citizens as co-producers 
of justice.  As we have seen, the commission's 
standards -- 
*  are customer oriented in that evaluations
reflect the concerns of those who use the
courts rather than those who run the courts
*  focus on performance and outcome rather 
than on structures, processes, and resources
*  examine trial courts as organizations
involved in tasks and processes that are
linked together and that affect one another
*  are based on reliable data rather than on
reputation.

It is hoped that incorporating these measures 
into the management of State trial courts will 
not only provide an important management tool 
to make the judiciary more responsive to the
"democratic vision" but also guide leaders
in other sections of the criminal justice
system -- police, prosecution, defense, and
corrections -- in the development of their
own standards and measurement tools.

About the author

George F. Cole is Professor and Head of
the Department of Political Science at The 
University of Connecticut.  A specialist 
on the administration of criminal justice, 
he has published extensively on such topics 
as prosecution, the courts, and corrections. 
He has been granted two awards under the
Fulbright-Hays Program to conduct research 
in England and Yugoslavia, and has held a 
fellowship at the National Institute of 
Justice.  In addition to his scholarly 
publications he is the author of the widely 
used introductory textbooks, The American 
System of Criminal Justice, 6th edition 
(Brooks/Cole, 1992) and with Todd Clear, 
American Corrections, 3rd edition (Wadsworth, 
1994).

Measuring Police Performance
in the New Paradigm 
of Policing***Footnote 1: Portions
of this essay have been taken from
Alpert and Dunham, Policing Milti-
Ethnic Neighborhoods (1988) and
Policing Urban American (1992).***

by Geoffrey P. Alpert and Mark H. Moore 

Introduction

During the 1980's and 1990's there has
been a resurgence of interest in community
policing. As an outgrowth of police-community 
relations, the concept of community policing 
has become the goal, method, and guiding 
principle for police. Unfortunately, community 
policing remains a concept and philosophy in
search of a process, without proper ways to
document or evaluate its efforts.  This
essay in the BJS-Princeton series focuses
on community-oriented policing and takes
a new approach to the measurement and evaluation 
of police performance.  Before outlining our
paradigm of police performance measures
we will review the conventional measures
and why we believe a new way of thinking
must direct our attention to new
performance measures. 

Citizens and their elected representatives
have long sought a bottom line to measure
police performance.  The goals have been
to reassure the public that hard-earned tax
dollars were being spent to achieve important 
results and to hold police managers accountable 
for improving organizational performance. 
As police agencies matured, four generally
accepted accounting practices became
enshrined as the key measures to evaluate
police performance.  These include --    
1) reported crime rates
2) overall arrests
3) clearance rates
4) response times.  

As these measures became institutionalized over 
the years, investments were made in developing
information systems  to record police
performance consistent with these measures.  
Statistical reports using these measures were 
routinely issued.  Further, the media, overseers 
in city councils, and auditors in city managers' 
offices have all been primed to acknowledge and 
use these measures to compare police performance
from year to year and to compare local
accomplishments with those of other cities.  For 
most practical purposes, these are the statistics 
by which police departments throughout the United 
States are now held accountable.  

These measures remain critical as part of
an overall system for measuring police
performance.  As currently used, however,
these measures reflect an increasingly
outmoded model of police tasks and fail to
capture many important contributions that
police make to the quality of life.  More
important, these measures may misguide
police managers and lead them and their
organizations towards purposes and
activities that are less valuable than 
others that can be achieved with limited and
diminishing resources.  

Police performance measures should focus
on a new model of policing that emphasizes 
their charge to do justice, promote secure 
communities, restore crime victims, and promote 
noncriminal options -- the elements of an 
emerging paradigm of criminal justice (DiIulio, 
1992: 10-12). The purpose of this paper is to 
describe how policing fits in with this new
paradigm, including implications for
restructuring the overall objectives and
measuring the accomplishments of policing through 
police agency performance measures (Kelling, 1992). 

The evolving strategy of policing

Historically, policing in America has been
inspired and guided by a vision of
professional law enforcement.  This vision
is a coherent strategy of policing defining
the principal ends, means, and legitimating
principles of the police enterprise (Wilson
and McLaren, 1977).

Professional law enforcement: 
The dominant strategy of policing

In this vision, the primary, perhaps
exclusive goals of the police are to reduce
crime and criminal victimization.  Police
seek to achieve this goal by arresting and
threatening to arrest those who violate the
criminal law.  They organize themselves to
produce this result by: 
1) patrolling city streets hoping to detect
and deter crime
2) responding rapidly to calls for service
3) conducting investigations after crimes
have been committed to identify criminal
offenders and develop evidence to be used
in prosecutions. 
 
In essence, in the vision of professional
law enforcement, the police are seen as the
all-important entry point to the criminal
justice system -- the gatekeeper managing
the --first step in bringing the force of 
the criminal law to bear on offenders.

To deal effectively with serious crime and
dangerous criminal offenders, specialized
skills are required.  The police have had to
learn how to use legitimate force with skill
and confidence.  They have had to improve
their ability to investigate and solve crimes
to reduce the chance that serious offenders
could escape accountability.  Thus, in search 
of increased effectiveness in dealing with an 
increasingly challenging and urgent problem, 
the police consciously narrowed their focus and 
refined their skills in responding to serious 
crime and dangerous offenders.  By relying on 
the techniques of patrol, rapid response, 
and retrospective investigation, the police
have been kept at the forefront of community 
life and have been made available to anyone who 
needed them when a crime occurred.  

Limitations of professional law
enforcement

Recently, enthusiasm for this strategy of
professional policing has waned.  The
professional policing model has been
ineffective in reducing crime, reducing
citizens' fears, and satisfying victims that 
justice is being done. Indeed, recent research 
indicates that a majority of the population 
believes that the crime problem has become
progressively worse during the past decade
(Gallup, 1992, cited in Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1992: 185).  Similarly, citizens
have lost confidence in the criminal justice
system to protect them (Cole, 1992: 23). 

Such charges are, in many respects, unfair
to the police.  It is unreasonable to expect 
the police to reduce crime all by themselves.  
Crime rates are affected by vast social, eco-
nomic, and political forces.  No matter
how professional, police cannot solve the
"root causes" of crime.  They cannot be
blamed for increasing unemployment,
increasing inequality, or eroding family
structures (Bazelon, 1988).  In addition,
police are dependent on the rest of the
criminal justice system to give significance 
to arrests.  

Toward a new paradigm of policing

Many police executives are beginning to
think about and experiment with a strategy
of policing that differs from the
professional model and emphasizes the
development of a strong relationship with the
community.  The essence of this new paradigm 
is that police must engage in community-based 
processes related to the production and 
maintenance of local human and social capital. 
The means by which these lofty goals are
to be achieved are through the development of 
strong relationships with institutions and 
individuals in the community.  While the specific 
elements of this new strategy of policing have not
been agreed upon or clearly delineated, the
broad characteristics are reasonably clear.

The major theme of building a strong relationship 
with the community has two justifications. First, 
it is an important way to make enforcement more 
effective. Second, it is a way to prevent 
crime and make the community co-producers of
justice (Skogan and Antunes, 1979).  

One excellent example comes from the
Metro-Dade Police Department (MDPD)
in Miami, Fla. In June 1992 the staff of
the Northside Station of the MDPD
conducted a survey of local residents
(mostly African-American) to determine if
any public personalities or activities could
serve as common ground between the police 
and young males (Metro-Dade Police Department, 
1992).  What emerged was a fascinating finding.  
The young respondents identified local rap radio 
disc jockeys and rap music as personalities and
activities that interested them.  

In March 1993 the police turned these
empirical findings into action.  They
created a series of "Jammin' with the
Man" concerts.  Local disc jockeys were
invited to hold concerts in local parks
sponsored by the police.  While the youths
enjoyed the music and festivities, the
police were there, talking with the youths
and encouraging them to talk and work with 
the police to understand each other. Although 
more than 5,000 people attended the first event,
there were no negative incidents.  The MDPD 
report concluded by noting:

While Jammin' with the Man was originally
intended to be a single step in a process to 
improve police-community relations, a step 
aimed particularly at young men, [it] seems to
have become part or all of the answer. It
has also become an educational experience
for the community as they see police as
agents of peace rather than enforcers of
law.  More importantly, it has demonstrated 
that the mere act of the police engaged in 
active listening has the effect of empowering 
them and perhaps alleviating some of their sense 
of alienation (Metro-Dade Police Department, 
1993: 6).
 
In other words, this project provided an
excellent vehicle for the police to create
and maintain positive contacts with
members of the community they serve and
to be seen in a positive light.  Further, by
initiating and participating in activities the
youths enjoyed, the police had an opportunity 
to see youth in a positive light.

Dr. Trevor Bennett has classified the
various ways to consider community
policing and has reduced them to three
categories.  First, he notes that there are
arguments which refer to the intrinsic
"goodness" of the general relationship
between police and the community. 
Second, he recognizes relationships in
which the police and the public work
together to achieve common and specified
goals, including the shared responsibility
for crime control. Third, he acknowledges
the need for police to take into
consideration the wishes and concerns of
the community.  In Bennett's words:
 
... [A] workable definition of a community
policing philosophy might include the
following basic elements: a belief or
intention that the police should work with
the public whenever possible in solving
local problems and a belief that they
should take account of the wishes of the
public in defining and evaluating
operational police policy (Bennett, 1992:
7).

A second theme emphasizes attacking the
communities' problems on a broader
front -- in effect, rejecting the exclusive
focus on serious crime.  The theme
emerging from research is that much fear
of crime is independent of victimization
and that there are things the police can do
to deal with fear (Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1988, 1992).  Research findings
and practice make clear that citizens use
the police for many purposes other than
crime control and that things other than
crime are principal concerns (Alpert and
Dunham, 1992: 2-3).  Certainly, goals
other than the reduction of serious crime
should be emphasized when it is realized
that crime control is not the principal or
only objective of the police.  In any case,
the police cannot achieve the reduction of
fear or crime by themselves.  What the
police can achieve is the independent goal
of public or customer satisfaction.

A third theme emphasizes some important
changes in the way the police visualize
their work and their methods.  In the
traditional strategy of policing, the key
unit of work is the "incident."  That is,
patrol officers respond to a specific
incident, and it is the incident that
becomes the focus of a criminal investigation.  
What we have recently learned, however, is 
that a large proportion of incidents emerge 
from a relatively small number of situations 
and locations. Moreover, analysis of the 
problems underlying many incidents reported 
to the police suggests that the police might 
be able to imagine and mount different kinds
of intervention (Goldstein, 1990).  

The concept known as problem-oriented
policing emphasizes involvement of the
police in community life.  This strategy
has police serve as community agents
rather than adversaries with the
community.  Study group member
Professor James F. Short suggests that
police should not maintain their gatekeeper
function and solve problems for the
community but should be involved in
solving problems with community support
and assistance.  In this way, police can
help develop and promote a sense of
community (Short, 1990: 225-226). 
Professor Short makes a critical link from
the 1990s problem-oriented policing to
the role of police in the Chicago Area
Project during the 1940's.  As he informs
us, there are many similarities in police
functioning then and what we are suggesting 
for the future.  The vision was --     

... [T]he police as a resource for the
community, aiding local residents and working
with indigenous leaders to solve community
problems, with special focus on the problems
of young people. The goal in each of these
programs is to promote the achievement of
"functional communities," that is, communities
in which family life, work, religion, education,
law enforcement, and other institutional areas 
reflect and reinforce common values (Short, 
1990: 226).

Although arrests of offenders remains an
important tactic, the police repertoire must
be widened to include a variety of civil
actions, mobilization of citizens and other
government agencies to change the conditions 
that generate crime or that will likely 
escalate deteriorating conditions. For example, 
the strategy of "Weed and Seed" is to eliminate 
drug-related crime and to restore economic 
vitality to inner cities through multi-agency 
cooperation and the use of community empowerment
and resident involvement (Department of
Justice, 1991).  An important aspect of this
third theme is that the police should become 
pro-active, interactive, and preventative 
in their orientation rather than rely solely on 
reacting and control.  

A fourth theme focuses on changes in
internal working relationships.  That is,
police agencies need to examine the
potential strengths and weaknesses of
decentralization of authority by seeking
ways to guide discretion and police
behavior generally through increasing
reliance on values rather than rules and
strict methods of accountability (Alpert
and Smith, 1993).  These ideas are central
to the concepts of community policing,
problem-solving policing and smarter
policing.  Incorporating these ideas into
strategies of policing, we believe, would
truly professionalize police rather than
treat them as blue-collar workers.  In
addition to making police work more
effective, these -- four strategies may
increase job satisfaction -- and most
importantly -- community satisfaction
(Greene, Alpert and Styles, 1992).  

These four themes combine to form the
overarching principle of changed
police-community relationships. 
Currently, police work revolves around
serious crimes.  The community
participates by becoming the eyes and ears
of the police; however, this strategy keeps 
the police outside and above the community. 
Police are summoned by the community
through individual requests for service,
and those requests are evaluated primarily
in terms of whether an offense has been
committed and a crime has been solved.

Creative, problem-oriented policing
strategies place the community in a much
different position than they have been in
the recent past.  Under this new paradigm,
police work is oriented toward community
satisfaction and the increase in human and
social capital in the community. 
Satisfaction is determined not only by the
police response to individual calls, but also
by community members banding together
to advise and consult with the police. 
Further, community institutions play the
most important roles in changing
community conditions that generate crime
and in shaping police activities related to
crime and other community conditions.  Placing
police and the citizens in communication
with community leaders creates a dialogue
and interaction.  This removes the police
from a hierarchical position and has the effect 
of increasing the accountability of the police
to the community. 

One of the crucial issues that must be
faced by all concerned with community
policing is the assumption that there is a
community to organize.  Some cities and
suburbs have developed rapidly and have
not formed what sociologists refer to as
communities or neighborhoods.  Similarly,
some precincts or reporting areas may not
be contiguous with natural neighborhoods
or communities. Finally, some areas that 
have deteriorated or are in the process of 
deteriorating may be difficult to organize.  
Areas needing organization the least will 
be the easiest to assist, while less well-
organized communities, particularly underclass 
areas of the inner city, will be the hardest 
to organize(Alpert and Dunham, 1988). However, 
examples of difficult and complicated 
organization are available.

One example of this community-building
comes from Judge Thomas Petersen in
Dade County, Fla. Judge Petersen was
able to create a sense of community in
several areas known for their lack of
community spirit or allegiance.  Judge
Petersen, with assistance from the housing
authority, law enforcement officials, and
private industry, established three
community stores that sold essential items
in housing projects.  In each, the housing
authority found sufficient space and turned
the space into grocery stores with supplies
donated by private industry.  The shelves
were stocked with no up-front costs. 
Further, training for the people necessary
to run the business was procured from
professionals in the grocery business. 
Those who were hired to run the store
were in need of childcare, and the space
and training for that service was provided
by the housing authority. 

After a short period of time, a group of
people were working in the store, others
were working in the child care center, and
all were removed from public assistance. 
More important, however, was the sense of
community created by the stores and child
care centers.  The stores became a focal
point of the projects, and residents, police,
and others involved in their establishment
gained a mutual respect and trust for each
other.  Residents who had been scared to
talk to other residents began to realize the
importance of community spirit and the
benefits of mutual assistance.  The workers
and residents began to identify with the
operation of the store, and when anyone
began to cause trouble or tried to sell
drugs, the police were called immediately, 
and residents would point out the offender and 
work with the police to do justice.  After a
short period, the stores earned the reputation 
as establishments that would not only sell goods 
but also as the heart of the housing projects, 
serving as a rumor control center, a place to 
get assistance from others, and a place with 
respect for the police function.

This new-found respect for police spread
very quickly through the projects and
neighborhoods.  Residents who once
despised the police were now working
with them to solve crimes and create an 
atmosphere where street criminals would not 
be tolerated. In many respects, Judge
Petersen had created a community spirit
that fit neatly into the community-oriented
policing strategy (Petersen, 1993).

Implications for police performance
measurement

As society and the police approach a new
understanding of how each can contribute 
to the other, it is critical to develop 
new measures to determine how well the 
police perform. Measures of performance 
rely on the definition of what the police 
are expected to do and how they are expected 
to do it. The measures must not only reflect 
but also help to shape community expectations 
of the police.  For example, consider how
neatly the current enshrined measures of
police performance fit the dominant current 
strategy of policing.

Current performance measures as a reflection 
of professional law enforcement 

Recall that the current strategy of policing
emphasizes crime control through arrests
and that arrests are produced by patrol,
rapid response to calls for service, and
retrospective investigation.  Current police
performance measures are linked directly
to these tasks.  First, the overall objective
of police has traditionally been perceived
to reduce crime.  It follows that the
traditional measure of police performance
is the level of reported crime measured by
the Uniform Crime Reports.  Another
police task is apprehending offenders. This 
task is measured by arrests.  Other traditional
measures related to the crime rate include
the ability to solve crimes (clearance rates
-- a very subjective measure) and the
ability to get to crime scenes quickly
(response times).  These existing measures
fit the traditional policing strategy
perfectly, and they have become recognized as 
the important measures. 

What is missing from these measures   

Limitations of the traditional policing
strategy are also represented by the current
performance measures.  It is important that
crime is measured in terms of reported
crime, rather than through victimization
surveys.  Indeed, the police long resisted
the development of criminal victimization
surveys, concerned that they would reveal
differential reporting and would be too
subjective.  This emphasis on reported
crime left invisible many crimes such as
domestic assault, child abuse, extortion by
armed robbers and drug gangs, and other
crimes in communities that did not trust or
have confidence in the police (Bureau of
Justice Statistics, 1992, and Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 1992).

It is also important that the measures that
could have revealed the fairness and
economy within which the authority of the
police was deployed got less attention than
the question of police effectiveness.  There
was no routine expectation that the police
would publish data on patrol allocations, 
response times, or crime solution rates 
across neighborhoods. 

Similarly, no serious efforts were made to
develop statistical evidence on the
incidence of brutality, excessive use of
force, discourtesy, or corruption.  In
principle, one could have collected
information about these things by
soliciting civilian complaints and taking
them as indicators of problems, if not
probative of individual officer misconduct
(U.S. Civil Rights Commission, 1981). 
Again, the argument, albeit flawed, was
that unlike official crime statistics, such
information was suspect and too subjective.  
Thus, in this area as elsewhere, the commitment 
to fairness and discipline in the use of 
authority was less important than the claim 
of crime control effectiveness.

Further, there was no real way to capture
the quality of the response that the police
made to citizen calls other than those
involving criminal offenses for which an
arrest could be made.  In fact, most of the
operational indicators implicitly viewed
responding to non-crime complaints as
something to be avoided and resisted
rather than taken seriously.  Measures
included a comparison between time out of
service and time in-service.  In-service
meant being on patrol, while out-of-service 
included meal breaks but also included meeting 
citizens and responding to their calls for 
service. Similarly, time spent on high-priority 
calls was compared with time spent on
"nuisance calls."  The purpose was to
reduce time on nuisance calls, despite the
fact that it was these calls that could be
used to build the relationship with the
community that was necessary to make
their current tactics effective in dealing
with crime (Sparrow, Moore, and
Kennedy, 1990).

Finally, there was no real way to account
for or measure pro-active operations.  The
only way to do this was through monitoring 
specialized squads or units. Units were 
created to deal with particular problems, 
often on a temporary basis, without the
establishment of a method to capture the 
nature or extent of the units' activities.  
Similarly, there was no attempt to determine 
how much of the organization's resources was 
being committed to such pro-active operations
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1992).

Reforming police performance
measures

Orienting the agency to the community

Several options exist to reform police
performance measures. First, existing
measures could be improved to live up to
the challenge of professionalism.  This
would include audited clearance and arrest
rates and the development of statistical
evidence on the use of force and the
incidence of brutality, discourtesy, and
corruption, among others.  Second,
performance measures could be linked
more closely to action in the community,
including the level of centralization and
community-level programs.  Under this
structure, programs must be established
that encourage calls to the police and
evaluate calls to the police for service as
well as concerns regarding criminal
behavior.  Measures should also include -- 
*  police-related and inter-governmental
activities that improve the social fabric of
the community
*  projects with the assistance of private
industry that improve informal and formal
social control in the community
*  fear of crime
*  victimization and police service
programs that help promote community
spirit in those neighborhoods where none
existed.  

Further, measures of the form and level of
self-defense efforts by citizens and
measures of trust and confidence in the
police should be routinely taken and
evaluated. Measures of the quality of
service delivery by the police should be
taken to improve departmental functioning
and reveal the quality of individual
officers as reported by the citizens with
whom they come in contact (Furstenberg
and Wellford, 1973, and U.S. Civil Rights
Commission, 1981).

Encouraging pro-active problem solving

One of the biggest problems in accounting
for the performance of police departments
is to capture what is accomplished during 
pro-active and problem-solving activities.  
One way to measure this concept is to view 
each problem-solving initiative as a particular
program to be evaluated for its immediate
impact.  A second way to measure the impact 
is to view each as equivalent to a criminal 
investigation or special operation. In this way, 
a file is created, activities are monitored,
and results recorded and evaluated. 

The problem, of course, is that the problems 
come in different sizes.  Size can be measured 
in terms of --    
1)  total resources committed to the problem
2)  amount of time taken to solve
3)  the number of specialized resources required
4)  the extent to which higher-ranking officers 
must mobilize and coordinate efforts within and 
outside the department to deal with the problem
5)  its importance and scale within the
community. 

One way to deal with these concerns is to
develop a tailored program for individual
areas.  In other words, do not assume that
each community has the same concerns or
problems or that each community should
respond similarly to certain problems. 
One product that would result from the
effort to create, deliver, and measure these
community-oriented programs and surveys is a 
data base on which a department or a division 
within a large department could customize a 
pro-active or interactive problem-solving 
approach. Pressure to build a portfolio of 
problems solved successfully and improved 
attitudes toward the police could become as 
intense as current pressures to maintain low 
crime rates and quick response times.

Managing the transition to the new
strategy

One of the most difficult problems faced
by police managers in the short run is the
awkward period of transition to the new
strategy.  The new programs will not be up
and operating, and the new measurement
systems will not be working and widely
accepted.  Yet the police will still be
accountable to the public.  Thus, they will
have to develop measures that can keep
them accountable during the transition.

One method is to identify the particular
investments and efforts that are required to
implement the new strategy of policing
and report progress on these activities. If
new training is required, they can report on
the development of the new curriculum
and the number of  participating officers. 
If the formation of community groups is
identified as important, that progress can
be monitored and recorded.  If the
development of a new call management
system or a new scheduling system is
required, that too, can be monitored. The
point is simply to identify and monitor the
key organizational investments that are
required. Unfortunately, no data sets exist
on which to begin an analysis. The Bureau
of Justice Statistics has compiled the most
comprehensive data set (Law Enforcement 
Management and Administration Statistics -- 
LEMAS) but its elements do not include many 
of the critical measures discussed in this 
paper (Reaves, 1992).

Toward a new strategy

The urgent need today in measuring police
performance is to move away from a sterile
conversation about performance measurement 
as an abstract technical problem and to 
understand it as a device that can be
used managerially to shape the future of
policing. This is neither a question 
of the essential unchanging measures that
finally capture the value of policing nor a
discussion of outcomes versus outputs nor
a discussion of single versus multiple
measures of performance.  Instead, it is a
discussion about a strategy of policing that
will work in the future and how to measure
its effects.  Current measures of policing
are holding police departments in their
current mold and are keeping them mired
in the past.  These current measures need
to be supplemented by innovative policing
and new ways to measure their successes.

Our suggestion has several organizational
elements that must be added to the
traditional components already existing in
many police departments.  The police
initiative must stress the need to learn
about the residents and business people in
their neighborhoods and to see them in
situations that are not always defined as
negative or at best neutral.  This increased
role for the police must include two basic
approaches.  First, a method must be
devised to solicit information from
members of the community.  This method
can incorporate meetings or citizens'
advisory and focus groups with the police
and can be enhanced by community surveys to 
determine attitudes and suggestions concerning 
the police and the police role.  Another 
important dimension of this information gathering 
is the analysis of what Skogan has found to be
measures of neighborhood decline and disorder 
(Skogan,1990).  Second, the police must use this 
information to reduce isolation between police 
and the citizens. The strategy is to assign 
officers for an extended period, supervised by 
command staff and advised by community groups.
This move toward stability will increase
the identification of an officer with the
residents, geography, politics, and other
issues in a given neighborhood.  

These operational elements require proper
training, feedback mechanisms, and an
institutionalized reward system. 
Additionally, it is important that these
efforts are measured, analyzed, and
evaluated by the police officers, command
staff, and members of the public.

Neighborhood training

Neighborhood training involves two basic
questions the police must answer according 
to the needs of each community or
neighborhood: what to do and how to do
it. In other words, the priority of police
resources, whether fighting crime or
providing social services, changes from
neighborhood to neighborhood. Police
officers must identify these needs from
their own experiences and expectations,
from the perspective of the consumers, and
from that of the police administration. 
Neighborhood training can effectively
inform the officer as to what he or she can
expect from the residents, physical
surroundings, or other influences. This
in-service training can introduce officers to
community characteristics while they are
work-ing the streets under a supervisor (in
a way similar to a field training officer).  
What to do can be determined by problem-solving 
techniques.  How to do it is the all-important 
style of policing that needs to be developed 
and supervised by command staff. 

Distinct differences may exist among
officers, administrators, and citizens
concerning style. Matching the style of
policing to community needs and
requirements will improve both the police
and the community. This can be achieved
through training based upon knowledge of
community values and beliefs as well as
the attitudes and priorities of police
officers.  A necessary aspect of this is the
continuous dialogue between residents and
the police.  Research on attitudes,
expectations and evaluation of services of
both the police and the members of the
community is critical.

Monitoring 

The final component of this strategy
includes institutionalized monitoring and
a formal reward system. This requires an
ongoing system to monitor both the
community and the police.  The needs of
the community can be determined by
periodic social surveys, which, if linked to
census data and local planning information, 
can inform officials of the changing nature 
of a given neighborhood. While it is relatively
easy to identify what constitutes negative 
behavior, it is difficult to specify exemplary 
behavior.  The proper use of good research, 
including appropriate sampling and a panel 
design, could provide a clear snapshot of the 
needs expressed by a given community.  Police
officers and administrators can work together 
to identify critical questions and a research 
design that can answer them.  A Blue-Ribbon 
Committee studying the Miami Police Department 
concluded that while crime-fighting activities 
are important, service activities are equally 
as  important in term of the new paradigm. In 
the final report, the committee noted:

It is our conclusion that a minor organizational
change can have a major impact on community
relations and on the interrelationships between
citizens and police. We believe that confidence
in the police will be enhanced if the police
measure and make more visible the activities
they perform. Moreover, police work is usually
rewarded by the gratitude an officer receives
from those whom he or she helps. Status in the
department, promotions, raises, commendations, 
etc., rest largely on his or her crime-fighting 
activities, the number of arrests, crimes he or 
she solves, etc. As a result, the patrol officer 
may regard service calls as a necessary evil 
(Overtown Blue Ribbon Committee, 1984: 199).

These creative data, together with traditional 
law enforcement information, will permit the 
development and maintenance of neighborhood 
profiles. Analyzing and monitoring these profiles
can assist the police in improving their
training, tactical decisions, effectiveness
and efficiency.

Rewarding the officers

Most police departments provide incentives 
for their officers. These include traditional 
promotions, merit increases, and "officer-of-
the-month" recognition. Many departments offer 
several opportunities for their officers to 
receive or earn rewards. Traditionally, these
rewards have been based upon aggressive actions 
that led to arrest(s), the capture of a dangerous 
felon, or some other heroic activity.  These 
criteria for rewarding police officers are 
important and serve to encourage similar 
actions from others. Yet other types of 
police behavior deserve recognition but 
remain lost and hidden behind the visible, 
aggressive activities of police officers. 
Activities that should receive more attention 
include exemplary service to the community 
and the reduction or diffusion of violence. 
Those who provide meritorious service may be
recognized but often their actions are lost
behind the brave shooting incident or
heroic rescue. The local community needs
to recognize officers who serve their
"beat" or neighborhood in an exemplary
fashion.  A "Best Cop on the Block"
recognition would be an important reward,
if provided by local residents or
merchants.  When an officer avoids a
shooting or talks a suspect into custody,
his or her superiors may not find out; if
they do, the officer may be labeled as a
"chicken" or one who cannot provide
needed back-up to his fellow officers.
Nonaggressive behavior that reduces
violence needs to be reinforced, rewarded,
and established as the model for other
officers to copy.

An institutional reward system should be
established for officers who avoid or
reduce violent situations and who avoid
the use of force, especially deadly force,
when avoidance is justifiable.  When
command officers, from the chief to the
sergeants, support and reward violence
reduction,  private business and service
groups can be enlisted to provide symbolic
and monetary rewards for such behavior.
The institutional support for the effective
policing of a neighborhood can only
encourage others to consider a change in
priorities and style.  While this is only one
aspect of a neighborhood intervention and
community evaluation model, it could
serve as a successful step toward meeting
the joint needs of the citizens and the
police.

Data on these activities should be collected, 
assessed and evaluated to help determine police 
departments' performance to do justice and promote
secure communities. Summary and conclusion

Police departments around the country
have instituted one or more of the
foregoing organizational components into
community policing programs, but we are
not aware of any agency that has incorporated 
them all or that uses many of these nontraditional
performance measures.  The components of the 
suggested program need coordination and individual
assessment as well as analysis as a total
effect. 

Effective neighborhood policing requires
that police administrators acquire adequate
information on the specific neighborhood,
including knowledge of the informal
control structure of the neighborhood,
attitudes about the police, and policing
strategies and styles.  This information can
be obtained from citizen surveys, census
data, community advisory groups, and
community leaders.  After accumulating
the information, police administrators can
decide how to deal with any incongruence
between the neighborhood context and
police policies, strategies, and styles. 
Some of these differences can be reduced
by campaigns to educate the citizens and
change public opinion and attitudes.  In
other cases, discrepancies can be reduced
by training programs for officers who are
assigned to the areas.  The training can
focus on neighborhood-specific strategies,
appropriate styles for the specific neigh-
borhood, and placing priorities on tasks
consistent with the neighborhood's
expectations.  Subsequent to appropriate
neighborhood-based training, police
administrators need to create and
institutionalize a system of monitoring and
rewarding police officers' behavior.  The
police officers assigned to the neighborhood 
provide the final link integrating the formal 
control system of the police with the informal 
system in the neighborhood. 

Officers must apply the training principles
appropriately through their use of discretion.

From data collected from the neighborhoods, a 
good plan for neighborhood intervention and 
community evaluation can bring modern police 
work in line with our modern world. Moore and
Kelling (1983: 65) have previously summarized 
these ideas quite well:

Police strategies do not exist in a vacuum.
They are shaped by important legal, political,
and attitudinal factors, as well as by local
resources and capabilities, all factors which
now sustain the modern conception of policing. 
So there may be little leeway for modern police
executives.  But the modern conception of
policing is in serious trouble, and a review of
the nature of that trouble against the
background of the American history of policing 
gives a clear direction to police forces that 
wish to improve their performance as crime 
fighters and public servants.

The two fundamental features of a new police
strategy must be these:  that the role of private
citizens in the control of crime and
maintenance of public order be established and
encouraged, not derided and thwarted, and that
the police become more active, accessible
participants in community affairs.  The police
will have to do little to encourage citizens to
participate in community policing, for
Americans are well practiced at undertaking
private, voluntary efforts; all they need to know
is that the police force welcomes and supports
such activity.  Being more visible and
accessible is slightly more difficult, but hiring
more "community relations" specialists is
surely not the answer.  Instead, the police must
get out of their cars, and spend more time in
public spaces such as parks and plazas,
confronting and assisting citizens with their
private troubles.  This is mundane, prosaic work 
but it probably beats driving around in cars 
waiting for a radio call. Citizens would surely 
feel safer and, perhaps, might even be safer. 

Private citizens working together and
through community institutions can have a
profound impact on policing.  Those
community organizations and police
agencies that have developed reciprocal
relationships will enjoy more success than
those attempting to work without the
benefit of the others' knowledge and
information.  

The maintenance and analysis of administrative 
statistics can provide community members and 
police supervisors with performance outcomes
that promote justice.  Patrol officers can 
be in the best position to understand the
varied and changing needs of the community, 
and with input from research and training, 
appropriate activities can be devised to do 
justice and promote safe communities and 
develop a new meaning for the phrase 
"professional policing."

Table 1

The mission of the police consists of many
diverse activities, not objectives in
themselves but which are directed toward
the protection of life. Goals include doing
justice, promoting secure communities,
restoring crime victims, and promoting
non-criminal options.  

Police: Goals, methods, and performance 
indicators

Goals          

Doing Justice.  Treating citizens in an
appropriate manner based upon their
conduct.             

Methods/activities

Balancing formal and informal social
controls, responding to calls for service,
patrolling tactics, issuing traffic tickets,
conducting investigations, writing reports,
making arrests, and assisting in criminal
prosecutions.

Performance indicators

Nature and type of patrolling strategy,
number of traffic tickets issued, known
crimes that are cleared by audit or arrest,
quality of reports, analysis of who calls the
police, evaluation of policies emphasizing
values over rules, time invested and
quality of investigations, number of known
crimes cleared by conviction, arrests and
arrests cleared by conviction, cases released 
because of police misconduct, citizen complaints,
lawsuits filed, and results of dispositions
and officer-initiated encounters.

Goals
              
Promoting secure communities, enabling
citizens to enjoy a life without fear of
crime or victimization.

Methods/activities

Preventing/deterring criminal behavior and
victimization, problem-solving initiatives,
training for community differences,
assisting citizens by reducing fear of crime
and victimization.

Performance indicators

Programs and resources allocated to crime
prevention programs, inter-governmental
programs, resources, both time and dollars
dedicated to problem-solving, rewards and
monitoring of police, public trust and
confidence in police performance, public
attitudes toward police actions and public
fear of crime, and home and business
security checks.

Goals
   
Restoring crime victims, by restoring
victims' lives and welfare as much as
possible.

Methods/activities

Assisting crime victims to understand the
criminal justice system, assisting crime
victims with their difficulties created by 
the victimization, assisting crime victims 
to put their lives back together.

Performance indicators

Number of contacts with victims after
initial call for assistance, types of
assistance provided to victims, including 
information, comfort, transportation, and
referrals to other agencies. 

Goals
              
Promoting noncriminal options, by developing 
strong relationships with individuals in the
community.

Methods/activities

Develop and assist with programs that
strengthen relationships between police
and members of the community and among 
community members, increase human and 
social capital in the community and 
linkages with private industry.

Performance indicators

Programs and resources allocated to
strengthening relationships between
police and the community and among 
community members, including traditional
community relations programs, school programs 
and resources spent to meet with the public 
in a positive alliance. Innovative programs 
to develop a sense of community, organizational
measures of decentralization, community
storefront operations and officer contacts with
citizens for positive relations and feedback on 
performance are aspects of developing strong 
relationships with members of the community.

References
  
Alpert, Geoffrey, and Roger Dunham. 
Policing Urban America. Prospect
Heights, Ill. Waveland Press.  1992.

Alpert, Geoffrey, and Roger Dunham. 
Policing Multi-Ethnic Neighborhoods. 
New York:  Greenwood Press. 1988. 

Alpert, Geoffrey, and William Smith. 
"Developing Police Policy: Evaluating the
Control Principle." American Journal of
Police. Forthcoming, 1993.

Bazelon, David. Questioning Authority. 
New York: Knopf. 1988.

Bennett, Trevor.  Community Policing in
Britain. Paper presented to the
International Conference on Community
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University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg,
Germany.  September 1992.

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Nation's Households, 1991. Washington,
D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1992. 

Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Sourcebook 
of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1991. 
Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice
Statistics.  1992.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. Report to 
the Nation on Crime and Justice, 2nd. Ed.
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Statistics. 1988.

Cole, George.  The American System of
Criminal Justice. Pacific Grove, Calif.: 
Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.  1992. 

Department of Justice.  Operation Weed
and Seed: Reclaiming America's
Neighborhoods.  Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Justice.  1991.

DiIulio, John.  Rethinking the Criminal
Justice System: Toward a New Paradigm. 
Washington, D.C.:  Bureau of Justice 
Statistics.  December 1992.

Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Crime in
the United States 1991.  Washington, D.C.: 
United States Department of Justice. 
1992.

Furstenberg, Frank, and Charles Wellford. 
"Calling the Police:  The Evaluation of
Police Service."  Law and Society Review
7:393-406 (1973).

Gallup, George.  The Gallup Poll Monthly,
Report No. 318.  Princeton, N.J.:  The
Gallup Poll. 1992.
 
Goldstein, Herman.  Problem-Oriented
Policing.  New York:  McGraw-Hill. 
1990.

Greene, Jack, Geoffrey Alpert, and Paul
Styles.  "Values and Culture in Two
American Police Departments: Lessons
from King Arthur."  Journal of
Contemporary Criminal Justice 8: 183-207
(1992).

Kelling, George. "Measuring What Matters: 
A New Way of Thinking About Crime and Public
Order."  The City Journal Spring 2:21-34
(1992).

Metro-Dade Police Department.  Survey of
African-American Males 15-30 Years of
Age.  Metro-Dade Police Department. Miami:  
1992. 

Metro-Dade Police Department. 
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Summary.  Metro-Dade Police
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Serve and to Protect:  Learning from 
Police History," The Public Interest 70:  
49-65. 1983. 

Overtown Blue Ribbon Committee.  Final
Report.  City of Miami, 1984.

Petersen, Thomas.  Personal
communication.  February 1993.

Reaves, Brian.  Law Enforcement
Management and Administrative Statistics,
1990: Data for Individual State and Local
Agencies with 100 or More Officers. 
Washington, D.C.:  Bureau of Justice
Statistics.  1992.

Short, James F. Delinquency in Society. 
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 
1990.

Skogan, Wesley.  Disorder and Decline:
Crime and the Spiral of Decay in
American Neighborhoods.  New York:
Free Press.  1990.

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"Information, Apprehension and
Deterrence: Exploring the Limits 
of Police Productivity."  Journal of
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Sparrow, M., M. Moore, and D. Kennedy.
Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing. New 
York: Basic Books. 1990.

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Guarding the Guardians?  Washington,
D.C.: USGPO.  1981.
 
Walker, Samuel. The Police In America. 
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Whitaker, Catherine.  Crime Prevention
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About the authors

Geoffrey P. Alpert is Professor of Criminal
Justice at the University of South Carolina 
and Research Professor, Institute of Public 
Affairs.  He has been a Visiting Fellow at 
the Bureau of Justice Statistics and has 
served as the Director of Research in the 
Georgia Department of Corrections.  He has
extensive experience in criminal justice
agencies and research.  For the past 10
years, he has focused his interests on 
evaluation research.  His research efforts 
include the evaluation of multi-ethnic policing, 
the police use of deadly force, the impact
of indicators of unrest on the prevention of
civil disturbances, how police pursuit
driving policies affect outcome, the effect
of social programs on keeping high-risk
students in school, and the effectiveness of
tactical narcotics teams.  He has published
more than a dozen books and monographs
and has contributed to legal, sociological,
and criminal justice journals.

Mark Moore is the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim 
Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and
Management and Faculty Chairman of the Program 
in Criminal Justice, John F. Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University.  For a 
decade he served as the Founding Chairman of 
the Kennedy School's Committee on Executive 
Programs.  His intellectual interests lie in 
criminal justice policy, in public management, 
and in particular, the intersection of the two
fields.  He has led national "executive sessions" 
on the future of juvenile justice, policy, and 
prosecution.  

In the domain of crime policy, he is the
author of Buy and Bust:  The Effective
Regulation of an Illicit Market in Heroin
and the co-author of Dangerous Offenders: 
Elusive Targets; From Children to Citizens:  
The Mandate for Juvenile Justice; and Beyond 
911: A New Era for Policing. In the domain 
of public management, his co-authored works 
include Inspectors-General:  Junkyard Dogs or
Man's Best Friend; Public Duties:  The
Moral Obligations of Public Officials; and
Ethics in Government:  The Moral Challenges 
of Public Leadership.

Measuring Performance When
There Is No Bottom Line

by John J. DiIulio, Jr.

The great scholar of American government, 
Wallace Sayre, promulgated the "law" that 
"public and private management are 
fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects."  
Many leading thinkers -- Graham T. Allison, Jr. 
of Harvard University and James Q. Wilson
of UCLA, to cite just two -- have echoed
this view.***Footnote 1: See Graham T. Allison,
"Public and Private Management: Are They
Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?"
In Richard J. Stillman, III, ed., Public
Administration: Concepts and Cases, Fifth 
Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1992), chapter 10, pp. 282-288, and James Q.
Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies 
Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books,
1989).***

As Wilson has noted, to a "much greater
extent than private bureaucracies,
government agencies (1) cannot lawfully
retain and devote to the private benefit of
their members the earnings of the organization, 
(2) cannot allocate the factors of production 
(land, labor, capital)in accordance with the 
preferences of administrators, and (3) must 
serve goals not of the organization's own 
choosing.  Control over revenues, productive 
factors, and agency goals is all vested to an 
important degree in entities external to the
organization -- legislatures, courts, politicians, 
and interest groups."*** Footnote 2: Wilson,
Bureauaracy, p. 115.***

With few exceptions, the human and financial 
resources of public managers are contingent 
upon the goodwill of legislators and other
policymakers, not the goodwill of customers 
and other consumers. Relative to private
managers, public managers in civil service 
bureaucracies have little discretion in hiring, 
firing, and promotion decisions; and, their 
ability to innovate   to change the way work 
gets done -- is far more constrained.

Unlike most private corporations, most
government agencies have no market-test
of output.  The managers of a smokestack
company are out to turn a profit; the
managers of the Environmental Protection
Agency are out to "protect the environment."  
The executives of television networks contrive 
to generate dividends for shareholders; the 
heads of the Federal Communications Commission
contrive to regulate airwaves in "the public
interest."  At most, public managers have
proxies for outputs:  for example, increasing 
weapons stockpiles as a proxy for "enhancing 
combat readiness" and "strengthening national 
defense."

Thus, as Allison observes, there is "little if
any agreement on the standards and measurement 
of performance to appraise a government manager, 
while various tests of performance -- financial 
return, market share, performance measures for 
executive compensation -- are well established in
private business.... Governmental managers rarely 
have a clear bottom line, while that of a private 
business manager is profit, market performance, and 
survival."***Footnote 3: Allison, "Public and
Private Management," pp. 285-286, summarizing
the ideas of John T. Dunlop.***  Or, in Wilson's 
words, "whereas business management focuses on
the 'bottom line' (that is, profits), government 
management focuses on the 'top line' (that is, 
constraints)."*** Footnote 4: Wilson, Bureaucracy,
p. 115.***

Thus, the essential differences between public 
and private management are rooted in the nature 
of their respective goals. Basically, there are 
two types of goals: operational and nonoperational.
***Footnote 5: I am indebted to James Q. Wilson
for this distinction.***  An operational goal is 
an image of a desired future state of affairs that 
can be compared unambiguously to an actual or 
existing state of affairs.  A nonoperational goal 
is an image of a desired future state of affairs 
that cannot be compared unambiguously to an actual
or existing state of affairs.

Some examples are in order. "Keeping America first 
in space technology" is a nonoperational goal; 
"Putting an American on Mars by the year 2010" 
is an operational goal.  "Improving the quality
of public education in America" is a 
nonoperational goal; "Increasing the
average verbal and math SAT scores of
public school students by 20% between the
year 1992 and the year 2000" is an
operational goal.  "Making America's
welfare system work" is a nonoperational
goal; "Instituting work-based welfare
programs that get 50% of all participants
off the rolls in their first 7 years of
operation" is an operational goal. 
"Reforming criminals" is a nonoperational
goal; "Doubling the rate of inmate
participation in prison industry programs"
is an operational goal.

Generally speaking, public managers have
nonoperational goals, while private
managers have operational goals. Moreover, 
public managers often work in the context 
of multiple and contradictory nonoperational 
goals.

Correctional agencies and forestry services
are two classic examples. For much of
American history, correctional agencies
were authorized to "punish, deter,
incapacitate, and rehabilitate" convicted
criminals.  Most employees of the Federal 
Bureau of Prisons, for example, are 
"correctional officers" responsible for the 
"care and custody" of prisoners. By the same 
token, most employees of the U.S. Forest Service 
are "forest rangers" charged with "multiple-use
management" (hunting, fishing, timber cutting, 
timber sales, fire prevention, flood control).  
The correctional officers are "social workers, 
prison guards, and managers" all rolled into one; 
the forest rangers are "executives, woodsmen, 
and planners" all rolled into one.***Footnote 6: For
a discussion of correctional management, see John
J. DiIulio, Jr., Governing Prisons: A Comparative
Study of Correctional Management (New York: Free Press,
1987); No Escape: The Future of American Corrections
(New York: Basic Books, 1991); and Principled Agents:
Leadership, Administration, and Culture in a Federal
Bureaucracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 
forthcoming). The best single account of forestry 
management remains Herbert Kaufman's The Forest 
Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1960).  For a more recent look at the U.S. Forest
Service, see Terrence J. Tipple and J. Douglas
Wellman, "Herbert Kaufman's Forest Service Thirty
Years Later: From Simplicity and Homogeneity to
Complexity and Diversity," paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Public
Administration, Los Angeles, Calif., April 10, 1990,
26 pp.***  In both cases, the multiple and 
contradictory nonoperational nature of the agency's 
goals renders inapplicable the much-misunderstood 
concept of efficiency.

Efficiency refers to a relationship between
valued inputs and desired outputs: 
maximizing outputs from a given set of
inputs, or minimizing the inputs necessary
to achieve a given level of outputs. In
many, perhaps most, government agencies,
the relationship between valued inputs
(people, money) and desired outputs (less
crime, better public health) is ambiguous. 
Where goals are nonoperational, and the
technologies necessary to achieve them are
either uncertain, or completely unknown,
or simply unavailable, the quest for a
"bottom line" is a fool's quest. To the
extent that goals are vague or inconsistent,
the concept of efficiency is irrelevant.
***Footnote 7: I am indebted to Edward C.
Banfield of Harvard University for this
insight.*** The concept of efficiency is thus 
irrelevant to many, if not most, public management
tasks.

Defining and measuring nonoperational goals:
What is to be done? 

Because public management and private
management are indeed fundamentally
alike in all unimportant respects, it makes
little sense to lament the fact that
"government isn't run like a business," or
to assume that government agencies are
inherently less "efficient" than private
firms.8  As Allison concludes, "the notion
that there is any significant body of private
management practices and skills that can
be transferred directly to public management 
tasks in a way that produces significant 
improvements is wrong."***Footnote 9: Allison,
"Public and Private Management," p. 24.***

It is yet possible, however, for public
managers to strengthen the relationship
between administration and goals, inputs
and outputs, process and performance. 
The multiple and contradictory
nonoperational character of most public
management goals -- the lack of a
market-test of output in much of the
governmental sector -- is neither an
immovable barrier to defining appropriate
measures for the goals of public agencies,
nor an inexhaustible excuse for the failure
to do so.  As Wilson notes, if someone set
out to measure "he output of a private
school, hospital, or security service, he or 
she would have at least as much trouble as 
would someone trying to measure the output 
of a public school, hospital, or police
department.  Governments are not the only 
institutions with ambiguous products."
***Footnote 10: Wilson, Bureaucracy, p. 373.*** 
In recent years, in fact, a number of major 
public policy reforms were launched as efforts 
to define appropriate measures for the goals 
of government agencies.***Footnote 11: One 
example is welfare reform; see Richard P.
Nathan, Social Science in Government: Uses
and Misuses (New York: Basic Books, 1998).*** 
There is no reason why the field of criminal 
justice cannot or should not follow suit.

A first step in defining appropriate
measures for the goals of the criminal
justice system is for practitioners to ask
four questions:
*  What do we want to achieve?
*  What human and other resources do we
have (or can we obtain) that might enable
us to achieve it?
*  How can we know the relationship
between the levels and modes of our
resource deployments, on the one hand,
and the achievement of our goals, on the
other?
*  How can we measure routinely the
extent to which we are achieving what we 
want to achieve, or moving toward achieving 
it?

These may seem like an incredibly obvious
set of conceptual questions to ask, but
they are ones that public managers have not 
asked with sufficient regularity or seriousness 
of purpose.  This is true even in public 
management sectors like defense, where 
there has been no shortage of well-funded
experimentation with different managerial
approaches and performance-appraisal
techniques.***Footnote 12: For a discussion
of the need for operational concepts in 
defense planning, see Glenn A. Kent, A
Framework for Defense Planning (Santa Monica,
Calif.: The RAND Corporation, August 1989),
especially pp. 21-24.***  It is even truer for 
a public management sector like criminal justice,
where the occasions for such experimentation 
have been severely limited both by fiscal 
constraints and frankly, by intellectually hide-
bound management traditions.

A second step in this direction is to translate 
the agency's nonoperational goals into measurable 
process and performance criteria. 

In a recent volume, a group of public management 
specialists analyzed "impossible jobs in public 
management."***Footnote 13: Erwin C. Hargrove
and John C. Glidewell, eds., Impossible Jobs in
Public management (Lawrence, Kansas: University
Press of Kansas, 1990).***  An "impossible job" 
is defined by --

*  agency goals that are multiple, contradictory,
 and nonoperational
*  strong political cross-pressures by competing 
external constituencies who favor one or another 
of the agency's goals to the exclusion of the rest
*  a lack of public confidence in the professional 
expertise of agency workers
*  clients whose mental and behavioral 
characteristics make them difficult to serve.  
Examples include the jobs of contemporary big-
city police chiefs, State mental health 
commissioners, public health commissioners, human 
services (welfare, Medicaid) commissioners, and
corrections commissioners.  Although they
varied widely across time, place, political
and organizational context, and nature of task, 
the reputationally successful public managers in 
these fields were found to employ certain "coping
strategies," chief among them a strategy for 
translating nonoperational goals into measurable 
process and performance criteria.

An example from corrections:  The
Federal Bureau of Prisons

A good example of this strategy in action
is the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). 
Established in 1930 and situated in the
United States Department of Justice, the
BOP is a career civil service agency.  It 
has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the 
finest correctional agencies in the country, 
and one of the best managed agencies of the
Federal Government. Contrary to the "Club 
Fed" stereotypes of the agency, the BOP has 
not always enjoyed "a better class of criminals," 
been less crowded, spent more per inmate, or 
had a lower inmate-to-staff ratio than State 
systems of comparable size and complexity. Instead,
its success in running safe, clean, programmatic, 
and cost-effective prisons has been the hard-won 
product of management innovations made under five
consecutive directors.

Historically, the core of the BOP management 
approach has been to translate its multiple, 
contradictory, and nonoperational goals 
(punish, deter, incapacitate, rehabilitate) 
into measurable process and performance 
criteria.  For example, the agency's fourth 
director, Norman A. Carlson (1970-87), was an
award-winning Federal executive.  He self-
consciously managed the agency around three 
criteria:  safety, humanity, and opportunity. 
Essentially, safety meant the incidence of 
things that either threatened the physical and 
emotional well-being of inmates and staff, or 
placed the public at direct risk, or both 
(assault, homicide, escape).  Humanity meant 
the incidence of things that made for decent
living and working conditions behind bars
(decent food, clean quarters, recreation). 
Opportunity meant the incidence of things
that enabled inmates to better themselves
(programs in remedial reading, job
training, drug treatment).  Thus, in the
recent agency publication Bureau of
Prisons Goals for 1992 and Beyond, we
read: "The Federal Bureau of Prisons
protects society by confining offenders in
the controlled environments of prisons and
community-based facilities that are safe,
humane, and ... provide work and other
self- improvement opportunities...."

Many correctional agencies have such
mission statements.  But few have actually
managed themselves around measurable
process and performance criteria as the
BOP has done from 1930 to the present.  A
good contemporary example is the
agency's Key Indicators/Strategic Support
System (KI/SSS).  Begun in 1983 and
carried out under Carlson's successor, J.
Michael Quinlan (1987-92), the BOP has
elaborated "safety, humanity, and
opportunity" into KI/SSS, a personal
computer-based management information
system that provides managers at all levels
with comprehensive, up-to-date,
system-wide information on a wide range
of specific performance variables.
Invariably, such innovations begin with
managers who --
*  ask themselves basic questions about the
relationship between what they want to
achieve and what they actually do 
*  recognize the need to translate their
agency's multiple, contradictory, and
nonoperational goals into measurable
performance criteria.

For example, in 1988, as the KI/SSS was
still being developed, participants at the
BOP's annual wardens' conference
received a perceptive four-page progress
report that read in part: "Unlike private
agencies and companies, the Bureau of
Prisons is expected to respond to a wide
variety of overall objectives, often
conflicting, often difficult to obtain....  
The Bureau has stated that its mission is 
to provide humane control of inmates (and)
... opportunities to those inmates who
choose to use them.... (W)e need to ...
translate that broad goal into more specific
measures."

Between 1983 and 1992, they did so, and it
helped the agency to manage successfully
a doubling in its prisoner population and 
a concomitant growth in the number of its
staff and facilities.
 
The measurement net: How tight a
weave?

Putting the example of the BOP to one
side, but continuing for the moment with
our focus on correctional agencies, the
central question is "How do we define a
comprehensive set of appropriate
measures for the goals of corrections that
can be used on a day-to-day basis by the
field's practitioners?"  The answer is far
from obvious, but some progress has
already been made.  The Study Group's
Professor Charles H. Logan of the
University of Connecticut has defined
eight distinct "dimensions of the quality 
of confinement" (security, safety, order,
care, activity, justice, conditions,
management), each of which can be
measured on four or more "subdimensions" 
via staff and inmate surveys and institutional 
records.***Footnote 14: Charles H. Logan,
:Criminal Justice Performance Measures
for Prisons," Performance Measures for the
Criminal Justice System (Washington, D.C.:
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993).*** 
Logan's work dispels one concern about
the possibility of defining such measures
and raises a second.  On the one hand, it
dispels the worry that any such measurement 
scheme is bound to be based exclusively on 
one or another moral or ideological view of 
the "ends of criminal justice."  His quality 
of confinement measurements encompass and
satisfy every major school of thought about 
"what prisons are for."

On the other hand, however, Logan mixes
process and performance measurements in
a way that may or may not represent the
final state of the art.  For example, his
"security" dimension has six subdimensions:  
security procedures, freedom of inmate 
movement, community exposure, staffing 
adequacy, significant incidents, and 
drug use.  Arguably, the first four of 
these security subdimensions are process
measures, while the last two are
performance measures.  The same sort of
indiscriminate mixing of process and
performance measures is present in the 
BOP's aforementioned KI/SSS. Whether it 
is either intellectually worthwhile or 
practically useful to distinguish more 
cleanly between process and performance 
measures remains an open question.
***Footnote 15: For a general discussion of 
this issue that argues in favor of distinguishing
process from performance measures, see John J.
DiIulio, Jr., "Recovering the Public Management
Variable: lessons from Schools, Prisons, and 
Armies." Public Administration Review, Volume 
49, Number 2, March/April 1989, pp. 127-133.***   

Be careful of what you measure, for
you may (or may not) get it

But before one even begins to treat with
such questions, at least four flags of
caution should be waved over any effort to
define appropriate measures for the goals
of criminal justice agencies, or, for that
matter, any governmental agencies.

First, it is naive to assume that what
government agencies actually do on a
day-to-day basis can be much affected by
how, whether, or to what extent their
managers define goals. In the preface to
his study of administration in the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the
Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Wilson
observes that the tasks of government
workers "are supposedly chosen, defined,
revised, or discarded as a result of efforts
by administrators to achieve organizational
goals," but "tasks are defined by forces far
more profound, and accordingly more
resistant to change...."***Footnote 16: James
Q. Wilson, The Investigators: Managing FBI and
Narcotics Agents (New York: Basic Books, 1978),
p. 8.***

Second, even if what government agencies
actually did was a simple function of how 
their goals were defined and measured, that 
would not necessarily be a good thing in 
all cases. There is always a danger that
measurement-driven government workers will, 
so to speak, "set up the target in order
to facilitate shooting," and give rise to
perverse and unintended administrative
routines.  Criminal justice agencies furnish
many examples:  FBI agents of the Hoover
era who padded "the stats" on bank
robberies; DEA agents in the 1970s who
persisted in street-level "buy-and-bust"
operations rather than more demanding
investigative chores that might not
succeed.***Footnote 17: Wilson, The 
Investigators, especially chapter 5.***

Third, it is often the most dedicated and
caring government workers who are
anywhere from suspicious to downright
dismissive of any attempt to define and
apply such measures.  For example, a
hard-working veteran correctional
counselor at a maximum-security prison
dismissed the need for such measures and
was heedless of what he judged to be the
pseudo-intellectual justifications for them:
"Experience on the ground is the only way
to understand the effects of a place like
this." An equally dedicated co- worker of
his stated: "I believe in this way of doing
things. I'd do it this way even if it didn't
make any difference."***Footnote 18: Quoted
in DiIulio, No Escape, p. 144.***  Similarly, 
a committed participant in a major community-
policing demonstration project was perturbed 
by the suggestion that the study would help to 
define appropriate measures for the goals of
police agencies: "It's not about measuring
anything, it's about doing things
differently."***Footnote 19: Interviewed for 
John J. DiIulio, Jr., "Crime," in Henry J.
Aaron and Charles L. Schultze, eds., Setting 
Domestic Priorities: What Can Government Do?
(Washington, D.C.: The Bookings Institution, 
1992), Chapter 4.***
 
Fourth, even under the best of conditions,
efforts to act on appropriate measurements
of agency goals can be blocked by personnel 
regulations and administrative behavior within 
government. Unfortunately, there are many 
examples. In a recent study of the Federal 
procurement process, Professor Steven Kelman 
of Harvard University studied managers who 
sought to withhold contracts for poor 
performance and secure the best possible deal 
for the Nation's taxpayers; paradoxically, 
they were defeated by procedural regulations 
intended to promote competition in contracting.
***Footnote 20: Steven Kelman, Procurement and 
Public management: The Fear of Discretion and 
the Quality of Government Performance (Washington, 
D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 
1990).*** In another recent study, Gerald J. 
Garvey of Princeton University had a similar 
tale to tell about change-oriented management 
within Federal regulatory bureaucracies.
***Footnote 21: Gerald J. Garvey, The Challenge
of Organizational Change: Living and Dying in a 
Federal Bureaucracy (San Francisco, Calif.:
Josse-Bass, 1992).***

None of these cautions, however, should
be sufficient to discourage one from exploring 
new and better ways of defining appropriate 
measures for the goals of criminal justice 
agencies.   

The Problem of Defining
Agency Success

by James Q. Wilson

For the most part, I agree with what
DiIulio says in the first essay in this
compendium, and I am generally
sympathetic to the Study Group's ideas on
performance measures for prisons and
police departments.  But let me
reformulate the question this way: How
can government agencies with nonoperational 
goals best develop performance measures?

The best way to approach this issue is to
ask how private organizations with
nonoperational goals (schools, colleges,
hospitals) cope with the problem of
defining success.  In principle, they need
not define it, for in a competitive market, 
success will be defined for them by survival 
or failure.  The heads of most such
organizations are unwilling to wait for this
Darwinian verdict; instead, they try to
anticipate it by looking at the following
measures:

*  Client satisfaction (student enrollments
and tuition payments, hospital accounts
receivable, and so forth).

*  Donor contributions (Federal subventions, 
alumni donations, foundation grants).

*  Employee attachment (the ease or
difficulty with which the organization can
recruit and retain skilled -- or at least
highly credentialed or well-thought-of --
employees).

*  Personal, up-close, or professional
evaluations (impressions gained by
executives as they move about the
organization or read and hear the
judgments of professional peers).

*  Proxy measures of goal attainment 
(for example, percentage of high school
graduates accepted at elite colleges, SAT
scores, Medicare reimbursements, cure
rates).

Two things need to be said about this list. 
First, the proxy measures at the bottom of
the list are somewhat crude and quite
easily misinterpreted.  A very good
inner-city high school may send few
students to Princeton but may have many
graduates who get jobs at Lockheed or the
Bank of America.  The number who do,
however, may be unknown because no
routine reporting system captures it and
the employment decision may come a year
or two after graduation.  In a hospital, 
the percentage of admitted patients who get
better, given a certain disease, may say
more about the personal habits and
self-care of the patients than about what
the hospital does.  As the government
increasingly subjects private agencies to
constraints experienced by public
agencies, private organizations are forced
to place greater weight on crude proxy
measurements like the ones mentioned above
because the government places great
weight on them. 

Second, the executives of private
organizations have more opportunity to
engage in personal exploration of their
organizational environment -- so-called
"soaking and poking" (soaking up
information and poking into corners) --
than do their public counterparts.  This
greater opportunity is because of three
factors:  

*  On the average, private organizations
are smaller than public ones (both in total
size and in size of the overhead staff that
must be managed). 
 
*  Private executives need to spend less
time satisfying external political demands
than do the heads of public agencies.  

*  The compensation and tenure of private
executives are more variable than those of
public executives, and so the former have a
greater incentive to find ways of
anticipating (and, if necessary, correcting)
adverse market trends.  Good executives
can be found among public agencies, but
they are rarer.  For example, the principals
of more effective public schools are almost
invariably ones who engage in a great deal
of soaking and poking and who devote a
lot of effort to student and teacher
motivation.  The literature on this subject
makes it clear that this is not routine
behavior for principals and often requires
for its existence strong, even eccentric,
personalities.

The case of big city police agencies

Most of the efforts to improve performance 
measures for policing have concentrated on 
finding either real measures of overall 
effectiveness or plausible proxy measures.  
Not much has come of these efforts for reasons 
that should be obvious. There are no "real" 
measures of overall success; what is measurable 
about the level of public order, safety, and 
amenity in a given large city can only partially, 
if at all, be affected by police behavior. 
(For example, if the murder or robbery rates 
go up, one cannot assume that this is the fault
of the police; if they go down, one should
not necessarily allow the police to take
credit for it.) Proxy measures almost
always turn out to be process measures --
response time, arrest rates, or clearance
rates -- that may or may not have any
relationship to crime rates or levels of
public order.

In my view, the search for better measures
of police performance is doomed to failure
so long as it focuses on city-wide or even
precinct-wide statistics.  Most police
chiefs will agree on this point, I think.  
No matter how we improve the Uniform
Crime Reports (UCR) or the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), they
will not tell us very much (and certainly not 
very much in a timely fashion) about what 
difference the police make in the lives of the 
citizens.

Nor can most of the other devices available to 
private firms be applied to policing.  There 
are no client payments or donor contributions; 
police appropriations tend to reflect fiscal 
constraints and past funding levels modified, 
from time to time, by generalized concerns 
over crime increases and police misconduct. 
Professional evaluations are not very
reliable; policing is not a profession with
clear standards enforced by knowledgeable 
peers, except on the rare occasions when an 
outside group is brought in to evaluate a 
department in trouble.  But small-scale 
soaking and poking may be applicable.

These considerations lead me to suggest
that the better approach to defining police
goals and performance measures involves
thinking small and from the bottom up.  

Let me clarify this suggestion by asking
what citizens want that is related to police
behavior. They want several things, but in
the interests of brevity I will focus on just
one.***Footnote 1: I omit fair play, civil
behavior, prompt response, and many other
important factors. Taking all these into account
would complicate my argument but not change it.***
People want to live in safe, orderly neighborhoods.  
Wesley Skogan has shown in his recent book that 
there is a high degree of consensus across
demographic categories as to what a safe,
orderly neighborhood is.***Footnote 2: Wesley G.
Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the
Sprawl of Decay in American Neighborhoods
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990).*** It includes
streets free of drug dealers, rowdy
juveniles, threatening derelicts, soliciting
prostitutes, and predatory criminals;
buildings without graffiti or other signs of
decay; no drive-by shootings, and so forth.

The police ought to make the production
of safer, more orderly neighborhoods (not
lower crime rates or more drug arrests or
more traffic tickets) one of their goals. 
They ought to design ways of assessing the
conditions of neighborhoods before and
after various police interventions. They
ought to use that assessment to modify
their deployments and tactics.

Adopting this view implies certain actions,
none easy but none impossible:
 
*  Categorize all neighborhoods by two
criteria:***Footnote 3: I do not here define
"neighborhood." This is an important issue
that cannot be resolved conceptually. In
rough terms, a neighborhood is what people
think it is. This size and shape will vary
from place to place and be affected by
natural boundaries (for instance, parks,
street-car tracks) institutions (grammar
schools or shopping centers or churches),
ethnic composition, and traffic patterns.
I wish to stress that the area should be
relatively small and its boundaries easily
understood by most people living there.***

--What is the level of disorder and
danger?  
--How amenable is that level to
improvement by a given, feasible level
of police and public action?  (Some
neighborhoods are almost self-policing
and require only police response to calls
for service.  Some are almost beyond
repair, given feasible levels of
intervention, because they are highly
transient or have other problems contributing 
to decay.  Some are amenable to improvement, 
provided existing resources are carefully used.)

*  Specify as concretely as possible the
features of a given neighborhood that are
strategic and must be improved if the
quality of life is to be improved.  For
example:

--A landlord who allows his building to
be used by drug dealers
--A deli or spa that allows teenagers to
hang out in front of it in ways others
find threatening
--A bar that is the scene of frequent
brawls
--A public housing project with poor
maintenance and security
--A bus or subway stop that is
dominated by aggressive panhandlers or
homeless people sleeping on public
benches
--A residential burglary gang that is
working the neighborhood
--A park that is the scene of muggings
and rapes.

*  State the methods to be used to remedy
the situation (for instance, filing nuisance
abatement charges against the landlord,
meeting with the teenagers and the deli
owner about how the sidewalk is used,
arranging to expel disorderly public-housing 
tenants, using saturation patrol for a limited 
period, stationing uniformed officers next to 
suspected drug dealers, and so forth).

*  Put in place a micro-level measure of
success.  These might include the
following:

--Tracking calls for service from a
specific address or its immediate
neighbors
--Hiring a resident to make regular
observations of life on the street by, for
example, at stated intervals counting the
number of panhandlers, suspected drug
dealers, sleeping vagrants, soliciting
prostitutes, 
and so on
--Conducting a telephone survey of
residents (using random-digit dialing to
minimize sample selection bias) to
assess their perceptions before and after
the intervention.

These micro-measures are likely to be
among the few valid measures of police
performance.  They may well lead to
conclusions quite at variance with
city-wide, aggregate data.  For example,
the "crime rate" might be getting worse  
at the same time that the conditions of life
in neighbor-hoods has measurably
improved, or vice versa.***Footnote 4: Some
will object that neighborhood measures ignore
spillover effects.  Up to a point, that is
true. But such evidence as we have on burglary
and robbery, drug-dealing, and other offense
suggest that the displacement of crime from one
area to the next is usually much less than 100%.
A lot will depend on the mobility of offenders,
and that will be constrained by ethnic identity,
profit opportunities, the desire for local
"cover," the threats of rival gangs elsewhere, 
and the depressing effect of laziness and/or
opportunism.***  For a thoughtful and more 
detailed proposal along these lines, the 
reader should consult a recent essay by 
George Kelling, especially his account of 
Operation Crossroads in New York City's 
Times Square.***Footnote 5: George Kelling,
"Measuring What Matters," The City Journal
(Spring 1992), 21-33.***

Just as important as the measures themselves 
will be the requirement that the police agency 
define its operational goals as improving the 
conditions of life in specific neighborhoods.  
The attentive reader will have noticed that 
this way of defining police goals is similar 
to what many advocates of community-oriented
policing (COP) propose. This is not an
accident. But my argument is not that
COP has such mystical, ideological, or
historical importance that it ought to
govern police decisions as a matter of
principle. My argument is that if the
police are serious about defining goals and
measuring progress toward them, they will
inevitably have to do so by identifying
problems relevant to citizen concerns at
the neighborhood level, specifying possible 
solutions, and measuring the effect of those 
strategies. This is what is meant by problem-
oriented policing (POP) which, in my view, is 
the heart of COP and what makes POP (and COP 
properly defined) different from police-
community relations.

Note the parallels between POP and the
More Effective Schools (MES) literature. 
Both focus on small spaces (neighborhoods, 
individual schools); both require the 
identification of specific problems (unruly 
teenagers, gang fights, and so forth); both 
can be evaluated only by specifying significant 
changes in the behaviors of particular people 
(fewer fights, quieter classrooms); both try to
improve the preconditions of better lives
(safer neighborhoods, more orderly classrooms) 
without directly attacking ultimate outcomes 
(crime rates, SAT scores) which have multiple 
causes; both require that the executive (police 
captain, school principal) spend a lot of time
observing and talking to the affected people.  
And, a final parallel:  only a minority of police 
chiefs (like the minority of school officials) 
are likely to want to do these things.

About the author

Since 1985 James Q. Wilson has been the
James Collins Professor of Management at
the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA). Before that he was for 26 years
the Shattuck Professor of Government at
Harvard University.  He is the author or
coauthor of 13 books, including The Moral
Sense, Thinking About Crime, Varieties of
Police Behavior,  Political Organizations, 
Crime and Human Nature (with Richard J. 
Herrnstein), Bureaucracy, and Essays on 
Character.  He has in addition edited or 
contributed to books on urban problems,
government, regulation of business, and 
the prevention of delinquency among children, 
including Crime and Public Policy, From 
Children to Citizens:  Families, Schools, 
and Delinquency Prevention (with Glenn
Loury), Understanding and Controlling Crime 
(with David Farrington and Lloyd Ohlin), and  
Drugs and Crime (with Michael Tonry).

He has served on a number of national
commissions concerned with public
policy. He was chairman of the White
House Task Force on Crime in 1966,
chairman of the National Advisory 
Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention 
(1972-73), a member of the Attorney General's 
Task Force on Violent Crime in 1981, a 
member of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board (1985-90), and a director
of The Police Foundation (1970-93).  

He is currently chairman of the board of
academic advisers of the American Enterprise 
Institute.

He has been elected a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and a fellow of the American Philosophical 
Society. In 1990 he received the James 
Madison award for distinguished scholarship 
from the American Political Science Association
and in 1991-92 served as that organization's 
president.  Educated at the University of 
Redlands (A.B., 1952) and the University of 
Chicago (Ph.D., 1959), he has received honorary 
degrees from five universities. He grew up in 
Long Beach, Calif., and attended public schools 
there. From 1953 to 1955, he served in the U.S. 
Navy.  He is married to the former Roberta 
Evans; they have two children.

End of file
12/12/02 ih