Abstract
Experimentation in criminal justice has become both philosophy and policy in recent years. Campbell (1969) first proposed an explicit link between social reforms and experimental methods and challenged the United States to become an “experimenting society.” The inferential persuasiveness of experimental results has contributed to the design of early childhood education programs, income maintenance policies, work and job training programs, regulatory law, and environmental conservation strategies. In general, these efforts illustrated conditions where experimental methods could be moved from the laboratory traditions of the natural and behavioral sciences to the uncertain conditions of social policy. Despite an uneven history of experimental research in social policy reform and program development, a recent manifesto on social policy experimentation called for a “marriage between experimental methods and assessments of public policy” (Berk, Boruch, Chambers, Rossi, & Witte, 1985, p. 389) and an explicit link between social policy change and experimentation.
The author is grateful to Ronald Clarke and Don Gottfredson for their comments on the chapter.
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Fagan, J.A. (1990). Natural Experiments in Criminal Justice. In: Kempf, K.L. (eds) Measurement Issues in Criminology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9009-1_5
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