NCJ Number
77448
Date Published
Unknown
Length
433 pages
Annotation
In 1975, with the cooperation of New York City prosecutors, judges, and the Legal Aid Society, the Vera Institute initiated an experimental evaluation of the Court Employment Project (CEP), one of the first pretrial diversion programs in the United States.
Abstract
The research was a continuation of previous efforts to assess the impact of pretrial diversion. Prominent researchers who had conducted the early program evaluations uniformly concluded that research using an experimental design and a randomly selected comparison population was essential if policy and program development were to progress in the pretrial field. Thus, this research entailed an experimental design with these major characteristics: concurrent and random assignment of defendants eligible for pretrial diversion to experimental and control groups; the creation of a large research population to permit adequate impact analysis (666 subjects were chosen over a 10-month period); a followup period of a year; and the development of an extensive data base, including material from several personal interviews with each subject and from official records. The most important finding was that clients' participation in educational, vocational, and other social activities was not significantly affected by their association with CEP. Moreover, the experimental group was not subsequently arrested for any fewer or less serious crimes than the control group during the study period. In response to these evaluation results, CEP determined that, although its services were basically appropriate for its clients, the mechanics of client selection needed changing. As of 1979, CEP accepted referrals from any court source, but participation in CEP was no longer a precondition for pretrial diversion from prosecution. In addition, the project began issuing reports to the referring source only with the voluntary agreement of the client. Also discussed are the diversion concept and rationale, their development over the 1970's, and the background and history of CEP. Appendixes provide study data and instruments, a description of the methodology, and a bibliography of approximately 125 references.