NCJ Number
226640
Date Published
March 2004
Length
48 pages
Annotation
This study by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) assessed progress in implementing recommendations from a previous GAO evaluation (1999) of the U.S. Justice Department’s Weed and Seed program, which aims to prevent and reduce violent crime in targeted neighborhoods through law enforcement (“weed”) and community-development (“seed”) efforts.
Abstract
The study found that despite some progress in implementing GAO’s recommendations from its 1999 evaluation, the Executive Office for Weed and Seed (EOWS) has not fully implemented the management-improvement recommendations. Although EOWS has revised its internal controls in order to require that significant qualification and funding decisions be documented and readily available for review in the central grant files, EOWS has not always ensured that its policies and procedures have been followed. EOWS reported taking a number of actions intended to improve program monitoring, such as mandating the timely submission of progress reports and adequate recording of site visits as GAO recommended; however, GAO found in the current assessment that although EOWS was able to provide such documentation before the review ended, documentation was not available in some of the central grant files reviewed by GAO. Further, GAO found that EOWS still lacks fully developed criteria for determining when Weed and Seed sites become self-sustaining and when to reduce or withdraw Weed and Seed funds because of the level of sustainability, even though such sustainability is the central goal of the program. Regarding another recommendation from the 1999 evaluation, EOWS has not developed outcome performance measures that can be used to track progress toward program outcomes. Although EOWS has initiated studies of how to develop performance measures, at the time of the current review, none of these studies had been completed, which means that definitive, reliable, and valid measures of program progress do not exist. Appended study scope and methodology, site-visit summary, proposed legislation, selected activities of EOWS, activity data collected by EOWS in fiscal year 2003, EOWS’s ongoing and completed studies, and comments on this review from the U.S. Justice Department