The diffusion and adoption of justice reinvestment across the United States
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Justice reinvestment is a criminal justice policy process that has been widely adopted in the American states over the past two decades. With an explicit focus on downsizing prisons, evidence-based decision-making, and the local and contextual aspects of crime, it is a unique policy innovation that differs greatly from much of the criminal justice policymaking that has occurred over the past fifty years. Much of the diffusion of justice reinvestment has occurred through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a public-private partnership between the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and several nonprofit organizations. This research examines the internal determinants of state adoption, employing a multivariate statistical model to examine the predictors of state adoption of justice reinvestment during two time periods—at the time of the conception of the idea in 2003 and after federal funding and the creation of the Council of State Governments Justice Center in 2007. The results of the latter model showed that states with higher innovativeness scores were less likely to adopt the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. These findings suggest that the Justice Reinvestment Initiative may be appealing to states that do not have the capacity and the readiness to implement far-reaching criminal justice reforms, and are less likely to create innovative criminal justice reforms on their own.
Description
Keywords
Criminal justice reform, Evidence-based policymaking, Justice Reinvestment, Policy diffusion, State characteristics