THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE SOLUTIONS to crime and violence in Jamaica is usually looked at from the supply side: Bullets, Guns and Destruction (BGD). The solution to crime problems worldwide is being solved from the demand side, People, Progress and Development (PPD).
The evaluation of policies, strategies and action in the field of crime prevention and community safety, notably the evaluation of their effects, impacts, and cost-effectiveness, has been the subject of considerable interest for several years.
Government centres with responsibility for crime prevention and community safety such as the Home Office in England, the National Crime Prevention Centre in Canada, or the Permanent Secretariat for Prevention Policy in Belgium have included an important evaluation component in their strategies and initiatives. Centres for research and policy analysis the ICPC, the research division of the Home Office, the Australian Institute of Criminology, and the Department of Justice in the United States have all produced syntheses of the results of evaluation studies on a range of prevention programmes and strategies.
Most authors agree that, unlike fundamental research, evaluation research should be useful and should be used. It should be useful to policy decision-making, useful to programme management, and useful to the practitioner on the site.
PRACTICAL & COST EFFECTIVE
However, apart from pronouncements "what counts is what works" calling for the implementation of policies and programmes which have been shown to be practical and cost effective, the translation of evaluation research findings into programme decisions is far from systematic. Who does not know of programmes that continue to be funded despite the fact that they have been shown to be ineffective, especially in the area of criminal justice? There are programmes that have been shown to be effective and efficient and yet are still implemented only here and there and without assurance of ongoing funding, rather than being integrated into a comprehensive strategy.
Also, it is often difficult for politicians and managers to translate the results of evaluation studies into policies and integrated strategies. Often evaluations focus on isolated, time-limited projects, with little known about their context or potential for replication. This may in part explain why it is easier for decision-makers to support individual projects, on a pilot or experimental basis, rather than develop a systematic programme with comprehensive measures.
In crime prevention, psycho-social interventions aimed at individuals and situational interventions aimed at improving the security of public places, such as the use of closed circuit television, can find themselves side by side in government approaches without apparent explanatory links. As well, certain types of quantitative evaluations have more appeal by force of numbers than context evaluations that are sometimes more qualitative.
Perhaps, this is also the reason that actions targeting individual psychological factors appear on the government agenda more often than community-based social development actions; the former lend themselves more easily to quantitative, quasi-experimental evaluations than the latter which are much more difficult to evaluate. One could therefore say that the previous saying becomes "what works is what counts or is countable..." Finally, the use of evaluation results to influence public policy is far from universal.
For methodological and even epistemological reasons sometimes, but also for theoretical and practical ones concerned with the very concepts of prevention and community safety, some observers remain sceptical. They are concerned about the validity of evaluating isolated projects, which are time-limited, sometimes undertaken after the fact, and which attempt to isolate certain variables from their larger social contexts. More specifically, doubts have been raised about the capacity to construct a logical sequence of cause and effect.
SCEPTICISM
This scepticism also relates to the difficulty of transmitting the results of evaluation into practice, notably because quasi-experimental types of evaluation are perhaps less sensitive to the processes underlying the success or the failure of such and such a measure.
At a time when it has become fashionable, as with private enterprises, to measure the efficiency (cost-effectiveness) of government action, evaluation has acquired much greater importance in general discussion if not in practice.
But should evaluation primarily serve to determine the efficiency of government measures? To ask this question is also to ask about the final outcome of government policies. Are these measures governed by the same principles as those used by private enterprise? What is the role of societal values? What is the role of components that are difficult to assess, such as "the public good"? How do we include and assess these factors within a context of evaluation? And when we will have evaluations that are well done, what should be our expectations regarding their use by decision-makers and managers? In sum, why do we evaluate?
I am, etc.,
PETER JONES
liontraders@yahoo.com
Peter Jones is the executive director of the Economic Development Institute, a
non-profit Jamaican economic development consultancy.
