Throughout the justice field, demand is growing for cost-benefit analysis (CBA), an economic tool that compares the costs of programs or policies with the benefits they produce. Although there is no one-size-fits-all template for conducting a CBA, analysts and researchers must follow a common methodology, or series of steps. This toolkit guides use...
The costs and benefits of criminal justice policies and activities affect everyone. Understanding what goes into the costs of operating jails, prisons, probation and parole, courts, law enforcement agencies, treatment programs, and other segments of the criminal justice system is important for taxpayers, politicians, practitioners, and society as a...
The Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice(CBKB), a project of Vera’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit, convened a working group of researchers and policymakers to help advance the use of rigorous cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in decisions about criminal justice programs and policies. Input from the working group helped shape this white paper, wh...
A Roundtable Discussion
Public safety agencies face continuing budget pressure and need to get the greatest return from their scarce resources. New public safety technologies (PSTs) have the potential to make law enforcement more effective, whether it is an automated reporting system, protective gear for officers, a crime analysis program, or body cameras to record intera...
A few years ago, a colleague asked me a pointed question about cost-benefit analysis: "Is it useful or a bunch of baloney?" (Actually, her words were a bit saltier.) We had worked together at the New York City Office of Management and Budget—and budget offices incubate a healthy dose of skepticism. Analysts often hear claims that a dollar spent tod...
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
Vera’s Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice (CBKB) project has two main audiences for its work. One is a technical audience, including legislative, policy, budget and fiscal analysts, researchers, evaluators, criminologists, and others in similar or related professions. For these readers, the forest is important, but the trees are more ...
The Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice(CBKB), a project of Vera’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit, convened a working group of researchers and policymakers to help advance the use of rigorous cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in decisions about criminal justice programs and policies. Input from the working group helped shape this white paper, wh...
Considerations for Law Enforcement Executives
Like other government agencies, police departments are under great pressure to get the biggest return possible when investing taxpayers’ dollars in justice programs and policies. The Law Enforcement Forecasting Group of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance asked Vera to develop a resource to help police departments address ...
This post originally appeared on the blog of the Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice (CBKB), a Vera project. When U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke to the American Bar Association recently about a range of criminal justice issues, it was his announcement of a change in policies for charging low-level drug offenders that ma...
Notes from a Roundtable Discussion
As state and local budgets have become increasingly strained in recent years, interest in using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in criminal justice policymaking and planning has grown. Although reliable information on costs and benefits can help guide budget officials, policymakers, and legislators, most jurisdictions have not been able to create a sus...
Building the will and the way
The title of a new publication from Vera’s Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice (CBKB) is admittedly a mouthful: Building Cost-Benefit Analysis Capacity in Criminal Justice: Notes from a Roundtable Discussion. It also includes a dreaded word: capacity. “Capacity” is described as a vague, quasi-occult term in its entry in the Communicati...
Watch Washington State Senator Karen Fraser and Tina Chiu of the Vera Institute of Justice lead a discussion that will help legislators, legislative staff, and other policymakers learn about using cost-benefit analysis for criminal justice policy.
What You Need to Know
Christian Henrichson, senior policy analyst at the Vera Institute of Justice and Valerie Levshin, a former Vera policy analyst, provide a practical training on how to estimate marginal costs and collect data from justice agencies. Marginal costs differ in important ways from average costs and more accurately measure the economic impact of initiativ...
Watch Ben Bryant, an economist with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Carl Matthies, a senior policy analyst at the Vera Institute of Justice, for a webinar about sensitivity analysis. This webinar is a fairly technical presentation that requires undergraduate-level knowledge of microeconomics, statistics, and probability. Viewers will gain...
Tina Sanford, director of the New York State Office of Victim Services, Kathryn McCollister, assistant professor and health economist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, and Valerie Levshin, former policy analyst at the Vera Institute of Justice, provide an overview of victim costs, the methods used to estimate them, and how to use victi...