Causal Research on Community Safety and the Criminal Justice System

Overview

Arnold Ventures (AV) is a nonpartisan philanthropy whose core mission is to invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. AV focuses on correcting system failures in the United States through evidence-based solutions. AVs’ Criminal Justice Initiative seeks to generate new evidence to inform policies that will make communities safer and make the criminal justice system more fair and effective.

This Request for Proposals (RFP) from the Criminal Justice Initiative (CJI) seeks letters of interest to conduct causal research projects of policies, practices, and interventions related to community safety and the criminal justice system.

Looking for a research idea? Check out this list of recently-passed policies in the crime/criminal justice space.

To be eligible to submit through this funding opportunity, research projects must adhere to the following criteria:

• Propose a strong causal research design, which can reliably and validly isolate the treatment effect of a policy, practice, or intervention. Examples of such research designs include difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variable, and randomization.
• The policy, practice, or intervention being tested is in the United States.
• Outcomes include measures of real-world behaviors (such as crime rates or criminal justice involvement), as opposed to measures collected in a controlled lab setting or measures of perceptions.

Submissions are welcome across all issues of crime and criminal justice that meet the above criteria. The ultimate goal of this RFP is to build credible evidence on policies, practices, and interventions that can improve crime and justice system outcomes and grow the number of policies and practices rigorously shown to produce improvements in community safety and to make the justice system fairer and more effective.

We will prioritize studies that:

• Focus on interventions where there is a clear path to federal and/or state policy adoption or implementation. Is there a state or federal policy lever available to scale this intervention?
• Outcomes are measured using administrative data, where they exist.
• Are led by researchers who have not previously received funding from Arnold Ventures as the primary or principal investigator, or are early-career/junior researchers (those who received their PhD in the past 6 years).

We ask interested researchers to submit a letter of interest for AV consideration (maximum of three pages). Applicants whose letters are reviewed favorably, based on the eligibility and prioritization criteria above, will be invited to submit a full proposal (full proposals must be invited). There is no deadline for submitting a letter of interest. 

Arnold Ventures anticipates that project budgets will depend on a variety of factors, including the complexity of the data acquisition and analysis plans, the number of study sites, and the study timeline. While there is no budget ceiling or fixed period of performance for applications received under this RFP, we expect to support projects that align with a typical CJI research project that has a median budget of $500,000 spread over 3-4 years.