Randomized Controlled Trials of Criminal Justice Programs and Practices

Overview

Arnold Ventures (AV) is a nonpartisan philanthropy whose core mission is to invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. This Request for Proposals—a joint effort of AV’s Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy initiatives—seeks grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of criminal justice programs and practices (“interventions”) in the United States that fall into one of three tiers:

1. The intervention is backed by promising prior evidence suggesting it could produce sizable impacts on important criminal justice outcomes (e.g., prevent violence, reduce recidivism, minimize injustice, improve health/employment of persons formerly involved in the justice system);
2. The intervention is widely adopted in practice, but has not yet been rigorously evaluated and its impacts on key criminal justice outcomes are thus largely unknown; or
3. The intervention is growing in use and likely to become widely adopted, but has not yet been rigorously evaluated.

While this Request for Proposals focuses on RCTs, we will also consider certain rigorous quasiexperimental designs when random assignment is not feasible, as discussed under “study design” below. Submissions are welcome in all areas of criminal justice; we especially encourage those that align with a priority area of the Criminal Justice initiative (i.e., policing, pretrial justice, community supervision, prisons, and reintegration) or with the Evidence-Based Policy initiative’s focus on areas where prior studies have identified a number of promising interventions (e.g., youth crime prevention).

Our ultimate goal in this effort is to build credible evidence about “what works” to improve criminal justice outcomes and, in particular, to grow the number of criminal justice interventions rigorously shown to produce important improvements in people’s lives. Few such proven-effective interventions currently exist, and until they do, our nation will lack critical knowledge needed to move the needle on crime, injustice, and other key criminal justice outcomes.

What To Expect in the Grant Agreement:

We will ask awardees, as a condition of their award, to –

• Pre-register the study on the Open Science Framework (OSF) website and, prior to commencement of the study, upload a copy of the research and analysis plan described in their proposal.
• Provide us with brief phone or email updates on the study’s progress on a periodic basis, and before making any key decisions that could materially affect the study’s design or implementation.
• Submit concise reports on the impact findings at appropriate intervals. These reports should make it easy for readers to see the study’s main results and gauge their credibility (e.g., by showing the similarity of the treatment and control groups in pre-program characteristics, the amount of sample attrition, and the statistical significance of the impact findings).

- and –

• Make their datasets and related materials (e.g., survey instruments, code used to clean and analyze datasets) publicly available on the OSF site. We ask applicants to do this within one year of the last data collection, and only to the extent allowed under any confidentiality/privacy protections.

Letter of Intent required.

The Policy permits institutions of higher education, including community colleges, to receive an indirect cost rate of 15 percent (15%) of total direct project costs; all other organizations (e.g., non-profit, governmental, for-profit, etc.) may receive an indirect cost rate of 20 percent (20%) of total direct project costs.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis; there is no deadline.

We recognize the need to expand and diversify the pool of researchers with RCT experience. Thus we strongly encourage researchers who are new to RCTs, including those from groups historically underrepresented in the research community – such as researchers of color and women – to participate in this funding opportunity. We therefore want to clarify that such individuals who do not meet the experienced researcher” criterion themselves may still serve as a study’s lead researcher as long as they partner with a colleague who does meet the criterion and will play a key substantive role in the study.