Smart Link of the Day: What works? What doesn’t?

Early this week, the U.S. Justice Department launched a new website. Crime Solutions does one simple thing – it tells me what works and what doesn’t when it comes to effective programs and initiatives in criminal justice, crime prevention and services for victims of crime.

I love their simple, and visual, rating system. It uses evidence based research to tell me whether or not a program is successful at achieving its goals. Brilliant.

If you’re a research geek like many of us in the Crime Prevention Council office, you can also dig into the methodology behind the reviews, the evaluation outcomes and the studies referenced in the process.

Smart on Crime in Waterloo Region clearly supports evidence based practice for crime prevention. In fact, we would go so far as to say that being smart on crime means we support initiatives and programs that are shown to work or have promise, and that we stop supporting initiatives and programs that don’t work.

Makes good, smart sense.

Public Safety Canada also publishes a list of Promising and Model Crime Prevention Programs. It’s always great to have access to Canadian examples and several of the projects listed in this report we are familiar with. It would be great to see some more dynamic information about the programs… the U.S Justice Department just might be leading the way on that front.