Successful Research-Practitioner Partnerships: Empirical Research in Honor of Joan Petersilia

Special Issue Editor

The goal of this special issue is to honor the legacy of Dr. Joan Petersilia, a policy and practitioner-oriented corrections and sentencing researcher of world renown, whom the field lost to cancer in September 2019 at the relatively young age of 68. I especially value the opportunity to guide the development of this issue, because Joan was my graduate mentor and was instrumental in my training and career advancement. She taught me a lot of lessons about the practice of research with practitioners and policymakers, some of which I list in the Dedication to her in the most recent volume of the American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections & Sentencing Handbook Series (Lane, 2020).

Joan was an amazing person and researcher, who spent more than 45 years working to bridge the gap between scholarly research and policy and practice, first at RAND Corporation and then at the University of California, Irvine and Stanford University. I know anecdotally that many people in the field have aspired to be like her. This is certainly true of her doctoral students that I know. She was the 1990 President of the American Society of Criminology. This year is the 30^th anniversary of her presidential address, in which she lamented the weakening impact of criminology on practice and policy. She argued that researchers too often focused on what was wrong rather than on solutions, did not directly engage with practitioners and policymakers, unnecessarily wrote in complicated ways, and earned no structural rewards for their policy-related research work. I would argue that many of her points then still apply.

In her address, she contended that we should make “policymakers (including funders) and practitioners confident that our research is relevant and responsive to their needs-without compromising the higher objectives of research” (Petersilia, 1991, p. 12). In the thirty years since her address, scholars in many areas of criminology have made much progress toward bridging this gap. Justice Quarterly has supported this effort in its aim to encourage submissions that provide “methodologically sound evaluations of current and emerging practice.” This issue aims to celebrate Petersilia’s legacy 30 years after her call for research to focus on improving policy and practice, through publishing articles that honor her commitment to building true academic-policymaker/practitioner partnerships to improve the administration of justice. The articles published here vary in how much their authors were actually immersed in the field with those doing the practical and policy work as Joan hoped for, but all of them have the explicit aim of using empirical results to make their findings pragmatically relevant to those doing the hard task of trying to administer justice. The articles also cover an array of justice topics, including policing networks and initiatives, 911 calltakers and dispatchers, jail population reduction, corrections officer suicides, solitary confinement, and implementation fidelity across different community-based programs.

My assessment of the field thirty years after Joan called for more of this work is that these types of true partnerships are still very difficult to pull off and are too rare. In my opinion, this is in part because they require adequate funding, different methodological skills than we often teach in graduate programs, continued persistence to establish, build, and maintain relationships outside of academe, a willingness to compromise and consider the research, economic, and political concerns of these justice partners throughout the research effort, and the ability to “do double duty” in writing, as Joan used to say. Academic researchers who immerse themselves in the field must write for both academics in traditional peer-reviewed outlets, so their work will be valued by their academic colleagues, and write more clearly and succinctly for practitioners and policymakers, often in outlets not valued by academia (see Petersilia, 1991). It is tough enough to keep up with the ever-increasing standards regarding academic publishing for tenure and promotion. It can also be frustrating to do the work and see few results, either in outcomes for those who participated in evaluated programs or in how practitioners and policymakers use (or do not use) the findings. Sometimes practitioners and policymakers ignore our work because we do not communicate it in ways that can be specific and useful. It is one thing to say in a policy implications section to “do a better job of preparing inmates for release.” It is another to give specific guidance on how to do that, as Joan did, for example, in suggesting that prisons consider implementing treatment, work and educational tracks in prison, encourage inmate responsibility by making daily life inside resemble that on the outside, and implement comprehensive prerelease planning starting at prison entry (Petersilia, 2003). I believe Joan’s approach to specifying policy implications is much more likely to make a real difference in justice practice.

Joan was one of few criminologists who embedded herself in the field wholeheartedly in an effort to bring research implications to practice, especially in her later career when she worked to give direct guidance to and teamed with state of California policymakers as they overhauled their correctional system. She believed she truly had an impact. She wrote, “I believe there are programs and policies that are in place today that would not be there except for my contributions” (Petersilia, 2008, p. 339). Many of us who do or have done evaluation research would not do it if we did not think we could make a difference. I hope the research published here will make concrete contributions to the field but will also encourage other criminologists and students to consider doing this tough but very satisfying work. Our justice systems affect millions of people. They need our help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jodi Lane

Jodi Lane earned her Ph.D. in 1998 at the University of California, Irvine, under the direction of Joan Petersilia. She briefly worked at RAND before becoming a professor at the University of Florida in 1999. Her work focuses broadly on reactions to crime, including policy, practitioner and public responses.