Performance Measures for the
Criminal Justice System

Discussion Papers from the BJS-Princeton Project

October 1993, NCJ-143505

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics

Lawrence A. Greenfeld
Acting Director


Bureau of Justice Statistics - Princeton University
Study Group on Criminal Justice
Performance Measures

The goal of the BJS-Princeton Project is to engage the criminal justice community in a rigorous debate regarding appropriate measures and ways in which they can be effectively utilized by policymakers and practitioners.

Papers were prepared for Study Group review and dissemination by John J. DiIulio, Jr. (project director), James Q. Wilson (project advisor), Mark H. Moore, Joan Petersilia, Geoffrey P. Alpert, George F. Cole, and Charles H. Logan. The authors focus on selected components of the criminal justice system and the utility of performance measures for each. Other members of the study group are Norman A. Carlson, University of Minnesota; Wayne Estelle, former warden, California Men's Colony; James Short, Washington State University; and Steven K. Smith (project monitor), BJS.

This project is supported by BJS grant number 92-BJCX-0002 to Princeton University. The contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the U.S. Department of Justice.

Contents

Acknowledgments

A number of individuals actively contributed to the working group meetings, reviewed papers and provided comments, including Pamela Casey and Sally Hillsman of the National Center for State Courts; James P. Lynch, American University; Elizabeth McCaughey, Manhattan Institute; Anne Piehl, Harvard University; Allen J. Beck, Tom Hester, and John M. Dawson of BJS; and Steven D. Dillingham, former director of BJS and study group member. Production was administered by Marilyn Marbrook and Yvonne Boston of BJS.

Foreword

Efficiency, and fairness are central goals for the administration of criminal justice in the United States. Efficiency means economically applying available resources to accomplish statutory goals as well as to improve public safety. Effectiveness refers to carrying out justice system activities with proper regard for equity, proportionality, constitutional protections afforded defendants and convicted offenders, and public safety. Assuring equal treatment and handling of like offenders and giving equal weight to legally relevant factors in sentencing represent the types of concerns generally expressed about the fairness of the criminal justice system.

Unanimous agreement exists that the justice system ought to be efficient, effective, and fair. Less accord, however, exists about how best to secure these essential qualities or how to measure whether they have been achieved. Apart from the obvious problem of determining the measurement criteria for a particular performance expectation, there is a more difficult subsequent problem of determining what weight to give to the findings and what changes need to be made to resolve the gap between expectation and performance. Unlike marks on a ruler, criminal justice measures are not neutral standards but are factors that enter into the processes being analyzed-identifying relative degrees of improvement in fairness in sentencing, for example, would still indicate that the sentencing process was giving weight to information not legally relevant.

The essays in this volume take a new tack as their authors address all three concerns. The participants in the Bureau of Justice Statistics-Princeton Study Group focus attention on the problem of measurement with respect to these fundamental expectations for the administration of justice. After years of observing the justice system that they are now writing about, the authors provide some new ideas to consider for improving the justice system.

In the first essay, the director of the study group, John DiIulio, Jr., proposes a fresh way to understand or interpret the familiar elements in American criminal justice: prisons, community supervision, trial courts, and police. He establishes the theme that there must be a full and realistic accounting of the activities of criminal justice agencies. In calling for measures grounded in civic ideals, DiIulio also initiates the refrain that underlines the involvement of citizens in the work of those agencies.

Before the discussion curves back to DiIulio's and James Wilson's thoughts about the challenge of measuring performance in public organizations, the individual essays both widen the argument, taking in broader intellectual concepts, and narrow it, listing specific performance measures. In some cases, as in George Cole's presentation of measures for trial courts, the basic outlines of the activities remain untouched, while in other cases, as in Mark Moore's and Geoffrey Alpert's consideration of measures for police, the authors urge a departure from the familiar. In probation and parole, the rapid growth in the community supervision population, according to Joan Petersilia, has forced control out of the hands of corrections professionals. She believes that one way administrators can regain the operational levers is to define a mission and to measure clearly how well the agencies are achieving their goals.

BJS data: Delineating and testing performance measures

The participants in the BJS-Princeton Study Group reached their conclusions with few direct references to the basic numbers and statistics that BJS has reported over the past 20 years. Their task was to start hammering out an institutional template of concepts. As more persons enter the discussions about evaluating the administration of justice, however, increased attention will have to be paid to existing data and the need for new data.

A commonly held view, for example, is that the criminal justice system is chaotic and rather poorly administers the statutory expectations placed upon it. BJS data reveal that there may be more coherence between law and practice than is generally assumed:

Example: Over the last decade, States have reformed many of their criminal sentencing laws, largely aiming to increase the likelihood of a prison sentence. BJS data reveal that what the State and Federal lawmakers sought in these reforms has been achieved-the odds of imprisonment given conviction for most crimes has increased. The reforms effectively brought about three record high rates in the prison population: per capita, per reported crime, and per arrest.

Example: Over the last decade, as well, a "War on Drugs" was waged, and BJS data show that drug offenses now account for a larger share of convictions and imprisonments than ever before. BJS data tell us, in other words, that the public's legislative agenda produced the results that were being sought.

The criminal justice system is busy, with many millions of transactions taking place annually. Spending for criminal justice activities accounts for just over 3 cents of every dollar in public spending (about $74 billion)-less than 1% of Federal spending, more than 6% of spending by the States, and nearly 7% of local spending. Overall spending at all levels of government for justice activities is about equal to spending on transportation and just below that spent by government on hospitals and health.

The annual total for State and local justice translates into about $300 per capita of the nearly $9,000 annual per capita spent by government. While municipal and county governments accounted for 53% of all justice spending, the States accounted for 34%, and the Federal government just under 13%.

From 1985 to 1990, corrections spending has grown faster and spending on police has grown slower than any other components of the justice system. The following compare the increases in per capita spending (in constant dollars) occurring between 1985 and 1990 to the increases in workload:

• Spending on police protection grew 8%, the number of Index crimes reported by law enforcement agencies increased 16%, and the number of arrests grew 19%

• Spending on corrections grew 48%, the overall corrections population increased 45%.

Example: Besides delivering what the public and their legislators demanded, criminal justice agencies have maintained the quality of services provided. Between 1984 and 1990, BJS data on State prisons show-

• about a 2% reduction in the average amount of housing space per inmate (from 57 square feet to 56 square feet)

• about a 4% improvement in staffing per inmate (from 2.8 inmates per staff member to 2.7 inmates per staff member)

• the same percentage of prisons under court order to improve conditions of confinement or practices within the facility (24% of all prisons in both years)

• about twice the percentage of inmates involved in drug, alcohol, and personal counseling programs (14% versus 30%) and nearly 4 times the number of inmates in such programs on a single day (53,000 versus 193,000).

Example: BJS data can be used to evaluate the fairness with which the system is operating. Surveys conducted among representative samples of State prisoners in 1979, 1986, and 1991 reveal that while the offense composition has changed, with drug offenses accounting for more than twice the percentage of inmates in 1991 compared to earlier surveys, little has changed in the criminal histories of those confined. In all three surveys well over 9 out of 10 prisoners were either violent offenders or recidivists with prior sentences to confinement facilities or probation.

Research using a variety of sources including the National Crime Victimization Survey, the FBI data on arrests, and national prisoner surveys, has revealed that for personal contact crimes, the racial composition of offenders as identified by victims closely parallels the racial distribution of those arrested and sentenced to prison for the same crimes.

Data from recent national polls indicate that our citizens hold the criminal justice system in much lower esteem than they do most other public institutions. To operate a justice
system that is effective, efficient, and fair challenges us to think anew, examine, debate, and continuously measure and evaluate its practices. In the final analysis, how these measures are used to reduce the disparity between expectation and practice is fundamental to the credibility given to our collective ideal of justice.

Lawrence A. Greenfeld
Acting Director

Rethinking the Criminal Justice System: Toward a New Paradigm

By John J. DiIulio, Jr.

Overview: Beyond crime rates and recidivism rates

Rates of crime and recidivism have long served as critical measures for the performance of the Nation's criminal justice system. These measures represent the basic goals of public safety to which all components of the criminal justice system contribute. At the same time, however, rates of crime and recidivism are not the only, or necessarily the best, measures of what criminal justice institutions do.

Few police officers believe that their work solely determines crime rates in their jurisdiction. Few corrections officials believe that what they do chiefly determines recidivism rates. Likewise, most criminal court judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and other justice practitioners know from experience that the prevalence and severity of crime depend mainly on factors affecting individuals long before most are taken into custody. Most justice practitioners understand that they can rarely do for their clients what parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, clergy, big-genetic inheritances, or economic opportunities may have failed to do.¹

Still, crime rates and recidivism rates are meaningful overall measures of the system's performance in protecting public safety, and what justice practitioners do undoubtedly affects crime and recidivism rates. For example, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that rising imprisonment rates may have reduced crime rates in the Nation by 10% to 20%. ² Furthermore, numerous studies refute the once-fashionable idea that "nothing works" in the rehabilitation of criminals, showing that, other things being equal, offenders who participate in certain types of institutional or community-based treatment programs are less likely to be repeat offenders than the nonparticipants.³ While no evidence indicates that mere increases in police on auto patrol cut crime rates, a growing body of evidence establishes that crime and disorder are less common in neighborhoods where police get out of their cars and into regular contact with citizens. ⁴

Unquestionably, the justice system affects crime and recidivism rates. As James Q. Wilson has commented, given "the elasticity of crime or recidivism rates to feasible changes in police or correctional practices, how much of a change in these rates can be obtained at a given cost in money, liberty, etc.? Surely the answer is some number greater than zero. If it were zero, then we could abolish arrests and prisons with no adverse effects on society. Clearly, that is not something we would be inclined to try. It is true that the prevalence and severity of crime in society do not depend mainly on what justice practitioners do. But the real question is: What feasible changes in what institutions and practices will make the largest marginal changes in crime rates? Judged that way, it may turn out that arrest or imprisonment rates have bigger effects on marginal rates than any feasible change in family or school practices, because what one can feasibly change in family or school practices turns out to be pretty trivial."⁵

Toward a new paradigm

To evaluate the performance of police departments, correctional agencies, and other key components of the justice system exclusively in terms of crime rates and recidivism rates may cause observers to overlook other important contributions of the system's day-to-day performance and can obscure the role that average citizens play in promoting secure communities. A wide gap often exists between the general public's expectations for the justice system and what most justice practitioners recognize as the system's actual capacity to protect public well-being. This paper sketches an outline of a new paradigm encompassing the criminal justice system's history, vision, purposes, and measures. Four points of qualification, however, are in order.⁶

First, this call for a new paradigm is not motivated by a desire to design performance measures that guarantee justice agency success. Rather, it represents an attempt to develop realistic intermediate and long-range measures. Realistic measures account for the daily activities of justice agencies and for the constraints under which they normally operate. Realistic, however, does not mean easy to achieve. Indeed, the alternate measures presented in subsequent papers in this volume are measures according to which many justice institutions, programs, and practices now fail.

Second, better performance measures do not act like magnets for better ways of meeting goals. All performance measures have their limitations and may invite perverse and unintended administrative consequences. Still, justice practitioners probably can learn something about how to fashion and implement effective performance measures from the experiences of other organizations, public and private.

Third, a paradigm is broader than a theory. A theory is a statement about the relationship between two or more variables that is supposed to hold under specified conditions. ⁷ A new paradigm orients general understanding to historical, empirical, or normative realities that a prevailing paradigm has arguably de-emphasized, devalued, or simply ignored. In essence, to call for a new paradigm is to appeal for new concepts and categories of thinking about a given subject.

Fourth, crime rates and recidivism rates are indeed important measures of the system's performance, which ought to be continually used and refined. Even so, all citizens in a democracy are responsible to some degree for the way in which society addresses the problem of crime. In addition, justice agencies serve the public in myriad ways that are indirectly related to crime control goals, and society should devise and implement performance measures that respect this reality.

History: Multiple, vague, and contradictory purposes

The history of the American criminal justice system is a history of swings in public mood. Americans have long been ambivalent about the purposes of criminal justice.⁸ Among other things, they have wanted a criminal justice system that apprehends and visits harm upon the guilty (punishment); makes offenders more virtuous, or at least more law abiding (rehabilitation); dissuades would-be offenders from criminal pursuits (deterrence); protects innocent citizens from being victimized by convicted criminals (incapacitation); and enables most criminals to return as productive citizens to the bosom of the free community (reintegration). They have wanted the system to achieve these contradictory public goals without violating the public conscience (humane treatment), jeopardizing the public law (constitutional rights), emptying the public purse (cost containment), or weakening the tradition of State and local public administration (federalism).

Because the competing public expectations cannot be easily met all at once, first one and then another dominate public attention. Justice policymakers and practitioners have generally allowed the institutional and programmatic pendulum to swing with the public mood between different approaches to crime prevention and control.⁹

For example, between 1967 and 1992, the Federal Government fought two very different wars on crime. The first war (1967-80) was against poverty; the second (1980-92) was against criminals. In the first war the social and economic "root causes" of crime were attacked; in the second war the likelihood that criminals would be detected, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated was increased. The chief strategists in the first war were persons who believed that the Federal Government should play a central role in crime control. They emphasized the goals of offender rehabilitation, reintegration, humane treatment, and constitutional rights. The chief strategists in the second war were persons who believed that law enforcement was primarily a State and local responsibility. They emphasized the goals of punishment, deterrence, cost containment, and federalism.

Some justice practitioners have coped fairly successfully with such shifts in public sentiment, but many have not.

Despite the conflicting and changeful public demands on them, some police commissioners have been able to "make themselves accountable to the public by defining their purposes in broad terms and then by trying to keep their own actions, and the actions of their organizations, consistent with these broad purposes."¹⁰ Similarly, some corrections commissioners have coped well by means of "a creative capacity to translate broad societal expectations and policy decrees into administrative action." ¹¹ Yet, the fact remains that these swings in public mood and policy have fostered administrative instability, frustrated longterm planning, and bred bureaucratic norms that insulate practitioners from what they sometimes view as a fickle, generally unappreciative, and often hostile public.

Democratic vision: Citizens as co-producers of justice

In the light of this history, a moderating, democratic vision of the justice system's public purposes and limitations is both necessary and desirable. Such a vision emerges from the realization that all citizens have the right and the responsibility to participate in the system. Citizens are co-producers of justice.¹² The ability of justice practitioners to do their daily work depends on the cooperation and support of citizens who are formally "outside" the system -a citizen willing to testify against a violent drug dealer; a community group that trusts and assists the police; relatives, friends, and employers who help to keep a community-based offender on the straight-and-narrow. Citizens, not judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, or corrections officials, are primarily responsible for the quality of life in their communities, including the prevalence and severity of crime within them.

As many honest friends of democracy have argued down through the ages, democratic citizens are wont to hold everyone but themselves accountable for public problems and to become impatient when facile solutions do not produce immediate results.¹³ Citizens in a democracy must begin by holding themselves and their neighbors accountable for public affairs. A democratic vision of the justice system, therefore, is anything but a sop to public frustrations with crime and disorder. Citizens who expect judges, police, and other justice officials to solve society's crime problems are unrealistic; citizens should not expect the officials to succeed without the active cooperation and support of the community.

Criminal-justice purposes: Four civic ideals

This democratic vision supplies a rationale for identifying the major purposes of the system in terms of four civic ideals:

(1) Doing justice,
(2) Promoting secure communities,
(3) Restoring crime victims, and
(4) Promoting noncriminal options.

Justice can be defined as the quality of treating individuals according to their civic rights and in ways that they deserve to be treated by virtue of relevant conduct. Criminal justice is rights-respecting treatment that is deserved by virtue of criminal conduct as judged by the rule of law.¹⁴ Thus, doing justice implies at least four things: hold offenders fully accountable for their offenses, protect offenders' constitutional and legal rights, treat like offenses alike, and take into account relevant differences among offenders and offenses.

Promoting secure communities means more than to achieve low crime rates. Rather, it means providing the security to life, liberty, and property that is necessary for communities to flourish. It means enabling citizens to pursue their collective life as they see fit without undue fear of having that life disrupted or destroyed. It means securing communities against criminals who assault, rape, rob, defraud, deal drugs, burglarize, extort, and murder, but it also means securing them against the community-sapping disorders that are commonly associated with crime and the fear of crime-disorders such as petty crime, public drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, loitering, graffiti, abandoned cars, broken windows, and abandoned buildings.¹⁵

Restoring victims means to honor the community's obligation to make victims of crime and disorder whole again. The victims' rights organizations, manifestos, and laws that have proliferated over the last decade or so generally reflect and embody this long-overlooked goal.¹⁶ Victims of crime have a special claim upon the criminal justice system's human and financial resources. Whatever else it may achieve, no system that dishonors that claim can be considered legitimate.

Finally, promoting noncriminal options means that punishment for criminal behavior should interfere as little as possible with the pursuit of noncriminal behavior. Even in prison, offenders should have at least some opportunity to engage in meaningful, constructive, and legitimate activities. Nor should government impose arbitrary restrictions on employment or other legitimate activities by convicted offenders except where justified as a form of punishment or where public safety is at risk. This is not to say that society has any greater obligation toward the betterment of offenders than it owes to nonoffenders. It is not even to say that government has an obligation toward the betterment of offenders and nonoffenders alike. But one function of government is to promote (not necessarily to provide) legitimate opportunities and to facilitate (not necessarily to require or directly to reward) their pursuit.

Realistic performance measures

These four civic purposes point beyond crime rates and recidivism rates and toward more realistic ways of measuring the performance of justice institutions, programs, and practices. By no means is this the first call for such measures. During both of the Federal wars on crime from the 1960's through the 1980's, a number of well-intentioned efforts were made to rethink the measures commonly used to evaluate the system's performance. (See Selected sources of measurement topics, p. 17.) Few of these efforts moved much beyond a rehashing of such concepts as crime rates and recidivism rates, and none had a wide or lasting impact on the field. In conjunction with his work on the Study Group, Logan has developed a set of performance measures for secure correctional institutions.

The measures Logan proposes for prisons and jails have the virtue of not asking criminal justice institutions to do what other social institutions are more responsible for doing and in many cases what other social institutions have failed to do. They do not, for example, ask our corrections officials to somehow "correct the incorrigible, rehabilitate the wretched, deter the determined, restrain the dangerous, and punish the wicked." ¹⁷ But they do demand that, with the human and financial resources that society has provided, and with the requisite support of other social institutions, the officials must "keep prisoners-keep them in, keep them safe, keep them in line, keep them healthy, and keep them busy-and do it with fairness, without undue suffering, and as efficiently as possible."¹⁸ That alone is asking a great deal, but it is not asking too much.

By the same token, it makes little sense to measure police performance in terms of crime or arrest rates. Geoffrey P. Alpert and Mark H. Moore have developed an expanded range of policing measures. In anticipation of their contribution, it is worth highlighting George L. Kelling's recent article, "Measuring What Matters: A New Way of Thinking About Crime and Public Order." After documenting that the New York City Police Department has been doing quite well in relation to such conventional measures as crime rates, arrest rates, emergency response times, and incidence of corruption, Kelling keenly observes:

But New Yorkers are not the least bit reassured by these statistical and relative achievements.... These formal measures of police work have little to do with community needs.... [A] significant reason disorder has been ignored is that professional criminal justice ideology narrowly defines the appropriate business of police and criminal justice agencies as dealing with serious crime-that is, index crimes. Crime response, and arrest statistics, form a pillar of that ideology. Disorder does not appear in any FBI index; therefore, it has not been a priority.¹⁹

Conclusion: Toward a new paradigm?

Is it possible for justice officials to develop, implement, and organize themselves around performance measures that go beyond conventional measures such as rates of crime and recidivism? And can this be done for all components of the system-courts, prosecutors' offices, police departments, institutional corrections, community-based corrections?

The papers that follow in this compendium will tackle these questions and offer specific, detailed proposals for new measures consistent with the historical understanding, democratic vision, and civic purposes outlined above. In addition, they spell out the practical and policy implications of adopting the new paradigm and spotlight its implications for how agencies allocate resources, conduct program evaluations, and so on.

It is worth noting that many of the most successful major corporations use multiple performance measures that give tremendous weight to "soft" indicators along with sales reports, inventory records, and other "hard" financial data. For example, McDonald's Corporation has measured performance not simply by the conventional bottom line of profits, but by a dozen or so measures that roving teams of inspectors apply-Are the floors clean? Are the salt shakers full? Are the cashiers greeting customers and wearing their uniforms correctly? and so on. McDonald's recognized that the profits made by their stores were conditioned by economic and other factors over which their franchisees had little or no direct control. But the store owners, managers, and staff could be and are held strictly accountable for other factors that might affect business. ²⁰

Likewise, over the last decade, the United States military has made great strides in developing reasonable and realistic measures of combat readiness and combat effectiveness. Prodded by government and private studies that found a need for improvements in military planning, and in the areas of weapons acquisition, combat training, and force deployment, each branch of the military responded by revamping certain of its strategic doctrines and practices, and by getting away from simple "bean counting" measures. While many improvements have yet to be made, the military has begun to think about new and better ways of linking its national security mission to meaningful performance standards and objectives.²¹

The performance measurement lesson that much of corporate America and the American military have learned is one that the American justice system can also apply. Crime rates, recidivism rates, and other conventional bottom-line measures must have better grounding in community needs and must be joined to a realistic set of performance standards. The Study Group hopes to provide a gentle, democratic shove in that direction, and to get policymakers, practitioners, analysts, activists, and interested citizens thinking and debating toward a new paradigm of the American justice system.

About the author

John J. DiIulio, Jr., is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as founding director of Princeton's Center of Domestic and Comparative Policy Studies. He is a member of the National Commission on State and Local Public Service and served as an advisor to the National Performance Review. His most recent book is Improving Government Performance: An Owner's Manual (Brookings, 1993).

Selected sources of measurement topics

Gordon P. Whitaker, Stephen Mastrofski, Elinor Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, and Stephen L. Percy, Basic Issues in Police Performance, National Institute of Justice, July 1982.

Joan E. Jacoby, Basic Issues in Prosecution and Public Defender Performance, National Institute of Justice, July 1982.

Thomas J. Cook and Ronald W. Johnson, with Ellen Fried, John Gross, Mary Wagner, and James Eisenstein, Basic Issues in Courts Performance, National Institute of Justice, July 1982.

Gloria Grizzle, Jeffrey S. Bass, J. Thomas McEwen, Deborah M. Galvin, Ann G. Jones, Harriet D. Mowitt, and Ann D. Witte, Basic Issues in Corrections Performance, National Institute of Justice, July 1982.

Martha R. Burt, Measuring Prison Results: Ways to Monitor and Evaluate Corrections Performance, National Institute of Justice, June 1981.

Sorrel Wildhorn, Marvin Lavin, and Anthony Pascal, Indicators of Justice: Measuring the Performance of Prosecution, Defense, and Court Agencies Involved in Felony Proceedings; A Guide to Practitioners, National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, U.S. Department of Justice, May 1977.

Sorrel Wildhorn, Marvin Lavin, Anthony Pascal, Sandra Berry, and Stephen Klein, Indicators of Justice: Measuring the Performance of Prosecution, Defense, and Court Agencies Involved in Felony Proceedings; Analysis and Demonstration, National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, U.S. Department of Justice, May 1977.

Jack D. Reynolds, Performance Measurement in Probation and Parole, Washington, D.C.: University Research Corporation, 1979.

Benjamin H. Renshaw, A Recommended Set of Indicators for Evaluating the Performance of the Philadelphia Criminal Justice System. Philadelphia: Government Studies & Systems, Inc., 1971.

Criminal Justice Performance Measures for Prisons

by Charles H. Logan

This is the second in a series of papers on how to measure and evaluate the performance of various agencies within the American criminal justice system. The first paper argued the need for new criminal justice performance measures in addition to such conventional ones as crime rates, arrest rates, and recidivism rates.¹ This paper extends that argument and applies it to prisons. It starts with a very brief and general definition of criminal justice from a retributive (or "just deserts") perspective. Such a perspective is rights-based rather than utilitarian, which implies that evaluative indicators and measures of criminal justice should focus more on the satisfaction of certain standards, values, and constraints than on the production of particular consequences. In Herbert Packer's terms, they should focus more on the "DueProcess Model" than on the "Crime Control Model" of criminal justice.² The paper will then outline the "confinement model" of imprisonment, which rests on a normative statement of mission for a prison or prison system. Finally, the paper will offer a set of empirical indicators that can be used as performance measures for prisons and that concentrate on the competent, fair, and efficient administration of confinement as a form of deserved punishment. While based on the deserts theory of criminal justice, these measures will be seen to be at least somewhat sensitive also to such goal-based concerns as rehabilitation of inmates and protection of society, albeit for reasons independent of those utilitarian justifications of imprisonment.

What is criminal justice?

Justice is the quality of treating individuals according to their rights and in ways that they deserve to be treated by virtue of relevant conduct. Criminal justice is rights respecting treatment that is deserved by virtue of criminal conduct.

This definition of justice is rights-based, rather than utilitarian or consequentialist. A rights-based theory of justice gives a central role to punishment as a morally necessary response to the violation of rights. To believe in rights is to believe in duties; those are alternative statements of the same concept. To believe in duties is to accept, implicitly but of logical necessity, the corollary of punishment. When we say that people have a duty to refrain from violating the rights of others, we are saying that there must be some sanction if they fail to meet that duty. Duties are given meaning by the consequences that attach to their nonfulfillment. Thus, the meaning of a duty, like that of any other norm, must be socially constructed through the attachment of sanctions to behavior. A norm (a rule, a law, a duty, a right) that had no sanction attached to its violation would be empty and without meaning.

Justice by this definition is backward-looking. It requires that we treat people according to what they have done, not what they (or others!) might do in the future as a result of how we treat them now. Justice requires that all persons, including offenders, be treated as autonomous and responsible actors and as ends in themselves, not as means to social ends.

Finally, a rights-based theory sees justice as a process, an ongoing property of criminal sanctioning as it occurs, not as an expected outcome. Criminal justice is thus a value in itself and not merely useful as a means to some other end. Sanctioning that is evaluated as to its justice or injustice may, in addition, be evaluated in terms of its consequences for other values, such as freedom, order, happiness, wealth, or welfare, but those are separate concerns. This means that questions about the effectiveness or efficiency of the criminal justice system in achieving various "goals" or "purposes" should be kept separate from, and secondary to, an evaluation of the performance of the justice system in its most basic mission: doing justice.³

The nonutilitarian concept of prison performance

To date, most evaluation research on prisons has focused on utilitarian questions. What are the goals of imprisonment? To what extent and at what cost are they achieved? How does imprisonment compare to alternatives in these respects? If we want evaluations of prison performance that are based on a normative rather than a utilitarian view of criminal justice, we need to reframe our question. We might ask, for example, "To what values do prisons commit themselves in their mission statements, and how well do they live up to those values?"

Social scientists are not comfortable with the idea of applying the tools of measurement directly to questions of value. That's why criminologists are attracted to utilitarianism, because it allows them to treat evaluative research on prisons as if it were a purely objective, scientific enterprise. In contrast, a court-appointed special master, who is usually a lawyer rather than a social scientist, evaluates a prison mostly from a formalistic rather than a utilitarian perspective. That is, the prison and its activities are examined not as means to an end (rehabilitation or crime control) but in terms of standards and criteria of "proper" performance, or conduct in fulfillment of duty. Consider this statement by a prominent prison master:⁴

In summary, the ideal prison provides basic human services in a decent and healthful physical environment. Such a prison abjures idleness and its consequent human deterioration by offering constructive employment, programming, and recreational activities to the greatest extent possible; it addresses the human needs of prisoners for self-expression, faith, and maintenance of ties of importance to all human beings; it ensures safety from random violence, rape, and exploitation of the weak by the strong; it insulates decisions affecting the lives of prisoners from arbitrary chaos by adhering to due process of law; and it infuses the institutional environment with constructive expectations through use of positive incentives for hard work and good behavior.

That is not a bad statement of the mission of a prison, and it is probably one with which most correctional officials could agree. The most important point to note here is that it does not focus on ultimate goals, such as treatment or punishment, but on a set of abstract values and normative criteria against which to evaluate the day-to-day operation of a prison.

A prison mission statement under the confinement model

We ask an awful lot of our prisons. We ask them to correct the incorrigible, rehabilitate the wretched, deter the determined, restrain the dangerous, and punish the wicked. We ask them to take over where other institutions of society have failed and to reinforce norms that have been violated and rejected. We ask them to pursue so many different and often incompatible goals that they seem virtually doomed to fail. Moreover, when we lay upon prisons the utilitarian goals of rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation, we ask them to achieve results primarily outside of prison, rather than inside. ⁵ By focusing on external measures, we set prisons up to be judged on matters well beyond their direct sphere of influence.

If we do not want to set them up for failure, we must assign to prisons a function and a mission that we might reasonably expect them to fulfill. This mission ought to be fairly narrow and consistent in scope, and it ought to be special to prisons, rather than conflated with the functions of other social institutions such as schools or welfare agencies. It also ought to be achievable and measurable mostly within the prison itself.⁶ Finally, a prison's mission ought to have intrinsic, and not just instrumental, value. That is, it should identify activities that have value in themselves, when they meet certain standards and criteria of performance, not activities that have value only if, when, and because they are effective in achieving some further goal.

The prison mission statement proposed here is based on a "just deserts" theory of criminal justice, one that calls for a punitive and purely retributive (that is, a non-utilitarian) response to criminal conduct. Punishment under such a theory does not need to take the form of incarceration, but since this paper is about prison performance measures, I will narrow the theory down to what I call the "confinement model" of imprisonment.

Under the confinement model, the essential purpose of imprisonment is to punish offenders-fairly and justly- through lengths of confinement proportionate to the gravity of their crimes. Thus the term, "confinement model," may be thought of as a shortened version of a clumsier but more explicit label: the "doing justice through confinement as a form of punishment model."

The mission of a prison under the confinement model can be summarized quite succinctly:

The mission of a prison is to keep prisoners-to keep them in, keep them safe, keep them in line, keep them healthy, and keep them busy-and to do it with fairness, without undue suffering, and as efficiently as possible.

The confinement mission of prisons is not as narrow as it may seem at first, nor is it necessarily harsh or insensitive to the welfare of prisoners. It should be noted that under the confinement model offenders are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment. It is not within the legitimate mission of a prison to attempt to add to (any more than to avoid or to compensate for) the pain and suffering inherent in being forcibly separated from civil society. Stated more positively, coercive confinement carries with it an obligation to meet the basic needs of prisoners at a reasonable standard of decency. Thus, measures of health care, safety, sanitation, nutrition, and other aspects of basic living conditions are relevant. Furthermore, confinement must meet constitutional standards of fairness and due process, so it is not just the effectiveness and efficiency, but also the procedural justice with which confinement is imposed that is important. In addition, programmatic activities like education, recreation, and work can be seen as part of the conditions of confinement, regardless of their alleged effects on rehabilitation. In short, confinement is much more than just warehousing.

Under the confinement model, a prison does not have to justify itself as a tool of rehabilitation or crime control or any other instrumental purpose at which an army of critics will forever claim it to be a failure. It proclaims itself to be, first and foremost, an agent of justice, and not necessarily an agent of either individual or social change. It asks to be judged only on its performance in carrying out the sanction of confinement-as-punishment; the effectiveness of that sanction may be a valid and important question, but it is not relevant to the measurement of prison performance under the confinement model.

What, then, are the relevant criteria?

Prison performance criteria under the confinement model

It might seem that measuring prison performance within a confinement model would be fairly simple-and indeed it is more straightforward than attempting to measure the success of rehabilitation, deterrence, or incapacitation (let alone the net effects of imprisonment on all three of these in combination)-but it is by no means easy. Still, the confinement model does facilitate performance measurement, because it focuses less on the achievement of ultimate and abstract goals and more on the fulfillment of delimited and immediate tasks. It shifts our attention away from hard-to-determine outcomes and toward more directly observable processes and adherence to measurable standards.

The confinement mission of a prison, as stated above, identifies eight distinct dimensions for prison performance measures: Security, Safety, Order, Care, Activity, Justice, Conditions, and Management. Each of these dimensions will be discussed briefly.

1. Security ("keep them in"). A secure facility is one that is impervious in either direction, outward or inward. Escapes are an obvious indicator of a lack of security, but inward penetration, of drugs or other contraband, also represents a breakdown of external security. Internal security would include control over movement of prisoners within the prison and control over internal movement of contraband, such as food or silverware from the dining hall, drugs from the infirmary, or tools from workshops.

2. Safety ("keep them safe"). Inmates and staff need to be kept safe, not only from each other but from various environmental hazards as well. Thus, measures of safety would include assault statistics, safety inspection results, and accidental injury reports.

3. Order ("keep them in line"). Prisons run on rules, and the ability of prison administrators to enforce compliance is central to prison performance. Allowing for variation in the nature of their populations, it seems proper to evaluate prisons according to their ability to prevent disturbances, minimize inmate misconduct, and otherwise preserve order inside their walls.

4. Care ("keep them healthy"). I use the term "care" rather than "service" to cover the ministrations of such personnel as doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and dieticians. The distinction is primarily one of degree and entitlement. Convicts are entitled only to a very basic, minimal level of personal care consistent with the principle that it is not the purpose of imprisonment to inflict physical suffering. At a minimum, prisons have an obligation to try to prevent suicide, malnutrition, exposure to the elements, and the spread of contagious diseases. Beyond the level of very basic care, however, the simple fact of confinement does not entitle convicts to levels of service or to degrees of personal welfare that exceed what they are able to obtain with their own resources. Therefore, when rating prisons on this dimension an evaluator might choose not to make distinctions beyond a certain level.

5. Activity ("keep them busy"). When evaluating prisons under a rehabilitation model, heavy emphasis is usually given to inmate programs; under a confinement model, programs are still relevant, but on a different basis. Programs can be classified into five different types: work, training, education, recreation, and therapy. All five types are relevant under a confinement model but in each case any rehabilitative effect a program might have is not directly relevant to its evaluation. Therapeutic programs are so closely associated with the rehabilitative ideal that they are difficult to recast in terms of the confinement model. They can, however, be offered as a form of "care," and evaluated according to the principles discussed under that dimension. Programs of the other three types should be judged according to how much opportunity they provide inmates to engage in constructive activity or enterprise.

"Constructive" activity is not defined here as "contributing to the betterment of inmates" but as activity that is, on its face, consistent with the orderly, safe, secure, and humane operation of a prison. Idleness and boredom can be seen as wrong in themselves, from a work ethic standpoint, or as so fundamentally related to mischief as to be undesirable for that reason. Either way, prison programs of work, training, and education should be evaluated under the confinement model as forms of constructive activity and as antidotes to idleness, not as methods of rehabilitations.⁷

Under a rehabilitation model, work, education, and training are seen as benefits that are offered to prisoners, or even forced upon them, in the hope that this will make them better and more law-abiding citizens. Under the confinement model, work, education, and training are not benefits; they are opportunities, available to prisoners who are willing to make productive use of them. Ideally, prisons would have, or would fit into, an economy in which inmates could earn money by producing goods and performing services having real value. Inmates might then seek education and training, not to impress a parole board or a prison counselor, but to be able to perform a more valuable and higher paying job.

The availability of opportunities for education and employment should offset some of the austerity of a prison organized around a strict confinement model. However, amenities, privileges, and benefits that might be justified under a rehabilitation model as a worthwhile investment of taxpayers" money should not be provided free to prisoners under a confinement model. Any social benefits that are guaranteed to all citizens should be provided to prisoners as well (within limits imposed by security needs), but beyond that prisoners would have to earn or purchase them at their own expense. Examples would include higher education, entertainment, and medical, dental, or psychological services beyond the minimal levels entailed in the confinement model.

Some people believe that constructive activity should be more than just an opportunity available to inmates; it should be a prisoner's obligation as well. Offenders, in this view, should be held financially as well as morally responsible for their crimes and their imprisonment. Thus, prisoners should be required to work, to make restitution to their victims, to support their families, and to pay something toward the cost of their incarceration. Financial responsibility is not inconsistent with the confinement model, and could therefore be included under the dimension of activity. However, it is independent of, rather than integral to, a prison's primary mission of confinement-as-punishment.

6. Justice ("do it with fairness"). In measuring the performance of justice within prisons, the propriety of the sentence may be taken for granted; what remains to be judged is the fairness with which the sentence is administered. Stated more broadly, governing with justice requires adherence to the rule of law inside prisons just as it does on the outside. Rules ("laws") must be clear,
sanctions for their violation must be specified in advance and applied consistently, enforcement and adjudication must follow due process, and there should be provisions for independent review of decisions. Relevant to this dimension would be procedures and practices in imposing discipline and allocating good time, grievance procedures, availability of and access to legal resources, and inmate perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of rules and their enforcement.

7. Conditions ("without undue suffering"). A confinement model obviously requires some evaluation of the conditions of confinement. This broad term would include such things as population density, food, clothing, bedding, noise, light, air circulation and quality, temperature, sanitation, recreation, visitation, and communication with the outside. As with the dimension of "care," evaluation of living conditions and quality of life should not be completely linear (the more the better, without limits). In principle, this dimension is curved, so that differences imply improvements at the lower end but have declining or even negative merit ("too good for them") above some higher point. Most prisons today, however, probably lie along the middle range of this dimension, where comparison can be linear.

8. Management ("as efficiently as possible"). Quality of management is probably the single most important source of variation in the first 7 dimensions of quality of confinement. As such, there may be some redundancy in evaluating management as, itself, a separate component of prison performance. However, it is better to over measure than to under-measure, and many management variables bear a strong enough presumptive relationship to overall quality of institutional operation that they can be used as indicators of otherwise hard to measure concepts.

For example, such management-related variables as staff morale, absenteeism, and turnover are visible reflections of institutional stress and tension. Training levels may be both a cause of quality (through increased staff competence) and a result of quality (as a product of institutional concern with proper procedure in treatment and discipline of inmates). Thus, various sorts of management information can be used as a measure as well as an explanation of confinement quality. Good management is also a legitimate end in itself. The public has an interest in seeing that the money it spends on imprisonment is not wasted, through over-staffing, high turnover, or other management-related problems.

These eight dimensions-security, safety, order, care, activity, justice, conditions, and management-are appropriate concerns of prison professionals under the confinement model of imprisonment, and therefore constitute relevant focal points when measuring prison performance. Moreover, they are relatively precise concepts susceptible to operationalization and empirical measurement. First, however, each dimension must be divided into its component parts, or subdimensions.

Subdimensions and empirical indicators

The eight dimensions of prison performance described above are not directly measurable in themselves. As abstract concepts, they must eventually be linked to more concrete and observable indicators before they can be transformed into performance measures. A first step in that direction is to break each of the eight general concepts down into an associated set of more specific subdimensions, as shown in Figure 1. These subdimensions can be defined operationally by linking them to relevant empirical indicators drawn from two types and sources of data: institutional records and surveys of staff and inmates.⁸

Figure 1. Prison performance measures based on staff and inmate surveys and institutional records

I
Institutional records data can be drawn from such sources as the following:

    Significant incident logs
    Disciplinary logs and files
    Grievance logs and files
    Inmate employment records
    Education records
    Health clinic logs
    Psychologist logs
    Personnel records

Most prisons maintain records like these and should be able to retrieve and calculate summary information from them on a periodic basis. The Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts a complete, nationwide census of all prisons and jails every 5 years. The form used for this census requests information on facility characteristics, court orders or consent decrees, inmate population size and characteristics, housing confinement space, inmate education and work assignments, counseling and other programs, furloughs, staff characteristics by function and payroll category, inmate medical facilities and HIV testing, inmate deaths, and major incidents during the last year. For the 1990 prison census there was an additional set of questions on inmate drug use, interdiction methods such as drug screening for inmates and staff, and treatment programs. Ideally, the data collected through these censuses would allow researchers to construct performance measures for comparing prisons both cross-sectionally and through time. Unfortunately, respondent burden makes it difficult to expand the BJS census forms to address more of these issues in depth, at least as the forms are administered to all facilities. It might be feasible, however, to extend the data collection effort for a limited sample of prisons. Examples of performance measures based on institutional records are
offered in an appendix to this paper. Many of them could be derived directly from questions already included on the BJS census form while others would require collecting additional data.

Surveys of staff and inmates can be more costly than a census of facilities, but they have the advantage of being able to generate a far greater range of performance measures. Since the Bureau of Justice Statistics also does national surveys of prison and jail inmates, in addition to the facility census, it might be feasible for those surveys to include questions aimed at constructing performance measures. The Bureau of Prisons has developed what it calls the Prison Social Climate Survey (PSCS) to gather information useful in the management of its facilities. This survey is administered to staff at half of the Bureau's prisons every 6 months and there is a parallel version of the survey for inmates, though it is rarely used. The PSCS includes questions in four areas:

1. Personal safety and security, which asks about the safety of staff and inmates; incidence of assaults, gang activity, and use of weapons; dangerousness of inmates; use of force; security procedures; and degrees of control on different shifts.
2. Quality of life, which asks about sanitation, crowding, turnover, privacy, noise, and grievance procedures.
3. Personal well-being, which asks about emotional and physical health and symptoms of stress.
4. Work environment, which includes questions on management effectiveness, job satisfaction, employee morale, adequacy of staff training, and relations with inmates.

The inmate version of the PSCS also covers the first three areas, but in place of Work environment it has a Services and programs section asking about medical care, counseling, education, recreation, work, and religious programs. Elsewhere, it has questions on staff competence, attitudes, and interactions; on the discipline process; and on aspects of living conditions beyond those asked also of staff.

Most questions in the PSCS ask the respondent to answer in terms of conditions prevailing during the last 6 months, so that repeated surveys can be used to map changes through time. The numerous questions cover all of the dimensions of prison performance and quality identified in this paper, albeit some dimensions more thoroughly than others. Many of the survey-based indicators listed in the appendix are taken from the staff and inmate versions of the PSCS.

Significantly, this paper's eight conceptual dimensions of prison performance, and the prison mission statement that underlies them, were inspired in major part by analyzing the management concerns of the Bureau of Prisons as revealed in its Prison Social Climate Survey. That the dimensions and measures of prison performance recommended here should come from observing the self-imposed tasks, standards, and evaluation criteria of a well-regarded prison system is consistent with the primary theme of this essay: Prisons should be evaluated according to that which it is reasonable and realistic to regard as being within their sphere of influence, competence, and accountability.

Introducing an instrument for prison performance measurement

The final section of this paper is the Appendix, p. 42. It presents an organized set of empirical indicators that could be used as performance measures for prisons. These indicators are grouped into the eight dimensions that have been identified as relevant to prison performance and quality under a confinement model of imprisonment. Within each dimension, the indicators are further organized according to subdimensions, and the indicators based on official records are distinguished visually (by the use of italics) from those that are based on survey instruments. This set of performance measures has not been tested for validity, reliability, internal consistency, scalability, predictive weighting, discrimination, or other statistical properties, and has been used, in its current form, in only one study.⁹ What the indicators have to recommend them for further study is not so much their current methodological quality as the fact that they are based on a clear conceptual model.

In concluding this paper, a few caveats on the application of these measures may be in order. First, the indicators are offered here without any instructions for coding, scoring, combining into scales, or interpreting results. The intent of this paper is to offer some grounded and specific criteria and empirical indicators for evaluating prison performance, but not to prejudge the question of just what standards should differentiate good, fair, or poor performance. Indeed, such standards probably cannot be articulated in abstract or absolute terms. Rather, prison performance should generally be viewed as a relative or comparative matter, and preferably within contexts that hold constant or adjust for such factors as the population type, security level, or other characteristics of the prisons being compared. In any case, the most important thing in developing performance measures is not the choice of cutting points to use as standards (such as 60 versus 58 square feet per cell), but the choice of the criteria themselves (such as space per inmate in living areas). It is by choosing the criteria for evaluating performance that we structure incentives and thus shape the behavior we wish to evaluate and, ultimately, improve.

Second, as suggested by the large number of indicators in the Appendix, the concept of prison performance is complex and multi-dimensional. No single indicator, nor even any small subset of indicators, should be taken too seriously by itself. Multiple indicators are required to capture the many tradeoffs that must be made between the various and sometimes conflicting criteria of quality in the operation of a prison. Since no organization can maximize all values at once, the more criteria and indicators we use, the more accurately we can reflect the total pattern of an institution's strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, some indicators must be viewed in conjunction with others in order to be interpreted fully. For example, data on the frequency of shakedowns must be combined with measures of inmate grievances, drug use, and amounts of contraband found, in order to say whether those shakedowns amount to harassing inmates, engaging in needless ritualism, or doing what is necessary to interdict illicit traffic. Indicators taken separately will always produce errors of measurement and interpretation. Using large numbers of indicators helps to smooth out and counterbalance these errors, so that an overall pattern of findings will be more reliable and meaningful than the results of any of the individual indicators alone.

Third, note that some indicators are used multiple times, to measure different concepts, sometimes with conflicting results. For example, freedom of movement for inmates is a negative indicator on the dimension of Security, but a positive indicator on the dimension of Conditions. That sort of ambiguity is a fact of life, so it is valid to include measures that are scored both positively and negatively, on different dimensions. More troublesome are indicators that can be interpreted either positively or negatively within the same dimension. Many potential indicators were discarded during the process of constructing the set of measures found in the Appendix because opposing interpretations seemed equally plausible. Even after that culling process, however, some of the remaining indicators can be interpreted, at least arguably, in either a positive or a negative direction. There is no way to avoid that problem completely. To restrict oneself to indicators that are absolutely clear and unambiguous would produce very limited and uninteresting reports. A better solution is to report findings in detail, thus allowing others to make differing interpretations, and to search for patterns rather than relying very much on single indicators.

Finally, it may be noted that some of the indicators are "harder" and some "softer" than others. Most of the indicators based on official records produce relatively objective, factual, and verifiable data, while the indicators based on inmate and staff surveys are more subjective and perceptual. Researchers should be sensitive to the need to look for conflicting results (for example, between staff and inmate perceptions), should try to use the "harder" indicators to corroborate the "softer" indicators, and may wish to consider weighting some indicators more heavily than others.

Appendix

Criminal Justice Performance Measures for Prisons

Italicized items are based on official records. Others are based on surveys of staff or inmates (or both, in which case the staff and inmate means are counted as separate indicators). "Rate per capita-6" means "divided by total number of inmates resident at some time during a 6-month reference period." Scale values are omitted for all scale items ("rating of ...," "perception of ...," etc.).

Survey and official record measures of prison performance

Dimension 1: Security ("keep them in")

A. General
    1. Rating of how the building design affects surveillance of inmates

B. Security procedures (6-month period)
    1. Perceived frequency of shakedowns in the living area      
    2. Perceived frequency of body searches
    3. Proportion of staff who have observed:
        a. Any consequential problems within the institution
        b. Lax security
        c. Poor assignment of staff
        d. Inmate security violations
        e. Staff ignoring inmate misconduct
        f. Staff ignoring disturbances
        g. Other problems
    4. Number of cell or bunk area shakedowns conducted in a l-month period
        a. Rate per inmate
        b. Proportion finding contraband
    5. Number of urinalysis tests based on suspicion in a l-month period
        a. Rate per inmate
        b. Proportion testing positive for opiates

C. Drug use (6-month period)
    1. Drug-related incidents, number and rate per capita-6
    2. Discipline reports related to drugs or contraband, number and rate per capita-6

D. Significant incidents (6-month period)
    1. Significant incidents, total and rate per capita-6
        a. Proportion of 6-month population involved in any incidents
    2. Escapes, number and rate per capita-6

E. Community exposure (6-month period)
    1. Furloughs, number and rate per capita-6

F. Freedom of movement
    1. Perceived freedom of movement for inmates: Day / Evening / Night

G. Staffing
    1. Ratio of resident population to security staff

Dimension 2: Safety ("keep them safe")

A. Inmate safety (6-month period)
    1. Perceived likelihood of an inmate being assaulted in his living area
    2. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of armed assaults involving inmates
    3. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of assaults against inmates without a weapon
    4. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of sexual assaults upon inmates
    5. Estimated rate (per 100 population) of instances inmate has been pressured for sex
    6. Inmates' perceived danger of being: a. killed or injured b. punched or assaulted
    7. Proportion of inmates who say they have been physically assaulted by another inmate in a 6-month period
    8. Proportion of inmates who say they have been physically assaulted by staff in a 6-month period
    9. Discipline reports that involved fighting or assault, number and rate per capita-6
    10. Significant incidents involving inmate injury, number and rate per capita-6

B. Staff safety (6-month period)
    1. Rating of how the building design affects staff safety
    2. Perceived danger to male staff
    3. Perceived danger to female staff
    4. Rating of how often inmates use physical force against staff
    5. Perceived likelihood that a staff member would be assaulted
    6. Proportion of staff who say they have been assaulted by an inmate in a 6-month period
    7. Significant incidents involving staff injury, number and rate per capita-6

C. Dangerousness of inmates
    1. Proportion of inmates perceived to be extremely dangerous
    2. Proportion of inmates perceived to be somewhat dangerous
    3. Perceived frequency of inmate possession of weapons in living quarters

D. Safety of environment (6-month period)
    1. Perceived frequency of accidents: Housing Units / Dining Hall / Work Environment
    2. Perceived occurrence in housing units of clutter that could feed a fire

E. Staffing adequacy
    1. Proportion of staff and inmates who feel there are enough staff to provide for safety of inmates: Day / Evening / Night
    2. Proportion of staff who feel there are enough staff to provide for their own safety: Day /Evening / Night

Dimension 3: Order ("keep them in line")
A. Inmate misconduct (6-month period)
    1. Perceived frequency of physical force by inmates against staff
    2. Perceived security of inmate personal property
    3. Proportion of inmates who report being punished in the last 6 months: a. with a major sanction b. with a lesser sanction
    4. Number of inmates written up, as proportion of 6-month population
    5. Discipline reports, total and rate per capita-6
        a. Reports per inmate among those written up
    6. Significant incidents of disturbance or incitement to riot, number and rate per capita-6

B. Staff use of force (6-month period)
    1. Perceived frequency that staff have used force against inmates over a 6-month period
    2. Significant incidents in which force was used, number and rate per capita-6
    3. Significant incidents in which restraint was used, number and rate per capita-6

C. Perceived control
    1. Agreement that staff know what goes on among inmates
    2. Agreement that staff have caught and punished the "real troublemakers"
    3. Perceptions of how much control inmates have over other inmates: Day / Evening / Night
    4. Perceptions of how much control staff have over inmates: Day / Evening / Night

D. Strictness of enforcement (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of discipline reports that were:
        a. Dismissed
        b. Guilty of a minor report
        c. Guilty of a major report
    2. Proportion of minor report convictions that received a sanction of:
        a. Warning/reprimand
        b. 5-10 extra hours of duty
        c. 15-20 extra hours of duty
        d. 25-30 extra hours of duty
   3. Proportion of major report convictions that received a sanction of:
        a. Segregation only
        b. Loss of goodtime only
        c. Segregation and loss of goodtime
    4. Average number of goodtime days taken away
    5. Average number of days to be spent in segregation
    6. Proportion of major report sanctions
        a. Suspended at committee level
        b. Modified by warden

Dimension 4: Care ("keep them healthy")

A. Stress and illness (6-month period)
    1. Inmate stress scale: average of 9 items reporting feelings of mental, physical, and emotional strain
    2. Average number of days an inmate was ill or injured
    3. Average number of days an inmate was seriously ill enough that medical help was needed but did not go to sick call
   4. Significant incidents involving suicide attempts or self-injury, number and rate per capita-6
    5. Significant incidents requiring first aid or infirmary visit, number and rate per capita-6

B. Health care delivered (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates who used medical facilities other than for emergency problems
        a. Proportion of those who used the facilities who felt the problem was properly taken care of
    2 . Proportion of inmates who reported having had emergency medical treatment
        a. Proportion of those who received emergency medical treatment who felt that it was adequately handled
   3. Clinical contacts, total and rate per capita-6
    4. Sick calls, number and rate per capita-6
    5. Medical appointments, number and rate per capita-6
    6. Physicals and TB tests, number and rate per capita-6
    7. Lab appointments, number and rate per capita-6
    8. Miscellaneous clinic visits, number and rate per capita-6

C. Dental care (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates who received dental treatment a. Proportion of those receiving dental treatment who felt it was           adequately handled
    2. Dental visits, number and rate per capita-6

D. Counseling (6-month period)
    1. The alcohol and drug counseling services have been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    2. Other counseling services have been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    3. Proportion of inmates who report having participated in some kind of counseling:
        a. Drug/alcohol counseling
        b.Therapy
    4. Psychologist contact cases per capita for I month
    5. Number of contact hours per contact case for I month
    6. Proportion of inmates who were involved in the following programs:
        a. Psychology/psychiatric; includes substance abuse
        b. Employment and pre-release counseling
    7. Psychiatric visits (over a 6-month period), number and rate per capita-6

E. Staffing for programs and services
    1. Number of program or services delivery staff (FTE):
        a. Medical clinicians
        b. Education/work
        c. Psychology/counseling
        d. TOTAL
   2. Number of inmates (average daily resident population) per FTE staff position in programs or services:
        a. Per medical clinician
        b. Per education/work staff
        c. Per psychologist/counselor
        d. Per total program/service staff
    3. Program or services delivery staff as a proportion of total staff

Dimension 5: Activity ("keep them busy")

A. General
    1. Inmates usually have things to do to keep them busy

B. Work and industry involvement (6-month period)
    1. involvement in prison industry, work release, or institutional jobs:
        a. Proportion of population eligible
        b. Proportion working
    2. Among eligible inmates, proportion involved in:
        a. Prison industry
        b. Work release
        c. Institutional jobs
    3. Average work hours per week among employed inmates

C. Work and industry evaluation (6-month period)
    1. The work training program has been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    2. Have the vocational training courses provided skills that are useful?
        a. Perceived importance of learning the information presented in class
        b. Perceived understanding of the information presented in class
   3. Grievances that involved problems with work, number and rate per capita-6

D. Education and training involvement (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates who report having participated in some educational program
        a. Educational
        b. Social education/pre-release skills
    2. Enrollment in education or vocational training classes:
        a. Proportion of population eligible
        b. Proportion enrolled
    3. Among eligible inmates, proportion involved in the following programs:
        a. Adult basic education
        b. Secondary education
        c. College education courses
        d. Vocational training
    4. Average class hours per week among those in education or vocational training programs

E. Education and training evaluation (6-month period)
    1. The general education program has been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    2. Have the academic courses provided useful skills?
        a. Perceived understanding of the information presented in class
        b. Perceived importance of the information presented in class

F. Recreation (6-month period)
    1. Recreational activities are satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    2. Rating of how often prison recreational facilities are used
    3. Rating of how often inmates are unable to use the recreational facilities

G. Religious services (6-month period)
    1. Religious services have been satisfactory (agree/disagree)
    2. Rating of how often inmates attend religious services

Dimension 6: Justice ("do it fairly")

A. Staff fairness
    1. Questions on aspects of staff fairness
            (agree/disagree)
        a. Staff let inmates know what is expected of them
        b. Staff are fair and honest
        c. Inmates are written up without cause
    2. Staff are too involved in their own interests to care about inmate needs (agree/disagree)

B. Limited use of force (6-month period)
    1. Staff use force only when necessary (agree/disagree)
    2. Perceived frequency with which staff have used force against inmates
    3. Significant incidents in which force was used, number and rate per capita-6
    4. Significant incidents in which restraints were used, number and rate per capita-6

C. Grievance volume (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of staff reporting having a grievance filed against them in last 6 months
    2. Proportion of inmates who reported filing a grievance against staff or management
    3. Inmates filing grievances, number and proportion of 6-month population
    4. Grievances filed, total and rate per capita-6
    5. Number of grievances directed at individual staff
        a. Proportion of all grievances
        b. Rate per capita-6

D. The grievance process (6-month period)
    1. Perceived effectiveness of the grievance procedure
    2. Perceived benefits of the grievance procedure
    3. Perceived effect of grievance procedure on the quality of life
    4. Proportion of inmate grievants who report their grievance was taken care of:
        a. Completely
        b. Partially
        c. Not at all
    5. Proportion of inmates who did not file a grievance, who cite the following reasons:
        a. They never had any major complaint
        b. The problem was solved informally
        c. They thought it would be useless
        d. They were afraid of negative consequences
        e. Other reasons
    6. Proportion of all grievances that were appealed

E. The discipline process (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates receiving a major sanction who felt it was a fair punishment
    2. Proportion of inmates receiving a lesser sanction who felt it was a fair punishment
    3. Perception of how many maximum security inmates really belong there
    4. Proportion of discipline guilty verdicts that were appealed
        a. Minor reports
        b. Major reports
    5. Proportion of major report sanctions
        a. Suspended at committee level
        b. Modified by warden

F. Legal resources and legal access (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates who have used the law library
    2. Proportion of inmates who feel the law library has supplied adequate information
    3. Proportion of inmates who feel the law library has not supplied adequate information.
    4. Grievances that involved legal resources or access, number and rate per capita-6

G. Justice delayed (6-month period)
    1. Average number of days from the date of the discipline report until the hearing
    2. Proportion of minor reports with hearings beyond 7-day limit
    3. From date of grievance report until resolved by grievance officer:
        a. Average number of days
        b. Proportion beyond 20 days
   4. From date of grievance report until resolution approved by warden:
        a. Average number of days
        b. Proportion beyond 27 days

Dimension 7: Conditions ("without undue suffering")

A. General
    1. The administration is doing its best to provide good living conditions (agree/disagree)

B. Crowding (6-month period)
    1. Average resident population as percentage of capacity
    2. Proportion of 6-month period in which capacity was exceeded
    3. Average number of sq. ft. per inmate in housing units
    4. Perceived occurrence of crowding in the housing units
    5. Perceived occurrence of crowding outside the housing units

C. Social density and privacy
    1. Proportion of inmates who were confined in:
        a. Single-occupancy units of 60 sq. ft. or more
        b. Multiple-occupancy units with 60 sq. ft. or more per inmate
        c. Multiple-occupancy units with less than 60 sq. ft. per inmate
    2. Perceived amount of privacy within the sleeping area
    3. Perceived amount of privacy in the shower and toilet area

D. Internal freedom of movement
    1. Perceived freedom of movement for inmates: Day / Evening / Night
   2. Proportion of inmates who were confined to housing units for over 10 hours per day

E. Facilities and maintenance (6-month period)
    1. Residents vs. conveniences in living areas
        a. Inmates per shower
        b. Inmates per sink
        c. Inmates per toilet
        d. Inmates per telephone
        e. Inmates per television
    2. Grievances about maintenance, number and rate per capita-6

F. Sanitation (6-month period)
    1. Perceived occurence of insects, rodents, or dirt in the housing units
    2. Perceived occurrence of insects, rodents, or dirt in the dining hall
    3. Perceived occurrence of a bad odor or poor air circulation in the housing units

G. Noise (6-month period)
    1. Perceived noise level in the evening hours
    2. Perceived noise level in the sleeping hours

H. Food (6-month period)
    1. Quality of food at the institution
    2. Variety of the food at the institution
    3. Proportion of inmates who feel enough food is served for the main course
    4. Proportion of inmates who feel the appearance of the food is appealing
    5. Grievances involving food complaints, number and rate per capita-6

I. Commissary (6-month period)
    1. There is an adequate commissary selection (agree/disagree)
    2. Proportion of inmates who reported:
        a. No errors in their commissary account
        b. Errors that were corrected
        c. Errors that were not corrected

J. Visitation (6-month period)
    1. Proportion of inmates who find it hard to arrange visits with family and friends
    2. Proportion of inmates reporting family and friends who find it hard to arrange visits
    3. Average number of visitors reported by inmates
    4. Rating of the quality of visits
    5. Perceived occurrence of too many people in the visiting area
    6. Rating of how often it is hard to talk to a visitor because of noise in the visiting area
    7. Proportion of inmates who feel the visiting room has enough furniture
    8. Proportion of inmates who feel the visiting room has enough vending machines
    9. Grievances involving visitation and mail problems, number and rate per capita-6

K. Community access (6-month period)
    1. Furloughs, number and rate per capita-6

Dimension 8: Management ("as efficiently as possible")

A. Job satisfaction (6-month period)
    1. Institution satisfaction index: average across 3 items expressing positive feelings toward the institution
    2. Proportion of staff who reported filing a grievance against management
    3. Proportion of staff who have not filed a grievance, who cite the following reason:
        a. Never had a major complaint
        b. Problem was taken care of informally
        c. Thought it would be useless
        d. Afraid of negative consequences
        e. Other reason

B. Stress and burn-out
    1. Job stress index: average across 5 items regarding how often staff experience stress on the job
    2. Hardening-toward-inmates index: average across 3 items regarding how often staff feel indifferent or harsh toward             inmates
    3. Relating-to-inmates index: average across 7 items regarding how often staff feel positive about the way they work with           inmates

C. Staff turnover
    1. Staff on reference date divided into:
        a. Vacancies on reference date
        b. Terminations during previous 6 months
    2. Termination rate divided by relevant BOP tenure-specific rate

D. Staff and management relations
    1. Management and communication index: average across 10 items expressing positive appraisals of the organization and           authority of management
    2. Relationship-with-supervisor index: average across 6 items regarding how positive staff feel toward their supervisor
    3. Rating of how the building design affects communication among line staff
    4. Rating of how the building design affects communication between line staff and supervisors

E. Staff experience
    1. Average number of years worked at this institution
    2. Average number of other facilities worked in prior to this facility
    3. Average years in corrections
        a. Total staff, minus services staff
        b. Custody staff
        c. Top administrators    

F. Education
    1. Average years of education (excluding services staff)

G. Training
    1. Training index: average across 5 items regarding the effectiveness and quality of the training program

H. Salary and overtime (6-month period)
   1. Average salary (in $1,000's)
        a. Total, minus services staff
        b. Custody staff
        c. Top administrators
    2. Average number of overtime hours worked in a week
    3. Average proportion of overtime compensated by:
        a. Extra pay
        b. Compensatory time
        c. No compensation

I. Staffing efficiency
    1. Number of resident inmates per FTE staff member

This paper is based on research conducted by the author with support from several agencies of the U. S. Department of Justice: the Bureau of Justice Statistics (grant no. 92-BJ-CX-0001), the National Institute of Justice (grant no. 86-IJ-CX-0062-S 1), the National Institute of Corrections, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Department of Justice policy.

About the author

Dr. Charles H. Logan is a Professor and Associate Head of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he has taught since 1970. He has published widely on many criminal justice issues, including the deterrent effects of arrest and imprisonment, evaluation of correctional programs, the effects of parole, juvenile justice, jury selection, prison performance measures, and the privatization of prisons. His major work in the latter area is Private Prisons. Cons and Pros (Oxford University Press, 1990). In 1987-88 he served as a professional staff member for the President's Commission on Privatization and has been a Visiting Fellow to several agencies of the U.S. Department of Justice-including the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He is a member of the Corrections and Sentencing Committee of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section.

Measuring the Performance of Community Corrections

by Joan Petersilia

Introduction

The 1980's saw tremendous growth in community corrections' populations-from about 1.4 million persons at the start of the decade to 3.2 million by 1990-a more than 130% increase. This increase was larger than that experienced by either prisons or jails over the same time period (Hindelang et al., 1981; Jankowski, 1992). Today, 3 out of every 4 persons under correctional supervision in the United States are on some form of community-based custody-mostly probation or parole-although community corrections also includes halfway houses, residential centers, work furlough, and all other programs for managing the offender in the community.¹

Despite its wide usage, community corrections is often the subject of intense criticism. Probation and parole suffer from a "soft on crime" image and, as a result, maintain little public support. Their poor (and some believe, misunderstood) public image leaves them unable to compete effectively for scarce public funds. Nationally, community corrections receives less than 10% of State and local government expenditures for correctional services, which includes jails and prisons (Flanagan and Maguire, 1992). And their budgets are declining at a faster rate when compared to other criminal justice components. Over the last decade in Los Angeles, for example, the county Superior Court budget grew more than 200%, the sheriffs' and district attorneys' budgets grew about 50%, while that of probation grew by a mere 10%-even though probation populations more than doubled over this time period.

It is also true that those offenders being sentenced to probation and parole are more serious than in the past-in terms of their crimes, prior criminal records, and substance abuse histories (Petersilia and Turner, 1990). In New York, for example, 77% of probationers are felons (not misdemeanants), and fully a third of active cases are people who have been found guilty of violent crimes-yet these persons are supervised on caseloads of several hundred persons (Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1993:A20). The Los Angeles situation is even more critical. The L.A. County Probation Department, the largest in the world, supervises 90,000 adult offenders-80% of all those convicted in the county. But three-quarters of those offenders are monitored only by computer, by probation officers with caseloads of about 1,000 each. As a result, Chief Probation Officer Barry Nidorf estimates that his deputies have, on average, only 1 hour and 47 minutes per year to devote to each probationer (Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1993:A12).

Why does community corrections fare so poorly? It is not that its services are undervalued. Quite the contrary: every national study and commission beginning with the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) up to the more recent President's National Drug Control Strategy (1990) has recommended expanding community corrections. In fact, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973:311) referred to community corrections as the justice system's "brightest hope." Public opinion polls also show wide support for community-based sentencing for nonviolent offenders (Doble, 1987; Jacoby and Dunn, 1987).

But while there is general support for the concept of community sanctions, current programs are seen as inadequate. Most of the commissions that endorse community corrections go on to state that current programs are unable to provide effective offender supervision or rehabilitation. Furthermore, their minimal supervision is not seen as adequate punishment for most serious crimes. As DiIulio notes in No Escape: The Future of American Corrections (1991:68),

Most Americans think that criminal sanctions that make little or no use of incarceration fail to protect the public adequately, to deter would-be criminals, and to prevent convicted offenders from finding new victims. Furthermore, they simply do not feel that alternatives to incarceration are an adequate moral response to the pain and suffering imposed upon innocent victims by often calculating and remorseless victimizers.

In their defense, "community corrections" remains an ambiguous concept. It is a legal status, an alternative to incarceration, a service-delivery mechanism, and an organizational entity. As an organizational entity, it has objectives and performs a wide range of activities-some totally unrelated to offender supervision and/or treatment. One survey found that probation departments were responsible for more than 50 different activities, including court related civil functions (for example, step-parent adoption investigations, minority age marriage investigations) (Fitzharris, 1979). The time-worn controversy over whether community corrections (particularly probation) is punishment, treatment, or an amalgam of both further confuses discussions of its mission. As David Fogel (1984) observed: "probation lacks a forceful imagery that other occupations in criminal justice can claim: police catch criminals, prosecutors try to get them locked up, judges put them in prisons, wardens keep them there, but what do probation officers do?"

So while it is true that study panels continually endorse the expansion of community corrections, none has specified exactly what functions it should perform, or when and how it should be used. Having been founded more than 150 years ago, community corrections still has an unclear primary mission, with confusion about what activities contribute to that mission and how best to assess their performance. Many observers have urged community corrections to quantify what they do, with whom, and to what benefit (Cochran et al., 1991; Petersilia et al., 1985; Clear and O'Leary, 1983; McAnany et al., 1984; Blair et al., 1987).

Without a clear public mandate or an effective constituency, community corrections has been vulnerable to political pressures. It has fallen prey to the weakness described by the adage: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." In the 1970's, when rehabilitation was in favor, it promised to rehabilitate. In the 1980's, when the public mood turned tough-on-crime, it promised toughness. But with budget cuts, observers have noted that community corrections ends up promising much but being able to deliver very little (Clear and Byrne, 1992).

As DiIulio (1992) points out, to some extent these problems are endemic to all public agencies. However, they seem particularly problematic in community corrections agencies for two reasons. First, there is a serious lack of consensus-and in fact, widespread disagreement- among community corrections staff as to goals and mission. The leadership, as well as line staff, differ-both within and among departments-as to the importance of the surveillance/control model versus the treatment/service model. Of course, supervision usually combines elements of both, but studies have shown that supervision activities do differ significantly depending on which model the staff endorses (Ellsworth, 1992). The controversy over whether community corrections is punishment, treatment, or both has now been enlivened. A number of large community corrections agencies (for example, Los Angeles) have now openly embraced a surveillance model-quite different from the meshing of the two major goals in previous years.

Thus, there is a major disagreement within the leadership of community corrections about what the primary mission of their agencies is.

The second major difficulty-closely related to the first -is that community corrections has, by and large, never been able to show that it "works." Historically, recidivism rates-an offender's return to crime after some intervention-have been the gauge by which community corrections has been evaluated. And after hundreds of research studies (most poorly done), the weight of evidence shows that community corrections programs have not been able to reduce recidivism (Lipton et al., 1975; Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1980; Petersilia and Turner, 1993). A recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that 43% of felons on State probation were rearrested for another felony within 3 years (Langan and Cunniff, 1992).

After a long history of being unable to affect recidivism significantly, probation and parole leaders have begun to question the outcome measure itself-not whether recidivism should be included at all, but whether it should be the sole or primary measure of their performance. They note that crime is the result of a long line of social ills- dysfunctional families, economic and educational deprivation, and so on-and these social problems are clearly beyond the direct influence of probation/parole agencies. As the BJS/Princeton Study Group concludes (1992):

to evaluate the system's performance chiefly in terms of recidivism measures is to exaggerate the system's ability to affect the prevalence and severity of crime in society, to miss other important measures of the system's day-to-day performance, and to obscure the role that citizens can and should play in promoting secure communities (DiIulio, 1992).

Corrections officials also argue persuasively that recidivism rates measure just one function, while ignoring other critical probation/parole tasks, such as preparing presentence investigations, collecting fines and fees, monitoring community service, and so on. Adequate performance indicators should reflect the multitude of an agency's goals and activities.

The American Probation and Parole Association (1992) has recently called for including other intermediate outcomes in program evaluations. These would measure the offenders' activities while on probation or parole supervision (for example, rates of employment, drug use, participation in work and education). The association argues that programs do affect offender behavior, and that the effects would be shown if these mediating outcomes were measured.

Corrections practitioners also question whether their performance should be judged by how the offender behaves once he is off formal probation/parole supervision. After all, other components of the justice system are not judged by their ability to affect the future criminal behavior of offenders, and corrections should not be either. Charles Logan (1992) agrees and writes:

The police, prosecutor, and courts are judged by more proximate outcomes (such as arrest and conviction rates). It is only when the system switches to corrections, that changing the offenders' crime behavior becomes the primary measure of success.

An additional difficulty has recently emerged regarding the recidivism measure. Specifically, even if one accepts that recidivism is a useful measure of success, it is not clear which direction indicates success. If one believes that the major mission of community corrections is to protect the public-emphasizing the surveillance function-then perhaps increasing recidivism rates (for example, returns to prison) is a positive-not negative-performance indicator. If offenders are convicted of a crime and incarcerated, then public safety is being served. But if rehabilitation is the primary goal, as it has historically been, then decreasing recidivism indicates success. For example, a recent evaluation of intensive probation/parole supervision programs found that closer supervision increased technical violations and returns to jail and prison. The Los Angeles Times called the probation program a "dismal failure" since it failed to decrease recidivism. Barry Nidorf, Chief Probation Officer in Los Angeles County, used the higher recidivism figures to argue that the ISP program had succeeded. He wrote:

Reducing recidivism was not listed as the highest priority...holding offenders accountable was of primary importance...given the stated project goal of protecting the community, a significantly lower recidivism rate was not expected.

For years, probation has been measured only by recidivism rate...In today's environment, with over 70% of the probation caseload consisting of felony offenders, is it still realistic to use only this one criterion? Why is revocation and sentencing of a probation violator not considered a "success"? I believe it should be...(Nidorf, 1991a).

Without consensus about whether the major criminal justice outcome-recidivism-should be increasing or decreasing as a result of interventions, the research field is likely to become even more muddled.

It does appear that community corrections, more than other public agencies, has had difficulty articulating its mission and reaching agreement as to appropriate performance indicators. But as budgets shrink, public stakeholders will be increasingly asking what they are getting-in objective, measurable terms-for their dollar. Within this context, probation and parole will become increasingly vulnerable to budget cuts if they cannot clearly articulate what they do, with whom, and to what effect.

This paper is designed to address that need. Specifically, it attempts to-

1 ) articulate a mission statement for community corrections
2) identify the goals contained within the mission statement
3) specify methods or activities that address each goal
4) identify measurable performance indicators for each goal.

This paper is clearly just a first step and is meant to stimulate discussion and further work. Other goals could be added to the mission statement (for example, educate the public, prevent crime), and additional (or different) methods and performance indicators could be substituted for those indicated. Community corrections agencies should customize their mission statement, methods, and performance indicators so that they reflect local resources and priorities.

Step 1: Specify a mission statement for community corrections

A necessary first step toward developing performance indicators is to articulate the organization's goals and mission. As Peters and Waterman, authors of In Search of Excellence, put it: "Figure out what your value system is. Decide what your company stands for..." (1982: 227). The same principle applies to social, nonprofit organizations. Before community corrections agencies can evaluate their performance, they must first define what they are attempting to accomplish.

As noted above, probation and parole have historically had difficulty defining their mission (McAnany et al., 1984; Petersilia et al., 1985). Different goals are often given by administrators and staff within the same depart meet. And sometimes the same person gives different messages to different audiences, depending on his or her perception of their support for rehabilitation versus enforcement activities. In some instances, agencies adopt a mission or goal statement that they think will sell their services to the external community, but that staff do not sincerely support. And the goals of the staff might not be shared by their principal sponsors or customers (the judiciary, county funders, and the public, in the case of community corrections). The result is that the mission statements of many agencies become public relations gimmicks as opposed to working statements that assist internal agency operations.

DiIulio (1991) advises criminal justice a