What Is Experimental Criminology?
Experimental criminology is the use of advanced experimenal methods to answer key questions about the causes and responses to crime.
- How much crime does prison prevent--or cause--for different kinds of offenders?
- Does visible police patrol prevent crime everywhere or just in certain locations? What is the best way for societies to prevent crime from an early age?
- How can murder be prevented among high-risk groups of young men?
These an other urgent questions can be answered most clearly by the use of a research desgn called the "randomized controlled trial." This method takes large samples of people--or places, or schools, prisons, police beats or other units of analysis--who might become, or have already been, involved in crimes, either as victims or offenders. It then uses a statistical formula to select a portion of them for one treatment, and (with equal likelihood) another portion to receive a different treatment. Any difference, on average, in the two groups in their subsequent rates of crime or other dimensions of life can then be interpreted as having been caused by the randomly assigned difference in the treatment. All other differences, on average, between the two groups can usually be ruled out as potential causes of the difference in outcome. That is because with large enough samples, random assignment usually assures that there will be no other differences between the two groups except the treatment being tested.
Why Cambridge?
Experimental criminology is a rapidly growing field, with increasing influence on public policy decisions. It has already shown how to prevent millions of violent crimes, as well as unnecessary pre-trial detention of millions of people. These reasons alone make it appropriate to locate the world's first Centre of Experimental Criminology at Cambridge University, which has won more Nobel Prizes than any other university in the world. For like experimental medicine, this branch of criminology uses a scientific method that was invented by a Cambridge graduate, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, whose theoretical work on experimental methods revolutionized the study of cause and effect. In his time at Cambridge Fisher won the undergraduate mathematics prize and later spent 17 years as Professor of Genetics. Among his many ideas was the central insight that random assignment of a consistent action across some but not all of a large population could "hold constant" the other factors that could affect any subsequent outcomes.
Sir Ronald A Fisher
In 1959 Cambridge also established the first Institute of Criminology in the English-speaking world, with close links to the UK government and its need for policy-relevant research. Established in part with funds from the Wolfson Foundation at the request of Home Secretary RA Butler, the Cambridge Institute of Criminology has engaged equally with theoretical and applied questions of the causes and prevention of crime throughout its distingusihed history. These questions were of great interest to the Institute's founder, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, as well as to its long-term Director Sir Anthony Bottoms and its current Director Professor Friedrich Losel. They have also been of particular interest to the Institute's polymath of all branches of criminology, Professor David Farrington , who co-founded the Academy of Experimental Criminology in 1998 and served as its President (2001-2004).
For these and other reasons, the Jerry Lee Foundation decided in 2006 to offer to help found the first university centre devoted solely to the advancement of experimental criminology. With the Lee Foundation's initial pledge to fund a programme of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral "Jerry Lee Scholars," the University agreed to have the Jerry Lee Centre of Criminology established in the Law Faculty's Institute of Criminology in 2007. In that same year Lawrence Sherman, the University's fourth Wolfson Professor of Criminology, was appointed the first Director of the Jerry Lee Centre.
This appointment also benchmarked ten years of a continuing collaboration between Sherman and the Foundation's President, Jerry Lee , who
Jerry Lee has championed social science research in business and government for decades.
Their collaboration includes contributions to the founding of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology and the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, and other initiatives for advancing the institutional development of criminology. This includes the largest programme of multiple randomized trials of a single crime prevention startegy ever conducted in experimental criminology, the Jerry Lee Program of Randomized Controlled Trials in Restorative Justice, a series of 12 field experiments involving over 3,000 crime victims and offenders. A recent independent evaluation of seven of these Jerry Lee Program experiments conducted by Professor Joanna Shapland and her team found an overall 27% reduction in the frequency of reconvictions of offenders two years after random assignment to restorative justice meetings, compared to similar consenting offenders who were chosen for the control group.
What Does The Centre Do?
The Jerry Lee Centre for Eperimental Criminology at Cambridge has two primary tasks. One is to conduct research, with emphasis upon primary and secondary analyses of randomized controlled experiments in crime and justice. Its second task is to select and train an outstanding cadre of experimental criminologists for the future.
Research.
The Centre's research program is currently focused in two major areas. One is restorative justice, through the multi-national efforts noted above. This includes its responsibility for the Campbell Collaboration's systematic review of the effects of face-to-face restorative justice on crime victims and offenders. A second area of research is homicide prediction and prevention. This includes various initiatives with UK police and health agencies, as well as with Philadelphia's Adult Probation and Parole Department. The first paper of this project on forecasting homicide was recently published by the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A).
Training.
The Centre will carry out its training mission by recruiting and training highly effective people to design key experiments in crime and justice, to obtain funding and agency partners for conducting the experiments, and to analyze and report the results of these experiments with integrity and insight. These tasks go well beyond the standard skill-set found in observational or analytic criminology, and are especially dependent on the interpersonal and emotional intelligence of the scholar. People with excellent academic achievements are especially welcome to apply for the fully-funded Jerry Lee Scholarships to pursue pre- and post-doctoral training in experimental criminology. Those who show, in addition to excellence at writing and thinking, the best evidence of ability to create and lead research projects will be the most competitive.
The Jerry Lee Scholars Program will accept applications for pre- and post-doctoral study at Cambridge starting in 2010. Anyone interested in applying to the program can gather further information from the Centre Director, Professor Lawrence Sherman .
People at the Centre
Professor Lawrence
Sherman
The Centre's Director, Lawrence W. Sherman, began his career in 1971 as a research analyst in the New York City Police Department, and has since conducted over 30 field experiments with police and other agencies around the US, as well as with the Australian Federal Police, the Metropolitan Police Service of London at New Scotland Yard, and other police agencies. He has served as President of the American Society of Criminology, the International Society of Criminology. The founding President of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, Sherman has received awards for distingusihed scholarship from the American Sociological Association, American Society of Criminology, and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. He has also been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Society of Criminology, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology.
He is joined in the Centre's activities by several of his colleagues at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, including the following:
Dr. Manuel Eisner, University Reader in Criminology.
A Swiss sociologist whose has conducted path-breaking research on the long-term decline in violence across Europe since the middle ages, Dr. Eisner has recently led one of the largest community crime prevention programme evaluations ever conducted in Europe. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. 
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