An article in The Huffington Post co-written by Inimai Chettiar, Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and Marc Levin, Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, reveals that the United States spends $260 billion a year on criminal justice, and asks the question: “What has this extraordinary amount of money accomplished?”
Apparently not much, according to.Chettiar and Levin. They add, “The bottom line is that taxpayers simply cannot be assured that their money is used to optimize crime policy.” Both Chettiar and Levin advocate that before handing out grant money, the government should measure the results of a program’s success, and if the success rate isn’t high, funds would not be allocated. That seems like a reasonable solution, but the country’s largest criminal justice grant program, doesn’t measure the success rate of programs it funds.
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