rancis T. Cullen, John E. Eck, Christopher T. Lowenkamp
Why What Works Matters Under the Broken Windows Model
by Edward E. Rhine
Beyond Correctional Quackery
by Edward J. Latessa, Francis T. Cullen, Paul Gendreau
What Works in Juvenile Justice Outcome Measurement
by Kristin Parsons Winokur, Ted Tollett, Sherry Jackson
Gender-Responsive Programming in the Justice System
by Marcia Morgan, Pam Patton
School-Based Substance Abuse Prevention
by Michelle R. Burke
Juvenile Corrections and Continuity of Care in Community Context
by David M. Altschuler, Troy L. Armstrong
Treatment of Antisocial and Conduct-Disordered Offenders
by Henry R. Cellini
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 2
SPECIAL ISSUE:
WHAT WORKS
IN CORRECTIONS Federal
PROBATION
a j o u r n a l o f c o r r e c t i o n a l
p h i l o s o p h y a n d p r a c t i c e
A D V I S O R Y C O M M I T T E E
s p e c i a l a d v i s o r
Merrill A. Smith
m e m b e r s
Dan Richard Beto
Correctional Management Institute of Texas
Huntsville, Texas
Loren Buddress
Chief Probation Officer
San Mateo County, California
John W. Byrd
United States Pretrial Office
San Antonio, Texas
Honorable James G. Carr
United States District Court
Toledo, Ohio
Alvin W. Cohn
Administration of Justice Services, Inc.
Rockville, Maryland
Ronald P. Corbett, Jr.
Executive Director, Supreme Judicial Court
Boston, Massachusetts
Cecil E. Greek
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida
Thomas Henry
United States Pretrial Office
Newark, New Jersey
Magdeline Jensen
United States Probation Office
Tucson, Arizona
Jolanta Juszkiewicz
Pretrial Services Resource Center
Washington, DC
Honorable David D. Noce
United States District Court
St. Louis, Missouri
Joan Petersilia
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, California
Charles F. Wellford
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
P U B L I S H E D B Y
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts
Leonidas Ralph Mecham, Director
John M. Hughes, Assistant Director
Office of Probation and Pretrial Services
Federal Probation ISSN 0014-9128 is dedicated to informing its readers about current
thought, research, and practice in corrections and criminal justice. The journal welcomes
the contributions of persons who work with or study juvenile and adult offenders and
invites authors to submit articles describing experience or significant findings regarding the
prevention and control of delinquency and crime. A style sheet is available from the editor.
Federal Probation is published three times yearly, in June, September, and December.
Permission to quote is granted on the condition that appropriate credit is given the author
and Federal Probation. For information about reprinting articles, please contact the editor.
Subscriptions to Federal Probation are available from the Superintendent of Documents at
an annual rate of $14.00 ($17.50 foreign). Please see the subscription order form on the last
page of this issue for more information.
E D I T O R I A L S T A F F
Timothy P. Cadigan, Executive Editor
Ellen Wilson Fielding, Editor
Janice G. Barbour, Editorial Secretary
Federal Probation
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
Washington, DC 20544
telephone: 202-502-1600
fax: 202-502-1677
Postmaster: Please send address changes to
the editor at the address above. September 2002

1
THIS ISSUE IN BRIEF
This Septembers issue of Federal Probation considers What Works in Correctionsand how we can tell. Our guest editor, Alvin W.
Cohn, is familiar to regular readers as the contributor of the Juvenile Focus column. But he also carries on a very productive career
charting the course of correctional work. Over the years he has seen several fads in corrections come and go, and thus commands the
kind of perspective that several of this distinguished group of contributors also achieve. We hope you find these articles both thought-
provoking and helpful in figuring out how to ask and answer that bottom-line question, What works?
Ellen Wilson Fielding, Editor
Introduction
Heightened concern for improved performance and increased productivity have led agency administrators throughout the field of
justice administration to seek programs that will produce such results. Moreover, the demand for programs that work leads to a
dilemma: even if a program is successful at one agency, this does not necessarily translate into a workable program for another, for
there are organizational and programmatic variables that may or may not be conducive to replication. Therefore, a successful program
in one place may prove to be dysfunctional elsewhere.
Observation, unfortunately, reveals that too few agency administrators are committed to evaluating their programs. Further,
many programs are designed and implemented without explicit goals and objectives that are measurable. This is especially true
when there are goals, but they are latent rather than manifest. When this occurs, researchers have significant difficulty in designing
evaluation strategies.
It is axiomatic that evaluation for evaluations sake is just as irresponsible as designing change simply for the sake of change. Evaluation
must be structured and purposeful if it is to have significance both for policy- and decision-making efforts. Moreover, the implementation
of any program without consideration for eventual assessment reveals both poor management and irresponsible administration.
While a number of studies have been published that attempt to address the issue of what works (many of which are cited in the
articles that follow), it is quite likely that many programs throughout the field of justice administration plod along without any
attempt to measure success or failure. Perhaps this is due to administrative incompetence or unwillingness to face potential negative
assessment results. Or, failure to research may be a consequence of lack of knowledge on just how a program should and can be
evaluated. Or, no research may occur if there is disdain for outside consultants peeking into organizational activities.
Administrators who are pedestrian in their approach to program management instead of being progressive and visionary are
likely to lay constraints on information-sharing on the very superordinates who provide the resources needed by the agency. This
failure to recognize the legitimate needs of true customers can only result in mediocre delivery systems of services to clients as well
as communities. On the other hand, the sharing of programmatic successes and failures undoubtedly could lead to better
communications as well as better support for the programs that do indeed attain defined and explicit goals.
In this special issue of Federal Probation, which has as its theme What Works, the articles that follow reflect various aspects of
program evaluation, some of which point to successes and others, to an extent, to questionable results. All, however, reveal that
appropriate program design is inextricably linked to program assessmenta linkage that cannot or should not be minimized.
In the lead article, Managing the Correctional Enterprise: The Quest for What Works, Alvin W. Cohn suggests that the results of
any program evaluation have significant implications for both policy- and decision-makers, as a consequence of the values administrators
and researchers bring to the assessment process, notwithstanding the supposed value-neutral approach of the evaluator.
Felicia G. Cohns article, Valuing Evaluation, explores what is meant by values and discusses evaluation as fundamentally an
ethical enterprise: an effort to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and degrees of goodness and badness. She posits that
while evaluation can be valuable, it does not necessarily mean that it will be valuable in particular situations or that it will answer
particular questions.
In Supervision: Exploring the Dimensions of Effectiveness, Faye S. Taxman analyzes the role of supervision, which is a fundamental
task in every correctional agency. She reflects on the fact that there has been little in the way of rigorous research on the subject. She
examines such issues as the relationship of supervision to risk assessments, practices related to changing offender behavior, the use
of social controls, offender accountability, and successes and failures in intervention strategies.
Francis T. Cullen, John E. Eck, and Christopher T. Lowenkamp look at supervision from another perspective and report in
Environmental Corrections: A New Paradigm for Effective Probation and Parole Supervision that limited effectiveness of community
supervision practices is prompting calls to reinvent probation and parole. They argue that a key to reducing recidivism is reducing
offenders access to crime opportunities, which results in less focus on the amount and more on the nature of offender supervision
an approach they describe as problem-oriented supervision.
A new paradigm for probation practice is discussed by Edward E. Rhine in Why What Works Matters Under the Broken
Windows Model of Supervision, a model he helped to design. He reviews the Broken Windows paradigm, which includes seven
key strategies for re-engineering offender supervision, the most important of which is leadership; that is, the responsibility of leaders
to attend to the importance of creating public value in the work that they do. He goes on to state that this paradigm requires leaders
to embrace accountability for producing results that contribute to public safety and community wellbeing.
September 2002

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FEDERAL PROBATION
Volume 66 Number 2
The values and beliefs of both administrators and researchers as