Jo-Anne Wallace, Domingo Herraiz and Theron      Bowman at the failure roundtable

Frank Hartmann moderated the roundtable

Examining – and Embracing – Failure

The Center for Court Innovation, with the support of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance has embarked on a multi-faceted inquiry designed to analyze failure and innovation in criminal justice reform.  At its heart, this is an effort to shift the way criminal justice agencies perceive failure, from a stigmatizing and wholly negative force to a necessary companion and contributor to success.

Why failure matters:  Criminal justice literature is full of “best practices” – depictions of how drug courts reduced recidivism or COMPSTAT helped lower crime rates in New York City or DNA testing enabled a culprit to be nabbed.  And rightly so: success in any endeavor is difficult to achieve and deserves to be celebrated.  This is especially true in criminal justice, where for too long practitioners labored under the widespread assumption that “nothing works” and that it was impossible to reduce crime or change the behavior of offenders. 

In general, it is human nature to shout about new ideas that have succeeded – while failure is discussed in hushed whispers, if at all.  In truth, we know that it is impossible to have trial without error.  Nobody is perfect.  Nearly every criminal justice agency has attempted projects that have fizzled or failed to meet expectations.  If we want to encourage criminal justice officials to test new ideas and challenge conventional wisdom, we need to create a climate where failure is openly discussed.  We need to learn from our failures (and partial successes), examining whether an initiative works for some groups but not for others and figuring out what was wrong with the underlying assumptions that led us to try such an approach. This is the purpose of the Center's study of failure.

The Center's study of failure includes numerous products:

Written Products:  After interviewing a range of criminal justice innovators, the Center for Court Innovation prepared an essay identifying four contributing causes of failure:  failure of concept/premise (i.e., "a bad idea"); failure of implementation (i.e., "poor execution"); failure to manage "power dynamics" (such as "big-p" and "little-p" politics, funding realities, and inter-agency cultural conflict); and failure to engage in self-reflection (such as failing to make mid-course adjustments or recognize the early warning signs of trouble). The essay was published in Executive Exchange and can be found here. The Center for Court Innovation has also placed op-eds about failure in the National Law Journal and the Guardian (UK).

Public Events:  In January 2007, the Center for Court Innovation and the Bureau of Justice Assistance convened an all-day roundtable on failure, facilitated by Harvard's Frank Hartmann, at the Center for Court Innovation's headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The goal was to discuss concrete examples of criminal justice failures and identify potential lessons. An edited transcript from the roundtable was published in The Journal for Court Innovation and can be found here. In addition, staff from the Center have spoken at national conferences on the subject of failure, including appearances at the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, the National Association for Court Management, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Connecticut Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division.

Other Materials:  The Center's investigation of failure has been featured in numerous criminal justice blogs and publications including this feature story in Government Executive.