The Pew Index Strategy

[Posted by Ron Wright]

Doug is away for a few days. He’ll be checking in now and then from the road, but while he’s away I’ll be feeding the dogs, watering the plants, musing once or twice on the SLP Blog …

Recent SLP posts (here and here) have touched on the recent past work of the Pew Charitable Trusts. I want to highlight the future work of the Pew Public Safety Performance Project — looking up to the front Pew, rather than looking behind to the back Pew (sorry, I’m just trying to invoke Doug’s spirit of fun here).  As you can see from this description of the project, Pew’s emphasis is on promoting effective sentencing practices for states, without looking directly at the federal system.

The distinctive Pew technique for promoting good practices is to create a “report card” or an “index” to offer state officials an accessible way to compare their efforts to what happens in other states. They sort through features of state systems, reduce them to a single number or score, and compare states. Pew already uses this technique in areas such as higher education.

It’s an interesting affirmation of democracy, isn’t it? While it is tempting to call for the “politicians” to leave sentencing questions to the experts, the Pew strategy instead is to make expertise more populist. The report cards, to be sure, simplify some things and therefore distort to some degree. But if the rankings are done well, they focus policymakers on relevant measures and take advantage of a natural competitive spirit.

So here’s my question for the large and informed readership of the SLP Blog: What data points about a state sentencing system might be (1) measurable with comparable numbers across many state systems, and (2) tell us something worthwhile about the systems, something worth ranking and changing?