Community Policing
“Multisite Evaluation in Criminal Justice: Obstacles to Success.” 1991. In J.
Sinacore and R. Turpin (eds.), Multisite Evaluations: New Directions for Program
Evaluation, Vol. 50. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass, 83–96 (with Arthur Lurigio).
This chapter examines structural impediments to multisite evaluations (MSEs) in the
criminal justice domain. Besides the usual methodological considerations involved in
conducting credible evaluations, these structural features impose social, political and
organizational constraints on evaluation research which make MSEs difficult and risky. In
this chapter we describe the obstacles to MSEs and then review two projects that
succeeded despite these impediments.