Department faculty has expertise in the area of rehabilitation and behavior change pertaining to high risk and criminal behaviors that include criminal and violent offending and recidivism, delinquency, substance use and HIV risk behaviors.

Rehabilitation and behavior change focuses on research involving high-risk offenders and criminal behaviors that include criminal and violent offending, recidivism, delinquency, substance use, and HIV risk behaviors.

Project Title: Juvenile Justice-Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS)
Funding Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI), Wayne Welsh, Jennifer Wood and Matthew Hiller

Description: A five-year multisite project to test implementation interventions to identify and reduce gaps in substance abuse services for adolescents under community juvenile justice supervision. The project involves a cluster randomized trial in 34 sites in 7 states. We are testing the impact of various interventions involving needs assessments, data-driven decision making, behavioral health training, and facilitated local change teams on organizational, staff, and youth outcomes.

Project Title: SMART Supervision: CRIMNEEDS Evaluation
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller

Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.

Project Title: Philadelphia Revived: Obtaining Success through Peer Encouraged Recovery (PROSPER)
Funding Agency: Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko

Description: The goal of the PROSPER project, a collaboration between Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) and Temple University’s Department of Criminal Justice, is to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of integrating Peer Recovery Specialists (PRSs) in an adult drug treatment court. A growing body of research demonstrates that peer support can facilitate recovery and reduces health care costs, but to date the model has not been tested in criminal justice settings. This study will be the first in the U.S. to assess whether PRSs, working with the Philadelphia Treatment Court (PTC) staff and treatment providers, can help to promote retention, engagement, and ongoing recovery post-graduation. During the first project phase, focus groups and interviews will be conducted with key informants to provide insight into how PRSs can best support PTC clients. During the second project phase, 112 newly enrolled PTC clients will be recruited and randomly assigned to either be connected with a PRS or to receive treatment-as-usual (56 per each condition), and monitored for 9 months. Key indicators such as relapse, re-arrest, and drug court completion will help determine whether clients assigned a PRS have greater program success than those in the control condition. This study will answer important questions regarding how to successfully integrate peer staff into drug courts, and provide preliminary indications of the efficacy of adding PRSs to the treatment court process.

Project Title: Evaluability Assessment and Development of Outcome Evaluation for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Violence Prevention Program (VPP)
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh

Description: DVPP is a relatively new program being used to treat violent offenders who are eligible for parole. This specialized treatment program is designed to address cognitive distortions and aggressive behaviors in violent offenders to reduce the risk of future violence.

Project Title: Research and Analyses of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) Data Set
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman and Kate Auerhahn

Description: The data from the evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) are very complex and rich panel data that allow for the investigation of the dynamics of re-entry and the post incarceration experience. Released in 2011, these data are already the focus of a great deal of secondary analysis and are likely to continue as such. Missing data are a problem endemic to panel studies, and to research on offenders, ex-offenders, and other socially marginal populations. Given the theoretical and practical currency of reentry issues in criminal justice, and the importance of panel data to the study of these issues, Auerhahn is examining the theoretical underpinnings and subsequent consequences of different approaches to the handling of missing data. Research using the SVORI data to investigate the relationship between family support and recidivism reveals that analyses utilizing listwise deletion and multiple imputation are substantively quite similar. More specific comparisons of similarities and differences between these results are discussed along with implications for the interpretation of findings. Roman and colleagues are using the SVORI data to examine the relationship between prisoner debt, child support, employment and successful community reintegration. Recently published pieces include a descriptive analyses of child support debt and its relationship to service receipt post-incarceration (Criminal Justice Policy Review), and the longitudinal associations among child support debt, employment, and recidivism (Sociological Quarterly).

Project Title: Interventions for reducing online hate speech and radicalization through social media: A systematic review
Affiliated Faculty: : Ajima Olaghere and Steven Windisch

Description: The objectives of this review are to synthesize the available evidence on the effectiveness of deradicalization interventions aimed toward counteracting and/or reducing radicalization and hate speech through social media after an act of targeted violence.

The specific research questions guiding this review include: (1) Are deradicalization interventions through social media effective in reducing future acts of targeted violence and hate speech among individuals? (2) Is effectiveness related to the type of deradicalization intervention used? (3) Is effectiveness related to the characteristics of individuals experiencing the intervention (e.g., age, gender, race/ethnicity, offense history, childhood trauma)? (4) What are the barriers and facilitators of deradicalization and hate speech against the influence of social media?

Faculty research has focused on efforts to analyze key developments and contribute to theory related to the operation of systems of criminal justice, the interlocking nature of such systems and aspects of law and case processing as well as the strengthening of judicial processes. Faculty in this area also focus on the intersection of systems of oppression, such as racism, and the criminal legal system and help strategize about and evaluate system reforms.

Project Title: The Role of Body-Worn Camera Footage in a Prosecutor’s Decision to File Charges
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff and Jeffrey Ward

Description: The use of BWCs has grown rapidly across the world. Although BWC evaluations have concentrated on evaluating the implications for policing, other criminal justice agencies are also affected. In particular, there is an urgent need for the evaluation of BWC video on prosecutorial agencies. The large and increasing volume of footage produced by police heavily impacts. In addition, this change is occurring without any data or research informed policy guidelines for how to, effectively and efficiently, incorporate BWC video into filing decisions. This study how much and in what ways BWC footage currently affects filing decisions as well as the categories of misdemeanors for which BWC footage is particularly helpful. This is information is then used to create a guide to using body worn camera evidence in filing decisions.

• Guide for Practioners
• Final Report

Project Title: Power, Knowledge and Evidence: The Social Structure of the Production of Knowledge
Affiliated Faculty: Kate Auerhahn

Description: Foucault’s genealogical method is combined with Donald Black’s framework of “pure sociology” to elucidate the relationship between social-structural inequality and the discursive environment of the courtroom. Rules governing the admissibility of evidence on grounds of relevance structure and limit the forms in which “truth” is constructed in court proceedings. The analysis demonstrates that the formalized discourse of the courts – with specific focus on the rules of evidence – constitutes and reproduces dynamics of structural inequality. Practices examined include the discourses surrounding admissibility and relevance, privilege exclusions, and the structure of ritualized courtroom operations and procedures such as arraignments, bail hearings, adjudication and sentencing. The analysis reveals the ways in which evidentiary discourse reflects and ultimately reproduces social-structural relations of power and inequality with respect to various bases of stratification such as social integration, cultural legitimacy, and socioeconomic status.

Project Title: The Victim-Offender Overlap: Examining Police and Service System Networks of Response among Violent Conflicts
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman, Jerry Ratcliffe, Sharon Ostrow

Description:This project will examine how police and victim service system networks respond after violent street conflicts, and whether victims with offense/arrest histories are treated differently from victims who are not labeled as offenders.

Project Title: Bail, Pretrial Detention, and Case Dismissal: Punishment without Conviction?
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică

Description: Many defendants spend a significant amount of time in pretrial detention awaiting the adjudication of their cases only to have all charges against them dismissed. Considering that the main determinant of pretrial detention is the amount of cash bail assigned (i.e., many defendants cannot afford to post required bail), the pretrial detention of those defendants who do not get convicted of the crimes accused of raises serious questions of justice regarding the adjudication process. The goal of this study is to analyze the connection between the bail decision, the ensuing pretrial release/detention status, and the final case outcome. Using a sample of criminal defendants from Philadelphia, PA, predictive analyses will attempt to identify the factors predicting both the bail decision and the dismissal decision, and whether the pretrial detention/release status in itself plays a role in explaining case dismissal. Implications for policy will be addressed, particularly focusing on the use of pretrial detention as “punishment without conviction.”

Project Title: Mortality’ in Criminal Cases in a Comparative View: The Production of Dismissals in Adversarial and Inquisitorial Justice Systems and Their Implications for Justice
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică

Description: Case attrition in criminal justice processing is a phenomenon that occurs in all criminal justice systems, regardless of their underlying legal foundations, yet no research has attempted to explain its variation from a comparative perspective. This study will fill in this gap. The analyses will draw on comparable available aggregate data and will emphasize the implications of case mortality for the achievement of shared justice goals in the two types of legal systems.

Project Title: Criminal justice reform and labor markets in the 21st century
Affiliated Faculty: Kate Auerhahn

Description: Over the last three decades, the US prison population grew dramatically, largely fueled by the enforcement of policies associated with the War on Drugs. At the same time, the American economic system underwent radical transformation, characterized by growth in highly-skilled sector occupations and decline in unskilled jobs as a result of automation and foreign outsourcing, as well as declines in labor demand generally, as evidenced by three years of a “slack” labor market. Current trends in criminal justice, such as increased interest in reentry and in reducing rates of return for former prisoners, as well as the growing movement toward drug policy reform, if continued, will ultimately result in the decarceration and reintroduction of large numbers of men and women into the labor market, the vast majority of whom are qualified for (at best) unskilled occupations. These individuals are largely superfluous to the current economic system; given the cultural and social primacy of remunerative employment, the integration of these men and women into modern American society presents a significant social policy challenge. Because the American economy is unlikely to evolve in ways that will absorb these individuals, alternative approaches to addressing both the labor market discrepancy and the consequent implications for crime merit exploration. This project focuses on the idea of citizenship rights, and the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income, modeling a comparison of the costs of such a policy as compared to those of incarceration over the life course.

Project Title: Legitimacy in corrections at a time of crisis: Perspectives of incarcerated individuals
Affiliated Faculty: Ajima Olaghere, Rely Vîlcică and Jeff Ward

Description: To date, most criminological scholarship focuses on the legal decision-making and discretionary actions of police officers and the resulting impact on perceived legitimacy and public compliance. In an effort to help diversity scholarship, this study seeks to add to existing research in the areas of procedural justice and legitimacy in corrections. The study involves archival research and a qualitative content analysis and latent class analysis of approximately 160 unsolicited letters from incarcerated individuals in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The study draws on these letters to guide our understanding and encoding of the letters about the direct impact and collateral consequences of political expediency in decision-making about parole or conditional release from prison. The findings should illuminate important theoretical and policy implications for decision-making in times of political crisis, the process of release, and the broader reentry context.

Faculty conducting research in this area recognize that many of the determinants of health are more or less the same as the determinants of criminal justice system involvement. Furthermore, they understand that crime and reactions to it and criminal justice system involvement negatively impact the overall health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Faculty research includes projects that seek to develop, generate and analyze reliable data that can provide a rigorous understanding of risk factors across multiple domains and projects that evaluate collaborative multi-system prevention programs beyond the sole realm of the police and the criminal justice system. Many of these programs focus on changing environments and norms within communities.

Project Title: Research Support for the Philly Hub
Funding Agency: Everytown for Gun Safety
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman

Description: Faculty and graduate students in the department developed a research-practitioner partnership to support the implementation and expansion of the Philly Hub. The Philly Hub is a space and a process that provides service agencies the opportunity to work collaboratively to respond to individuals nearing a crisis situation that may have been brought on by exposure to violence. Initiated in 2020 by the Director of Philadelphia CeaseFire at the Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, the Philly Hub ultimately aims to reduce violence and victimization by breaking down institutional silos to facilitate voluntary, coordinated care. Graduate students assist the Hub staff with data entry and performance measurement. In addition, a process evaluation is currently being conducted. For more information about the Philly Hub, see Project Brief.

Project Title: Juvenile Justice-Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS)
Funding Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI), Wayne Welsh, Jennifer Wood and Matthew Hiller

Description: This five-year multisite project tests implementation interventions to identify and reduce gaps in substance abuse services for adolescents under community juvenile justice supervision. The project involves a cluster randomized trial in 34 sites in 7 states. We are testing the impact of various interventions involving needs assessments, data-driven decision making, behavioral health training, and facilitated local change teams on organizational, staff, and youth outcomes.

Project Title: SMART Supervision: CRIMNEEDS Evaluation
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller

Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.

Project Title: Philadelphia Revived: Obtaining Success through Peer Encouraged Recovery (PROSPER)
Funding Agency: Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko

Description: The goal of the PROSPER project, a collaboration between Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) and Temple University’s Department of Criminal Justice, is to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of integrating Peer Recovery Specialists (PRSs) in an adult drug treatment court. A growing body of research demonstrates that peer support can facilitate recovery and reduces health care costs, but to date the model has not been tested in criminal justice settings. This study will be the first in the U.S. to assess whether PRSs, working with the Philadelphia Treatment Court (PTC) staff and treatment providers, can help to promote retention, engagement, and ongoing recovery post-graduation. During the first project phase, focus groups and interviews will be conducted with key informants to provide insight into how PRSs can best support PTC clients. During the second project phase, 112 newly enrolled PTC clients will be recruited and randomly assigned to either be connected with a PRS or to receive treatment-as-usual (56 per each condition), and monitored for 9 months. Key indicators such as relapse, re-arrest, and drug court completion will help determine whether clients assigned a PRS have greater program success than those in the control condition. This study will answer important questions regarding how to successfully integrate peer staff into drug courts, and provide preliminary indications of the efficacy of adding PRSs to the treatment court process.

Project Title: CRIME-PA: Crime Model Evaluation for Physical Activity
Funding Agency: National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute (NIH)
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman and Ralph Taylor (subcontractors to UCSD)

Description: The study evaluates a trans-disciplinary conceptual model of the relation of crime and crime-related perceptions to physical activity and other cardiovascular disease-related outcomes across the life span. Research activities include development of reliable measures of crime-related constructs that will be applicable across the life span.

Project Title: Using Implementation Interventions and Peer Recovery Support to Improve Opioid Treatment Outcomes in Community Supervision
Funding Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH)
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko and Jennifer Wood

Description: In collaboration with researchers from Brown University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Rhode Island, this project is designed to determine whether a facilitated local change team intervention, and the use of peer recovery support specialists improves access to and adherence to medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) for people on probation. This type 1 hybrid implementation-effectiveness study involves 7 probation agencies in three states and includes (1) a core implementation study with staff trainings, agency needs assessments, and a facilitated local change team, and (2) a randomized experiment to compare MOUD treatment outcomes for probationers assigned a peer recovery support specialists and those without a peer. This project is part of NIDA’s Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network, initiated in 2019.

Project Title: Enhancing Healthy Reintegration and Recovery for High-Risk Opioid Users
Funding Agency: Pennsylvania Department of Health
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko and Caterina Roman

Description: This project is a quasi-experimental study of the experiences, challenges, and strategies to enhance access to medication assisted treatment (MAT) among formerly incarcerated individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) in Philadelphia. We will track outcomes for those who initiated MAT in prison or jail, and develop and implement an intervention to facilitate access to, initiation of, and adherence to MAT through the hub-and-spoke model TRUST Clinic at Temple Hospital and other community health and social services. The goals are to reduce relapse, overdose, and reincarceration, and increase engagement in treatment. Results will provide insights into the health system barriers affecting access to and long-term outcomes for MAT for previously incarcerated populations returning to Philadelphia. A minority training component will provide students from Lincoln University with opportunities to enhance their training and education in addiction, treatment, criminal justice, and public health.

Faculty has published extensively in the area of the geography of crime and justice and has developed methodological techniques that have become widely used in the field. Faculty have examined the intersection of the location of crimes and the location of criminals, taking into account aspects of the immediate geographic area such as the street segment or block and the physical and social aspects of the neighborhood.

Project Title: Crime in and around neighborhood parks: Bad parks, bad neighborhoods, or both?
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff and Ralph Taylor

Description: Neighborhood parks in urban areas are public spaces that provide a variety of recreational opportunities for residents in a natural environment. At the same time, they can become staging areas for illegal and disorderly activities. Systematic social observations describing park characteristics, US Census data quantifying neighborhood social composition, community surveys capturing social cohesion, and official crime data are analyzed using multilevel models to examine: 1) whether activity generating features of parks explain differences in crime levels across parks; 2) whether differences in parks’ neighborhood context explain differences in crime levels across parks; and 3) the extent to which park characteristics as opposed to neighborhood context explain differences in crime levels across parks. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of crime and place.

Project Title: The Philadelphia Predictive Policing Experiment
Affiliated Faculty: Jerry Ratcliffe and Ralph Taylor

Description: We used cutting-edge predictive policing software to plot locations of increased risk of violent and property crime. The Philadelphia Police Department then applied three different types of policing activity in these areas. Across five Philadelphia Police districts, officers were made aware of the predictive policing areas on roll-call. In five others, a dedicated police car patrolled the predictive grids. And in five other districts, an unmarked car patrolled the grids. The six remaining districts were used as control locations. The results of this NIJ-funded program are currently being analyzed.

Project Title: Linking Theory to Practice: Testing Geospatial Predictive Policing
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
 Affiliated Faculty: Alese Wooditch

Description: This NIJ-funded study seeks to advance the knowledge and utility of predictive policing by examining the strategy’s key components and processes. In collaboration with the Denver Police Department (DPD), this project evaluates available data sources for predictive analytics, and assesses a variety of predictive policing software programs to compare accuracy, reliability, and ease of use. The effectiveness of the best performing predictive policing software program will be conducted using a randomized control trial and the implementation of the predictive policing process by the DPD will be examined.

Project Title: Neighborhood Context and Spatiotemporal Patterns Of Crime
Affiliated Faculty: Jeffrey T. Ward

Description: With evidence for spatiotemporal patterning of crime mounting, there is a growing need to understand how neighborhood context impacts repeat/near repeat crime as well as crime that is not connected in space and time. This project has provided one of the first assessments of how social-structural and neighborhood design features similarly and differentially contribute to spatiotemporally related burglaries and spatiotemporally unrelated burglaries (Nobles, Ward, & Tillyer, in press, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency). Other crime types and additional sites beyond Jacksonville are now under study.

Project Title: Spatiotemporal Metropolitan Crime Patterns
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor and Elizabeth R. Groff

Description: This NIJ-funded study examined connections between jurisdiction-level demographic structure, land use, street networks and changing violent and property crime rates in the first decade of the 21st Century in the nine county Philadelphia Metropolitan region. Results suggest increasing spatial inequality in violent crime across the region, and impacts of large scale commercial sites on property crime rates. Implications emerge for cross-jurisdictional police cooperation.

Project Title: Community Criminology Crossroads
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor

Description: This review of almost 100 years of community patterns of crime and delinquency highlights four critical issues blocking further development in our understanding of the causes and consequences of crime and delinquency ecological patterns: temporal scaling, spatial scaling, ecological construct validation, and selection (NYU Press, 2015).

Project Title: Bail Prediction: Exploring the Role of Neighborhood Context in Philadelphia
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică

Description: This study (2015, Criminal Justice & Behavior) examined neighborhood effects on defendant pretrial performance. Specifically, the study looked at whether there was neighborhood-level variation in defendants’ failure-to-appear for trial and pretrial criminal conduct and explored the impact on these outcomes of neighborhood structural conditions such as socioeconomic status, stability, and racial composition. Prior bail prediction research has relied only on individual-level attributes. This paper, therefore, for the first time provided a novel perspective in recognizing the role of community context in empirical prediction of bail outcomes. The findings have important implications for bail decisionmaking policy and are relevant for the validity of the contemporary theories that emphasize the community context of crime in shaping deviant behavior.

The department has had particular strengths in research dealing with local policing, police organization, evidence-based policing and aspects of police-community relations.

Project Title: Smart Policing: Hypothesis testing
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance
Affiliated Faculty: Jerry Ratcliffe

Description: This BJA-funded project is designed to help Philadelphia Police commanders and crime analysts coordinate analysis and decision-making around numerous crime problems in the city. We are introducing a more scientific approach to the direction of crime analysis, and a more collaborative and community crime oriented response to the issues uncovered by the analysis.

Project Title: Translating ‘Near Repeat’ Theory into a Geospatial Policing Strategy: A Randomized Experiment Testing a Theoretically-Informed Strategy for Preventing Residential Burglary
Funding Agency: Subcontract to the Police Foundation (National Institute of Justice cooperative agreement)
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff

Description: For almost a decade research has shown that once a burglary occurs on a street, the homes on that street and on nearby streets are at a much higher risk of burglary over the next one to two weeks. But this research finding has not yet been translated into actionable crime prevention strategies for police agencies and tested in the United States using a randomized controlled experiment. This project aims to correct this deficiency by using the knowledge surrounding near repeat burglary to develop a crime prevention strategy.

Broadly speaking, the research seeks to determine if knowledge about near repeat patterns of burglary can actually be used for crime prevention purposes. Within this framework, we are attempting to determine if raising awareness about crime issues and crime prevention techniques with the residents near burglary locations can reduce further burglary in the area. The targeted department strategy we are suggesting is a one-page information-rich document (in English and Spanish) that would indicate that an incident has occurred and crime prevention efforts that can be undertaken by residents. We will also include in that document links to further information that will be available on line. A key feature of this experiment is the ability to get this information to all households within the defined area within 24 hours of a particular burglary incident (using community policing or patrol officers, auxiliary officers, or formal departmental volunteers).

At the end of the experiment, we will evaluate whether homes within the treatment areas were victimized less than those in the control areas. A random sample of residents will be surveyed to discover whether they received information and what actions they took in response. If a crime reduction occurs, a cost analysis will be conducted to discover whether the money saved through prevention offset the additional funds spent on notification.

Project Title: Police legitimacy perceptions
Affiliated Faculty: Ralph B. Taylor

Description: Much has yet to be understood about the determinants of perceived police legitimacy and related topics such as confidence in the criminal justice system. Recent research examines variable connections between perceived fairness and effectiveness depending both on perceiver race and urban vs. suburban location (Taylor, Wyant, Lockwood, Social Science Research, 2014 online), and impacts of both perceived fairness and incivilities on police confidence across the commonwealth (Taylor and Lawton Police Quarterly 2012).

Project Title: The motivations for police proactivity at the street level: A systematic review and meta-synthesis
Affiliated Faculty: Ajima Olaghere

Description: The purpose of this review is to develop a better understanding of factors that influence police proactivity at the street-level. We do not know the reasons why officers make decisions nor do we have insight into their decision-making process. This review is an attempt to glean an understanding of the motivations of police officers based on the available literature to date. The one major objective for this review is to develop a mid-range theory about police officer decision-making. Additionally, we are also interested in systematically synthesizing qualitative research on this topic to complement findings from the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) Committee on Proactive Policing (see National Academies of Sciences, 2017)

The faculty has expertise in a variety of theoretical and policy-relevant aspects of youth crime, delinquency prevention and juvenile justice, including criminal offending and impacts of justice interventions over the life course.

Project Title: Reducing Gang Violence: A Randomized Trial of Functional Family Therapy (with the University of Maryland)
Funding Agency: National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader and Phil Harris (retired)

Description: The research will produce knowledge about how to prevent at-risk youth from joining gangs and reduce delinquency among active gang members. It will evaluate a modification of Functional Family Therapy (FFT), a model program from the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development initiative. This modification, FFT-G, was developed in an earlier phase of the research. A randomized trial testing this adaptation is currently underway with funding from Smith Richardson Foundation. The long-term goal is the designation of FFT-G as a national Blueprint Model Program for a new and especially high-risk population, members of street gangs, thus providing the first known evidence-based program (EBP) for such youth. In addition to scholarly articles and presentations about the project, this research will produce a program model that is ready for broad dissemination, an existing dissemination mechanism, and a model for how public agencies can fund EBPs using existing funding streams. Given recent estimates that more than 782,000 gang members reside in the U.S., this product is expected to have a large impact on community uptake of the model.

Approximately 200 adjudicated males age 11-17 who reside in inner city Philadelphia neighborhoods with high gang prevalence and are gang members or at high risk for joining a gang will be court-ordered to receive family therapy. These subjects are then randomly assigned to receive FFT-G (treatment) or another family therapy typically used by the court (control). Treatment lasts 5 to 6 months. Participating youths and their care-givers complete interviews prior to random assignment and at 6 months post-randomization, and data from court and public assistance records are obtained. Interviews assess criminal activity, involvement in gangs, and several targeted risk factors that contribute to these poor outcomes. A process evaluation documents program implementation as well as costs for both the FFT-G and control groups.

Project Title: Gangs, Social Networks and Geography: Understanding the Factors Associated with Gang Desistance
Funding Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman

Description: This two-site study, involving collaboration between Temple University and RAND, examines the factors that influence gang disengagement and crime desistance. The research team used social network methods to collect detailed data on 225 gang youth and their social relations in the Philadelphia and the District of Columbia.

Project Title: Juvenile Drug Treatment Court Guidelines Cross-Site Evaluation
Funding Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko and Matthew Hiller

Description: Because of a growing concern about the relative effectiveness of Juvenile Drug Treatment Courts (JDTC) and Traditional Juvenile Courts (TJC), the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) entered into a cooperative agreement with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to launch a 6-year plan to better understand the evidence, develop a new set of guidelines based on this evidence, and then evaluate the effectiveness of the new guidelines. Phase 1 of the plan was completed in 2016 and resulted in the development of the new JDTC guidelines. Phase 2 of the plan is an evaluation of the implementation of the JDTC guidelines and outcomes of both JDTC and TJC among 10 JDTC courts sites, conducted in collaboration with Chestnut Health Systems. In 2 sites, youth who are eligible for JDTC and TJC are being randomly assigned to JDTC vs. TJC. In the remaining 8 sites, youth who are eligible for JDTC or TJC youth are being assigned to the most appropriate court under a regression discontinuity design, by assigning youth with the highest risk for recidivism youth to JDTC, and the lowest to TJC. Outcome measures include relapse to drug use, recidivism, and indicators of social and family functioning. Adherence to the JDCT Guidelines is also being assessed.

A range of faculty has published theoretically driven works in the area of traditional criminology and, more recently, in the area of cybercrime and terrorism. This is currently an area of critical need.

Project Title: CAREER: Applying a Criminological Framework to Understand Adaptive Adversarial Decision-Making Processes in Critical Infrastructure Cyberattacks
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Aunshul Rege

Description: This project investigates the adaptive and evolving adversarial decision-making (ADM) process in critical infrastructure cyberattacks. Specifically, this project has five research objectives: (1) Investigate adversary-defender interaction and identify adversarial attack paths, (2) Understand adversarial adaptability when attack paths are disrupted, (3) Investigate the importance and characteristics of the various stages in attack paths, (4) Identify which factors impact ADM at each stage of the attack path, and (5) Improve the transparency, consistency and validation of adversarial attack paths.

Project Title: CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Towards Secure Networked Cyber-Physical Systems: A Theoretic Framework with Bounded Rationality
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Affiliated Faculty: Aunshul Rege

Description: This project will develop a multidisciplinary framework that weaves together principles from cybersecurity, control theory, networking and criminology. The framework will include novel security mechanisms for networked cyber-physical systems (NCPSs) founded on solid control-theoretic and related notions, analytical tools that allow incorporation of bounded human rationality in NCPS security, and experiments with real-world attack scenarios. A newly built cross-institutional NCPS simulator will be used to evaluate the proposed mechanisms in realistic environments. This research transcends specific cyber-physical systems domains and provides the necessary tools to building secure and trustworthy NCPSs. The broader impacts include a new infrastructure for NCPS research and education, training of students, new courses, and outreach events focused on under-represented student groups.

Project Title: State of the art in agent-based modeling of urban crime: Overview, critical questions and next steps
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff

Description: Agent-based modelling is a relatively new methodology that facilitates theory-testing and thought experiments when empirical testing is not an option. This typically arises when data are not available or when manipulation of the variables of interest is not ethical or too expensive. This paper conducts a systematic review of the use of agent-based modeling to model urban crime published prior to 2015. Three goals motivate the endeavor – summarize the state of the art, identify areas where we have strong evidence and ascertain gaps that are limiting our ability to create and evaluate models of urban crime. A set of forward-looking suggestions are proposed.

Project Title: Criminal Violence: Patterns, Explanations and Interventions (4th ed.)(Oxford University Press, 2016)
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh , co-authored with Marc Riedel

Description: Describes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of violence that cuts across research and theories at the individual, group, organizational, community, and societal levels.

Project Title: Making Ends Meet in Frankford, Philadelphia
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader

Description: This community-based study uses participant observation and in-depth interviews with men aged 25-34 living in the Frankford section of the city. This neighborhood was selected because of its high crime rates, racial/ethnic diversity, concentration of halfway houses and drug treatment clinics, and disproportionate number of returning prisoners. The main part of the study focuses on whether and how crime plays a role in how men in this community make ends meet – that is, whether and how they have desisted from criminal activity. Extant theory suggests that men of this age should exhibit stability in terms of employment, housing, and social ties. However, the characteristics of the neighborhood would suggest that legitimate opportunities may be scarce and their lives may be characterized by less stability and less desistance from offending than traditional life course theory would predict for men of this age. Close attention is paid to how they construct masculinity in a social context in which mainstream markers of manhood are difficult to attain. A secondary study in this community involves regularly attending community meetings and documenting the way in which residents frame the problem of crime and its solutions.

Project Title: Philadelphia Drug Sellers Study
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader

Description: This research projects comprises an active offender study of drug sellers in Philadelphia. Interviews were conducted 2009-2012 and are being used to explore (1) how family criminal capital (i.e., criminal family networks) reduces the risks and potential costs of apprehension; (2) the relationship between legal and illegal employment, including drug sellers’ perceptions of whether drug dealing can be a long-term career; and (3) whether specific criminal justice sanctions (e.g., arrest, drug crackdowns) lead to adjustments in the strategies and techniques used to avoid apprehension.

Department faculty has an active, ongoing record of involvement with public officials and justice agencies and programs locally and nationally, applying research to enhance knowledge and theoretical understanding of policies adopted or proposed and their impact on systems. This area also includes work on organizational change and implementation science.

Project Title: SaTU: Educating STEM Students and Teachers about the Relevance of Social Engineering in Cyberattacks and Cybersecurity 
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 
Affiliated Faculty: Aunshul Rege

Description: This project has three objectives. First, it will educate students via hands-on course projects and a yearly intercollegiate SE Capture the Flag competition and training event. Second, the project will educate educators by hosting online and in-person training workshops across multiple STEM disciplines. Finally, the project will disseminate free resources such as SE course projects, datasets and analytic frameworks for research and education. The project will also develop a new set of assessment tools (surveys and focus groups) with Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching to measure student and educator learning specific to SE. This project proposes to enlarge and diversify the pool of students and educators by recruiting across multiple STEM disciplines at community colleges and universities in the U.S. with varying demographics. Minority serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities, and military/veteran friendly schools will be specifically engaged. In addition, the project team will actively seek participation from faculty belonging to underrepresented groups at these institutions.

Project Title: The Kensington Initiative: The Violent Crime and Opioid Reduction Partnership
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman

This collaborative project, led by the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General (OAG) (lead agency) expanded and evaluated a collaborative law enforcement and prosecution strategy, known as the Kensington Initiative (KI). The KI is designed to reduce violent crime and accidental overdose deaths tied to drug markets, but with specific emphasis on analysis-driven targeting, investigation and smart prosecution of crime drivers. The Temple research team developed a performance measures and conducted a process and impact evaluation. The research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. The summary evaluation brief (August 2022) can be found here and the original project brief can be found here.

Project Title: Criminal Justice Policy and Planning: Planned Change
Affiliated Faculty: Wayne Welsh and Phil Harris (retired)

Description: This book, now in its 5th edition, by Wayne Welsh and Philip Harris (Routledge/Anderson, 2016), presents a comprehensive and structured account of the process of administering planned change in the criminal justice system. A simple yet sophisticated seven-stage model offers a full account of program and policy development from beginning to end.

Project Title: SMART Supervision: CRIMNEEDS Evaluation
Funding Agency: Bureau of Justice Assistance, US Department of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Steven Belenko (PI) and Matthew Hiller

Description: The goal of this project is to enhance the efforts of the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department to address the unmet needs of moderate to high-risk offenders by fully implementing the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Moderate and high-risk officers are being trained in case management techniques and supervision planning, a customized criminogenic needs assessment tool is being developed, and a computerized decision-making tool is being developed to identify the best services in Philadelphia to address the criminogenic needs of probationers. Temple is conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of these new tools on probationer outcomes and service engagement.

Project Title: Coming into Focus: What Philadelphia has Learned about Body Worn Cameras in Police Work
Affiliated Faculty: Elizabeth Groff and Jennifer Wood

Description: This research evaluates a pilot deployment of body worn cameras in the Philadelphia Police Department. We conduct focus groups pre and post deployment, administer a survey to BWC officers to gain knowledge regarding their day-to-day experiences wearing cameras, and use a quasi-experimental design to determine whether the BWC officers’ behavior is different than other officers in the same district who did not wear cameras. We rely on official data sources to examine the effect of BWCs on officer behavior. We compare the activity of the 41 officers who volunteered to wear a camera with that of the 218 other officers in the 22nd district. We examine proactive officer actions as measured by arrests, car and pedestrian stops, and live stops. We also consider negative outcomes from police-citizen interactions such as use of force incidents and citizen complaints.

Project Title: Reducing Gang Violence: A Randomized Trial of Functional Family Therapy (with the University of Maryland) – Funded by National Institute of Justice
Affiliated Faculty: Jamie Fader

Description: The research will produce knowledge about how to prevent at-risk youth from joining gangs and reduce delinquency among active gang members. It will evaluate a modification of Functional Family Therapy (FFT), a model program from the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development initiative. This modification, FFT-G, was developed in an earlier phase of the research. A randomized trial testing this adaptation is currently underway with funding from Smith Richardson Foundation. The long-term goal is the designation of FFT-G as a national Blueprint Model Program for a new and especially high-risk population, members of street gangs, thus providing the first known evidence-based program (EBP) for such youth. In addition to scholarly articles and presentations about the project, this research will produce a program model that is ready for broad dissemination, an existing dissemination mechanism, and a model for how public agencies can fund EBPs using existing funding streams. Given recent estimates that more than 782,000 gang members reside in the U.S., this product is expected to have a large impact on community uptake of the model.

Approximately 200 adjudicated males age 11-17 who reside in inner city Philadelphia neighborhoods with high gang prevalence and are gang members or at high risk for joining a gang will be court-ordered to receive family therapy. These subjects are then randomly assigned to receive FFT-G (treatment) or another family therapy typically used by the court (control). Treatment lasts 5 to 6 months. Participating youths and their care-givers complete interviews prior to random assignment and at 6 months post-randomization, and data from court and public assistance records are obtained. Interviews assess criminal activity, involvement in gangs, and several targeted risk factors that contribute to these poor outcomes. A process evaluation documents program implementation as well as costs for both the FFT-G and control groups.

Project Title: Cannabis Decriminalization, Law Enforcement Activity in Philadelphia, and Impact on State Correctional Institutions
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică

Description: Vîlcică, in collaboration with researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, will too use interrupted time series analyses to examine the impact of the marijuana decriminalization in Philadelphia on the state’s correctional institutions. For control purposes, the study will examine prison trends in: a) other drugs and non-drug related sentences; b) admissions and releases from prison pre- and post-intervention; and c) correctional institutions in the Philadelphia county and other comparable PA counties not undergoing similar interventions. Lastly, basic cost-savings analysis will also be conducted. The results should help inform current policy debate on marijuana decriminalization or legalization on a wider scale.

Project Title: Measuring Success in Focused Deterrence through an Effective Researcher-Practitioner Partnership
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman

Description: This project supports the creation and maintenance of an effective, long term, sustainable research partnership that facilitates an overall research and evaluation approach utilizing joint strategy planning and development around implementing a focused deterrence law enforcement initiative in the city of Philadelphia. Focused deterrence strategies target specific criminal behavior committed by a small number of chronic offenders (in this case gang or group-affiliated offenders) who are vulnerable to sanctions and punishment.

The results of the impact evaluation can be found here in a practitioner-oriented research brief.

Project Title: Parole and Correctional Processes
Affiliated Faculty: E. Rely Vîlcică

Description: In September 2008, then-Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell imposed a moratorium on all parole releases from the state’s correctional institutions, following several killings of police officers by parolees recently released from prison. The moratorium was lifted in stages, with the parole process being fully restored in Spring 2009. The moratorium had several wide-ranging unintended consequences for the parole and corrections systems in the state. In recent investigations, Vîlcică documents the impact of the moratorium on parole practices, correctional processes, inmates, and correctional staff (Vîlcică, 2016, European Journal on Criminal Policy & Research, and Corrections: Policy, Practice and Research).

Project Title: Research Support and Evaluation for Philadelphia CeaseFire: Supporting and Developing a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence Reduction
Affiliated Faculty: Caterina Roman

Description: Housed in Temple University’s Center for Bioethics, Urban Health, and Policy at the Temple School of Medicine, Philadelphia CeaseFire is a gun violence reduction intervention that utilizes the Cure Violence public health model of stopping the spread of disease. Philadelphia CeaseFire works by detecting and interrupting potentially violent conflicts; identifying and treating the highest risk; and, mobilizing the community to change norms. The evaluation consists of three main tasks: Creating a support system for staff in the collection of performance measures that will aid monthly and quarterly reporting; the conduct of an implementation evaluation; and the conduct of a rigorous impact evaluation. The research also includes an evaluation of an expansion of the model to a local high school where two outreach workers have been employed to work directly with students.

You can view the results of the impact evaluation. To hear Dr. Roman discuss the research on Cure Violence and Philadelphia CeaseFire within the larger context of research on the strategy, watch a 30-minute panel discussion (see Panel 3) on Cure Violence that took place at John Jay College in 2017.

Project Title: Adult and Juvenile Drug Courts; DUI Courts
Affiliated Faculty: Matthew Hiller

Description: Despite the rapid proliferation of drug courts since their origin in the late 1980’s, research into the variation of this type of program have been hampered by the lack of a common measurement tool to quantify this. Dr. Hiller’s research in this area examines implementation and outcomes of both adult and juvenile drug court programs. One particular area of this research is focused on the development, testing, and psychometric properties of a self-report instrument designed to measure the 10 key components of the drug court model.

With regard to DUI courts, research in this areas involves an outcome evaluation that compared an intent-to-treat sample (i.e., all participants admitted to the program regardless of their graduation status) of multiple DUI offenders to a wait-list comparison group comprised of individuals who had applied to be in the DUI court, but were unable to participate because of limited program capacity. Findings showed that DUI court participation was significantly associated with better outcomes, thus adding to the limited literature on DUI court effectiveness.

Project Title: Quantifying the short- and-long-term causes and consequences of adolescent gang involvement
Affiliated Faculty: Jeffrey T. Ward

Description: Research on gangs has hit a coming of age. However, there are still a number of important questions that necessitate clearer answers. For instance, the gang-violence link provides strong evidence for an association. Due to the inability to utilize experimental methods for obvious ethical reasons, less clear is whether gang involvement causes increased delinquency and other non-criminal outcomes such as precocious transitions or whether these relationships are spurious. This project is seeking to better quantify the contemporaneous gang facilitation effect with longitudinal survey data by exploiting advanced statistical methods within a counterfactual framework. Beyond the immediate impacts of gangs, the longer term consequences of gang involvement are also critical to understand. Collaborative work has led to the identification of pathways that connect adolescent gang involvement with criminal and non-criminal outcomes in adulthood using structural equation models (Krohn, Ward, Thornberry, Lizotte, & Chu, 2011, Criminology).

Project Title: Criminal Justice Reform and Labor Markets in the 21st Century
Affiliated faculty: Kate Auerhahn

Description: Over the last three decades, the US prison population grew dramatically, largely fueled by the enforcement of policies associated with the War on Drugs. At the same time, the American economic system underwent radical transformation, characterized by growth in highly-skilled sector occupations and decline in unskilled jobs as a result of automation and foreign outsourcing, as well as declines in labor demand generally, as evidenced by three years of a “slack” labor market. Current trends in criminal justice, such as increased interest in reentry and in reducing rates of return for former prisoners, as well as the growing movement toward drug policy reform, if continued, will ultimately result in the decarceration and reintroduction of large numbers of men and women into the labor market, the vast majority of whom are qualified for (at best) unskilled occupations. These individuals are largely superfluous to the current economic system; given the cultural and social primacy of remunerative employment, the integration of these men and women into modern American society presents a significant social policy challenge. Because the American economy is unlikely to evolve in ways that will absorb these individuals, alternative approaches to addressing both the labor market discrepancy and the consequent implications for crime merit exploration. This project focuses on the idea of citizenship rights, and the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income, modeling a comparison of the costs of such a policy as compared to those of incarceration over the life course.

Analyzes data from investigatory stop reports generated by the Chicago Police Department, along with census and crime data, to monitor police department investigatory stops. They write reports that become part of the input considered by Judge Keys when he writes his reports. Of particular interest are questions of racial or ethnic disparities.

The results of these reports are shared not only with Judge Keys but also with other stakeholders, including the Department of Law of the City of Chicago, the Chicago Police Department and ACLU-Illinois.

The mutual benefit is to provide an evidence-based assessment of current police department investigatory stop practices.

Policing expertise is put to use to assist the Philadelphia Police in solving community-based problems to enhance the quality of life within the 3rd Police District and the Police Services Area.

Temple University and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services have been working together for two years to develop and implement an outcomes program to evaluate current practices and protocols surrounding responses to community violence as part of a system-wide collaborative effort to create a trauma-informed network of providers and first responders across the city of Philadelphia. Temple University Department of Criminal Justice researchers are working to launch two surveys as part of a wider data collection effort with the goal of implementing a comprehensive outcomes collection program to understand gaps and duplication in services and address inefficiencies in current, non-synchronized violence response protocol.

EAJLC is a carefully organized collaborative learning environment that brings together researchers, practitioners, policymakers and advocates twice a year over a three-year period to create more developmentally appropriate, effective and fairer criminal justice responses for youths ages 18–25. Participants of the Learning Community are all engaged in some aspect of this work in their professional pursuits.

Despite the fact that emerging adults have some of the worst criminal justice outcomes in our justice system, little attention has been paid to the research that would support new and improved justice system responses. The Learning Community’s goals are to provide researchers and policymakers access to one another in order to increase learning, practice and policy innovations by translating academic research into effective policies and developing opportunities to research burgeoning practices that contribute to a more equitable treatment of this population.

This is a mutually beneficial opportunity where Temple students gain hands-on learning experience about community organizing and community-driven efforts to address quality-of-life issues and crime. Students who participate will also use their participation in the academy as the basis for their final paper. Participating students will complete a project and engage in real-life issues to compare to classroom discussions and assigned readings. This project will develop networks between Temple and the community.

Inside-Out provides undergraduate students the opportunity to study together and work on collaborative projects with men and women who are incarcerated over the course of a semester. The class is dialogue-based and held inside prison, offering both inside and outside students the chance to delve into and explore topics related to social justice in an in-depth manner.

Inside-Out classes are college courses in disciplines that span the social sciences, the arts and humanities, social work, and the law. The entire process is one of mutual benefit to all involved—it is not a situation where the outside students are doing work for or studying those on the inside. The particular activities are focused on large group and small group discussions and projects that fully engage and benefit the learning of everyone involved. College-level courses are provided to men and women incarcerated in area prisons and jails, and stereotypes are challenged.

The project develops and monitors performance measures and conducts an objective implementation evaluation of the Philadelphia CARES strategy. The CARES strategy is designed to provide co-victims of homicide with trauma-informed support from the moment the homicide occurs and for 45 days afterward. The strategy is an innovative project that will fill gaps in trauma-informed victim services for Philadelphia as well as help reduce the likelihood of retaliation. Through the monitoring of performance measures and other data collection activities designed to more specifically examine program processes, an implementation evaluation allows for regular feedback to the program agency that can be used to continually improve program operations to help ensure program goals are met. The work is of mutual benefit to researcher and community in that performance monitoring and implementation evaluation are essential to understanding whether and how stated programs’ goals are being met, which, for this project, will ultimately benefit the victim population and the providers of victim services.

Implementation evaluations can help program staff make better management decisions, support new or innovative or evidence-based approaches and emerging practices, continuously improve existing activities, and in turn, improve the well-being of individuals and communities. For the CARES project, the implementation evaluation will be able to reflect on all activities, short-term successes and any challenges encountered providing the program staff with real-time opportunities to innovate and/or overcome challenges. The implementation evaluation may also assist the victim population through sharing the results with victim service administrators at the state and regional level.

The PRC developed and administered a Qualtrics survey to understand more about PRC members and reentry services in Philadelphia. The survey is designed to align with PRC goals, which include using data to strategize about how to improve reentry for returning citizens and improve the health of the community. The scope includes development, administration, data analysis and reporting. The survey allows us to better understand organizational needs and available resources and to track the collaborative impact. Gaining detailed information about existing services is a critical step in understanding combined strengths and weaknesses, identifying underutilized resources and analyzing gaps. By creating a more complete picture of reentry services across Philadelphia, the information from the provider survey will enable the Reentry Coalition to support challenged agencies, mobilize around priority areas and work collectively to more effectively provide resources that truly meet the needs identified by returning citizens.

A collaboration to understand how victims of violent street crimes fall through the cracks of the victim services system. One hundred victims of street crimes are being interviewed while focus groups are being led by victim service agencies, first responders are being coordinated and practice briefs—to share with community practitioners and city agencies working to improve victim services in the City of Philadelphia—are being developed. The project includes a variety of research tasks but will yield two community-focused practice briefs and a number of presentations to victim services agencies and associations around the city and state. This will result in a thorough understanding of gaps in services for this vulnerable population, a set of recommendations to improve police and hospital response after street victimization and a set of recommendations for victim services agencies at the local and state levels.