The Public Safety Performance Project conducts and publishes groundbreaking research that sheds light on key criminal and juvenile corrections trends and highlights policies and practices that demonstrate better outcomes at less cost.
Recent Work
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South Carolina Reduced Theft Penalties While Safely Cutting Prison Population
In 2010, South Carolina enacted comprehensive sentencing reforms that included a provision to increase the state’s felony theft threshold—the dollar value of stolen money or goods above which prosecutors may charge a person with a felony rather than a misdemeanor—and revise penalties for certain property crimes. The state is one of 37 that changed their theft thresholds between... Read More
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More Imprisonment Does Not Reduce State Drug Problems
Nearly 300,000 people are held in state and federal prisons in the United States for drug-law violations, up from less than 25,000 in 1980. These offenders served more time than in the past: Those who left state prisons in 2009 had been behind bars an average of 2.2 years, a 36 percent increase over 1990, while prison terms for federal drug offenders jumped 153 percent between 1988 and 2012, from... Read More
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Criminal Justice Reform Can ‘Make Georgia a Better Place’
Former Georgia state Rep. Jay Neal (R), a pastor in the city of Chickamauga, was a driving force behind his state’s comprehensive sentencing and corrections reforms and remains a leading voice on criminal justice reform in the state. Read More
