LBJ School News Brief

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Spelman receives Journal of Policy Analysis and Management’s 2005 award

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) has awarded Professor William Spelman the 2005 Raymond Vernon Memorial Prize for his article “Jobs or jails? The crime drop in Texas."

Named in honor of the founding editor of JPAM, the $1,000 award recognizes the outstanding contribution to the Journal in the past year. Spelman will be honored in November at the annual conference of Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, which publishes the journal.

In the article, Spelman examines the causes and effects of decreasing crime rates in the 1990s. Potential explanations include demographic shifts, improved economic opportunities, changes in drug markets, evolving police strategies, and an increasing prison population. According to Spelman, previous attempts to parcel out responsibility among these explanations are unpersuasive. Some do not consider all of the explanations, others rely on highly aggregated data, and others confuse cause and effect.

In an analysis of Texas counties that deals with these problems, Spelman shows that the Texas crime drop was largely due to increases in the jail and prison population; property crime also dropped due to increases in real wages and wealth and in public order arrests. Further prison construction would not be cost-effective in Texas due to declining marginal returns, he says, but direct interventions to improve economic opportunities or make police work more proactive might be.

An urban policy specialist, Spelman holds a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has a background in operations research and evaluation and in local government law, administration, and finance.

Formerly associated with the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C., Spelman has developed and evaluated police programs aimed at apprehension, deterrence, and rehabilitation of repeat offenders and solution of neighborhood crime and disorder problems. Two of his programs, the Baltimore County (Maryland) Citizen Oriented Police Enforcement program and the Newport News (Virginia) Problem-Oriented Policing program, have been selected as finalists for the Ford Foundation's prestigious Innovations Awards.

Since 1998, Spelman has also directed the Texas Institute for Public Problem Solving (TIPPS), which has trained over 11,000 police officers and community residents in the practice of community policing. His numerous publications focus on criminal justice policies, mainly in the areas of community crime prevention, repeat offenders, and neighborhood problem solving.

27 October 2005

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