A confluence of new items is raising again for me the question of how, or if, research ultimately influences public policy, and what roads might be taken to improve that influence. The Correctional Association of New York, a policy and advocacy organization, has just posted a comment on their site regarding last month's Fiscal Brief out of the New York City Independent Budget Office on The Rising Cost of the City's Juvenile Justice System. An Association representative notes "We worked hard to get the media to cover the findings of the IBO report--it is so important for the public to know..." Perhaps due to that work, the otherwise possibly overlooked report was the subject of a prominent editorial in the New York Times and elsewhere.
This further brought to mind the comments made by Todd Clear and Natasha Frost in their essay, "Informing Public Policy," which introduces the latest, extraordinary issue of Criminology & Public Policy (volume 6, number 4), a journal intended to "simultaneously maintain a high degree of academic credibility and inform public policy." In an insightful review of the eight years since the journal's inception, the authors note that "bridging the gap between criminological research findings and criminal justice policy has proven more of a challenge, and our successes in this regard have been fewer than we had hoped." Among other interesting comments, they further note that "engaging the media has proven to be the most challenging obstacle we have faced." In light of the Correctional Association of New York's observations regarding bringing media exposure to a governmental fiscal brief, I wonder what role the media plays in bridging the research and public policy gap. As Clear and Frost note, the media world, where "easily digestible sound-bites rule the day" is not particularly receptive to covering the intricacies of research findings. Thoughts?