Vera Institute of Justice

Overview

This is the 1977 preliminary report of Vera's evaluation of the Court Employment Project (CEP). This report examines the design and implementation of the CEP's controlled research into pretrial diversion, with particular emphasis on how the experimental and control groups were identified and selected and the problems engendered by the assignment of defendants with outstanding court cases to a control group. It suggests that the quasi-random procedure required by the policial and legal constraints of the research setting appears to have successfully approximated an equal probability (random) method. The report also describes the design of the research database, the types of data being collected and the methods of collection.