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Corrections Research Priorites

The National Institute of Justice has identified high-priority research, development and evaluation needs of corrections professionals. Those high-priority goals include:

• Create knowledge and develop technologies on how prisons, jails and community corrections can be better managed to provide safe, secure and cost-effective operations.
• Create knowledge on how best to assess and manage special offender populations in prisons, jails and in the community.
• Develop effective treatment/intervention strategies that enhance public safety by maximizing the successful reentry of offenders into communities.
• Research the causes of prison sexual assault and factors that may deter the reporting of such assaults and evaluate strategies, practices and policies designed to prevent it.
• Develop assured means to continuously and accurately monitor the location and status of corrections officers and personnel as well as inmates and detainees.
• Develop improved means to detect, locate and defeat the use of unauthorized wireless communications devices.
• Develop improved, unobtrusive means to accurately detect a broad spectrum of contraband to preclude its introduction into correctional environments.
• Optimizing the way in which corrections agencies employ new technologies, such as smart sensors, wireless mobile networks and knowledge management, in response operations.
• Develop improved information and data systems that link an individual's records and citations across various criminal justice databases from the time of entry into the criminal justice system.
• Develop devices providing multilingual speech translation capabilities for public safety application including voice and speech-to-text/ text-to-speech.

These priorities inform decisions about the scope of future work and the dissemination of NIJ-sponsored knowledge and technologies. At the same time, NIJ maintains the flexibility to respond to emerging needs and to consider the merits of individual projects that may contribute to other worthwhile goals.