Program Evaluation Article critique
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Program Evaluation Article critique
Introduction
This paper aims at critiquing Debus-Sherrill, La Vigne & Downey’s article on “CCTV in jail housing: An evaluation of technology-enhanced supervision.” The article was written in 2017 and aimed at examining how adopting closed-circuit television in jail housing units within a significant Eastern city impacts inmate perceptions of the incidents and safety of misconduct and violence. The article is well organized into different sessions, including abstract, introduction, methodology, evaluation of findings, and discussion. The abstract is well framed, entailing all the critical components of the article. The article introduces well the public surveillance cameras and denotes precisely the present situation regarding cameras. The authors employed a combination of frameworks in the report, including the Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) framework, to show how CCTV is supported. This is quite good and makes the article sound professional. However, some of the sources employed in the report to help the information are somehow too old. This could be improved by using more recent articles to support the information.
The research questions in this article are well formulated. They aim at solving the gaps highlighted not to have been covered. The research questions have considered the perception of the jail inmates, the jail staff, and administrators on the value and effect of CCTV and how such deployment of the CCTV impacts the inmate behavior. However, the research question regarding the impacts of the CCTV on the functioning of staff and administrators needed to be included to make the research more complete.
Methodology
The methodology embraced in this article was more effective. It comprised of three phases. The three steps highly encouraged useful data collection. Including site observations, inmate and staff interviews, administrative data, and other sources helped a lot in understanding violence within the facility and enhanced identification of critical contributing factors. The sampling strategy used in this study was poor. Random sampling is associated with several weaknesses, including refusal, which impacts the results of the investigation. The inmate surveys helped in availing data on inmate perceptions about safety and Indent data required by the authors to answer the research questions was gathered from the hard copy files of the reported cases. All these were useful in fostering active data collection. However, the article never indicated how ethical considerations were observed while collecting data from the respondents. Ethical considerations are essential in every research.
Results
The different methods used by the researchers were useful and contributed a lot in availing answers to the research questions. However, failure to include the research question on the impacts of CCTV cameras on the staff and administrators led to mixed opinions in the line of officers. Much of the criticisms centered on the utilization of cameras to monitor the behavior of inmate behavior. Despite this criticism, the data collected in this article was well-presented as per the method used to gather the information. Moreover, the authors embraced tables to present the results of the study. The tables are well-formatted and are pretty clear for any reader perusing through. In the data analysis, the authors adopted structural break analyses that regulated the inmate to staff ratios. From the results, there were no significant breaks recognized. Although this approach is right, to increase the effectiveness in testing the significance breaks, a randomized experimental design could be adopted.
Discussion
The findings of the research are well integrated with the original research questions in the discussion section. From the results indicated in this article, it is clear that fewer inmate respondents believed that consensual and compelled sexual behaviors were likely to result after the implementation of the camera. However, it is surprising for the researchers to reveal that the cameras had no change in perceptions concerning violence. In reality, the implementation of CCTV cameras contributes to some changes, even if the difference is that much positive. A study contacted by Gill & Spriggs (2005) indicated that cameras have a holistic influence on the perceptions of safety, especially regarding physical violence and the potential of the staff in detecting violence incidences as well as the presence of violence in specific locations. The findings of this study did not justify whether the lack of any changes was due to staff-inmate ratio or was due to other lessons. Even in the last question which concerned the effects of CCTV on the behavior of inmates, the conclusions were not definitive. Moreover, the measures of ensuring the validity of the research instruments are not provided in this article. The researchers of this article need to be trained on how to use a randomized experimental design to increase their potential in availing precise results.
Conclusion
In general, the article follows a well-organized format in examining how implementing closed-circuit television in jail housing units within a significant Eastern city impacts inmate perceptions of the incidents and safety of misconduct and violence. However, the results of the study did not reinforce confidence in the camera’s ability to deterring violence and other kinds of risk behaviors within correctional settings. The authors failed to conclusively determine whether any variations occur because of adopted interventions or other transformations within the facility because of being incapable of adopting the randomized experimental design.
References
Debus-Sherrill, S. A., La Vigne, N. G., & Downey, P. M. (2017). CCTV in jail housing: An evaluation of technology-enhanced supervision. Security Journal, 30(2), 367-384.
Gill, M., & Spriggs, A. (2005). Assessing the impact of CCTV (Vol. 292). London: Home Office Research, Development, and Statistics Directorate.