At PRI, we are committed to strengthening our ability to capture and communicate our effectiveness in order to learn what does and does not work in the development of fair and effective criminal justice systems worldwide.
Much of PRI’s work is advocacy and policy-based and produces intangible outcome – ‘raised awareness’ for example – that can be difficult to measure. Progress in criminal justice reform is often slow. Results achieved at an institutional level, changes to laws and policies for example, take time to reach and change the lives of beneficiaries, suspects, defendants, prisoners and former prisoners: certainly longer than the average project time frame of two to three years.
In 2013, we began a concerted programme of work to overcome some of these problems, testing and developing new methods which would help us rigorously assess and effectively communicate the medium-to-long term impact of our projects and programmes.