Arnold Ventures 2024 Criminal Justice Research Grants Demonstrate Commitment to Reducing Crime, Improving Public Safety and Justice System

Focusing on rigorous, causal evidence and understudied aspects of the criminal justice system ensures policymakers, practitioners, and researchers have access to accurate and actionable information on what makes our communities safer and fairer.

Houston, TX (March 27, 2025) — Arnold Ventures’ (AV) grants awarded in 2024 by its Criminal Justice program demonstrate the philanthropy’s commitment to rigorous studies across every aspect of the criminal justice system. From community safety and policing, to courts and pretrial, to incarceration and post-incarceration, funded projects demonstrated strong research methods, innovative new approaches for gathering and analyzing evidence, and/​or a focus on understudied aspects of our justice system.

Reducing crime, improving public safety, and making the justice system more effective remain top priorities for communities across the country. However, often policymakers do not have strong, reliable evidence about how to achieve these outcomes. 

“In order to craft effective, bipartisan public safety and criminal justice policy, we must have rigorous, causal evidence on what works and what doesn’t,” said Jennifer Doleac, Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at AV. ​“In 2024, our support allowed researchers throughout the country to investigate policies and interventions that can potentially reduce crime and make our criminal justice system fairer and more effective.” 

Projects supported in 2024 were primarily accepted through an open RFP. Examples of funded grant applications include:

Community Safety

• Name: Business Cycles and Police Hires
  Description: This project uses a difference-in-differences design to examine the impact of business cycles on the number and quality of police job applicants and the quality of police officers hired.
  Geographic Focus: Florida
  Grant Recipient: The University of Texas at Austin
  Principal Investigator(s): Cody Tuttle, Fernando Saltiel
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $55,800

• Name: How do policies encouraging or discouraging pretext stops impact civilian contact with the police?
  Description: This project uses synthetic controls to evaluate the impact of banning pretextual police stops and a difference-in-differences design to evaluate the impact of federal training for local law enforcement on how to make pretextual stops. 
  Geographic Focus: California
  Grant Recipient: The University of California at Irvine
  Principal Investigator(s): Emily Hope Anderson, Emily Owens
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $80,300

• Name: Sibling Spillovers and the Medium-Run Impacts of Restorative Justice: Exploratory Analyses
  Description: This project uses a difference-in-differences design to extend a previous evaluation of restorative justice practices in schools by examining medium-run impacts as well as spillovers among siblings.
  Geographic Focus: Chicago, Illinois
  Grant Recipient: The University of Chicago
  Principal Investigator(s): Anjali Adukia, Benjamin Feigenberg
  Term: 2024 – 2026
  Amount: $295,900

• Name: An Experimental Test of a Behavioral Science-Informed Violence Prevention Program: Choose to Change (C2C)
  Description: This project uses a randomized controlled trial to examine the impact of a behavioral science-informed intervention for youth at high risk of violence involvement. 
  Geographic Focus: Chicago, Illinois
  Grant Recipient: The University of Chicago
  Principal Investigator(s): Nour Abdul-Razzak, Kelly Hallberg
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $95,500

• Name: The Impact of Federal Investigations on Policing Activities
  Description: The project uses interrupted time series, difference-in-differences, and synthetic control methods to evaluate the impact of a federal consent decree in Seattle.
  Geographic Focus: Seattle, Washington
  Grant Recipient: Cornell University
  Principal Investigator(s): Romaine Campbell
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $57,500

Courts

• Name: A Randomized Controlled Trial to Measure the Impact of Financial Assistance on Pretrial Outcomes
  Description: This project uses a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of financial assistance on both short-term and long-term pretrial outcomes, including court attendance, incarceration for failures to appear, and case closures.
  Geographic Focus: Santa Clara, California
  Grant Recipient: Harvard University
  Principal Investigator(s): Sharad Goel
  Term: 2024 – 2026
  Amount: $271,100

• Name: Persistent Low-Level Offenders Diversion: An RCT
  Description: This project uses a randomized controlled trial to test if a court-led diversion program targeting persistent low-level offenders can reduce recidivism and improve housing and employment stability. 
  Geographic Focus: Toledo, Ohio
  Grant Recipient: Harvard University
  Principal Investigator(s): James Greiner
  Term: 2024 – 2030
  Amount: $843,600

• Name: A Tale of Three States: Bond Court Decisions and Outcomes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Colorado
  Description: This project uses interrupted time series and difference-in-differences designs to measure the effect of statewide policy changes on the use of monetary bail, level of pre-trial detention, and case outcomes. It also uses an instrumental variable design to recover the causal effect of monetary bail on pretrial misconduct (failure to appear or subsequent criminal activity).
  Geographic Focus: Illinois, Colorado, Wisconsin
  Grant Recipient: Loyola University of Chicago
  Principal Investigator(s): Branden DuPont, Joseph (J.J.) Naddeo, Don Stemen
  Term: 2024 – 2026
  Amount: $299,600

• Name: Reducing Racial Disparities in Bail Decisions
  Description: This project uses a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention designed to improve accuracy and reduce racial disparities in bail decisions.
  Geographic Focus: United States
  Grant Recipient: Harvard University
  Principal Investigator(s): Will Dobbie, Crystal Yang
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $140,600
  

• Name: Assessing the Impact of Bail Litigation and Abandonment of Bail Reform in Two North Carolina Counties
  Description: This project uses a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impacts of changes in bail policy to end the presumption of secured bonds for people with low-level misdemeanor charges in two North Carolina counties
  Geographic Focus: Alamance and Forsyth Counties, North Carolina
  Grant Recipient: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Principal Investigator(s): Alexander Cowell, Jessica Smith
  Term: 2024 – 2026
  Amount: $349,000

• Name: Research on Shelby County Bail Reform
  Description: This project uses a difference-in-differences design to evaluate the impact of reforms to the bail system in Shelby County, Tennessee.
  Geographic Focus: Shelby County, Tennessee
  Grant Recipient: The University of Memphis
  Principal Investigator(s): Jonathan Bennett
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $87,700

Incarceration and post-incarceration

• Name: Parental Sentencing Alternative
  Description: This project uses an instrumental variable design as well as a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of deferring prison sentences for convicted parents and the effects of releasing parents from prison early.
  Geographic Focus: Washington State
  Grant Recipient: The University of Chicago
  Principal Investigator(s): Danielle Nemschoff
  Term: 2024 – 2026
  Amount: $53,600
  

• Name: Impacts of Long Sentence Reforms in California
  Description: This project uses difference-in-differences designs to evaluate the impacts of two policy changes aimed at reducing prison sentences – Proposition 57 and Senate Bill 1393.
  Geographic Focus: California
  Grant Recipient: The University of California, Berkeley
  Principal Investigator(s): Mia Bird, Johanna Lacoe, Steven Raphael
  Term: 2024 – 2027
  Amount: $598,600

• Name: Prison Education and Prisoner Outcomes
  Description: This project uses an instrumental variable design to estimate the impact of higher education in prison on future education, reincarceration, and employment.
  Geographic Focus: Iowa
  Grant Recipient: Grinnell College
  Principal Investigator(s): Romaine Campbell, Logan Lee
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $50,500

• Name: Oklahoma Legal Debt Study
  Description: This project uses a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the long-term impact of court-ordered fines and fees in Oklahoma County’s misdemeanor court. 
  Geographic Focus: Oklahoma
  Grant Recipient: Columbia University
  Principal Investigator(s): Bruce Western, Lindsay Bing
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $99,900

• Name: A Multi-Tiered Analysis of Debt Free Youth Justice’s Impacts
  Description: This project uses difference-in-differences designs to assess the impact of legislative changes to reduce or eliminate the use of fines and fees in the juvenile legal system.
  Geographic Focus: United States
  Grant Recipient: The University of Missouri
  Principal Investigator(s): Valerie R. Anderson, Christopher Sullivan
  Term: 2024 – 2025
  Amount: $273,700

• Name: Evaluating a Change in Drug Sentencing in Connecticut: The Effect of HB-7104
  Description: This project uses a difference-in-differences design to evaluate HB-7104, which de-felonized drug possession convictions.
  Geographic Focus: Connecticut
  Grant Recipient: The Urban Institute
  Principal Investigator(s): Walter Campbell
  Term: 2025 – 2027
  Amount: $589,400

This release covers a subset of grants that were committed, awarded or fully executed in 2024. It is intended to be illustrative of the work that AV is funding in the criminal justice field and serve as a resource for academics and practitioners who might be interested in applying for funding or in the outcome of previously funded research. It is not a comprehensive summary of AV’s criminal justice grantmaking. Grant amounts are rounded to the nearest hundred dollars.