Books published by Urban Institute Press,U.S.

A new Urban Institute Press book offers a slate of reform opportunities for the ailing subprime mortgage market and provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of this still-evolving segment of the mortgage industry.

Every year Americans spend over 182 billion public and private dollars on services and supports for chronically disabled elders. This is projected to nearly double by 2030 to $341 billion and to grow to $684 billion once the last baby boomers have turned 85. And these estimates don't include the $375 billion in unpaid care family and friends provide-including foregone wages that would have helped support Medicare and Medicaid.

For the nearly 2 million children in the United States whose parents are in prison, caretaking necessary for optimal development is disrupted. These vulnerable youth¿a population that has shot up 80 percent in the last 20 years¿are more likely to experience learning difficulties, poor health, and substance abuse, and eventually be incarcerated themselves. Addressing the needs of children with imprisoned parents is urgent from corrections, child welfare, health care, and education perspectives. Children of Incarcerated Parents integrates a diverse literature, pulling together rigorous scholarship from criminology, sociology, law, psychiatry, social work, nursing, psychology, human development, and family studies. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will find in this volume here new directions for research and policies that will improve these children's life chances.

Criminal justice programs, to be adopted in today's climate, need demonstrate not only efficacy but return on tax dollars invested. Cost-benefit analysis, the economist's tool for determining the price of outcomes, yields a single metric that allows different interventions to be compared directly. Yet CBA is difficult, even controversial, to apply to crime control, as it involves placing monetary value on intangibles such as pain, suffering, well-being, and human life. Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control guides researchers through cost collection, design of bias-free studies, measurement of effects, approaches to estimating program benefits, and methods for combining the elements into a unified analysis

In Holding Police Accountable, nine of todays leading scholars on police work examine seminal research on the use of force and how it can inform today's research. The volume celebrates the late James J. Fyfe, the preeminent scholar on police use of force. In 1978 Fyfe found that administrative controls¿training, guidelines, and regulation¿reduced deadly shootings by officers without adversely affecting law enforcement or crime rates. The finding not only had profound impact on firearms policy, but compelled police departments to cooperate with independent researchers. Here, the scholars pick up the torch to work toward effective yet fair policing that will better protect all Americans.

Social experiments use random assignment to measure the market or fiscal outcomes of policy interventions. Since the 1960s, they have become the major method for evaluating proposed changes in social programs. To judge the social gains of these experiments, policymakers, funders of experiments, the public, and those who conduct social experiments need realistic standards and expectations for judging.Social Experimentation and Public Policymaking advances that effort with a history of social experimentation and a theoretical framework for study of its techniques. The authors analyze five of the most prominent social experiments ever conducted, to explore their origins, the use of the resulting findings, and factors that influenced the use of the findings. The result is a comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of social experimentation and important insights into how this powerful tool can be used to improve public policy.

Social experiments provide the most reliable guide to potential impacts of policy change because their methodology allows analysts to isolate the effect of the policy change from other, potentially distorting factors. This revised and updated edition of the Digest of Social Experiments documents 240 completed and 21 ongoing social experiments. In addition to the findings, each summary details target populations, policies tested, experimental designs and related issues, sites, key staff, sources of further information, and public access to the data. The authors also discuss the theory and practice of social experimentation, the reasons for conducting social experiments, the ethical issues, and non-experimental methodologies that have been proposed as substitutes. They examine the uses of social experiments in the policy process, and offer a brief history of social experimentation.