No rigorous outcome evaluation of criminal justice bias training exists yet.

Evidence

When we conduct workshops with prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, or judges, we generally use declarative titles: Prosecuting Fairly; Judging Fairly; Defending Fairly. Yet we are aware that these are still aspirational. While we have reason to think that these workshops may have a positive impact on those who choose to utilize the strategies we share, we are aware that a rigorous evaluation of outcomes of implicit bias trainings in the criminal justice context has yet to be done. This chapter is an effort to describe the underlying literature in an accessible form and the underpinnings of the workshops that Perception Institute has been presenting over the past five years. We plan to subject our own work to external evaluation and we urge others to do the same. Significant time and resources are now being devoted to addressing implicit bias—we need to know whether this approach will truly begin to address the seemingly intractable racial inequities in the CJS. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1416

Categorization

• QUESTION: Five years of workshops, no external evaluation — is this admission itself evidence that the field avoids hard scrutiny of its own flagship interventions?