About ACE!
What We Do
At ACE! our primary focus is on action research models with an emphasis on participatory research collaborative models. The frameworks assists individuals and programs to use data to continuously improve practices such as working relationships, interventions, practices and treatments aimed at increasing public safety, and improving individuals’ well-being.
Our work includes developing translational tools, conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or high quality quasi-experimental design studies, conducting program and policy evaluation, analyzing data, delivering hands-on training and technical assistance, disseminating our work through presentations, webinars, and publications, and developing the next generation of researchers through teaching and mentorship. Our Directors are leaders in the field: Faye S. Taxman as an ASC Fellow and Danielle Rudes as a 2018 ASC Teaching Award.
Our work covers multiple intercept points of the criminal justice system, including community corrections, pretrial, jail, prison, and non-justice system practices/interventions. We work extensively with community treatment providers who serve criminal justice-involved individuals.
Below are some of our areas of expertise. For more information on specific projects, visit Major Projects.
- Seamless systems of care models that link the criminal justice with other service delivery systems (Boundaryless Systems of Care)
- Reengineering probation and parole supervision services and organizational change models
- Examining the use of evidence-based practice in correctional and drug treatment settings and the factors that affect the adoption of science-based processes and interventions
- Examining the efficacy of various models of technology transfer and processes to integrate treatment and supervision
- Program design, experimentation and evaluation, advanced data collection systems
- Web-based interventions
- Implementation Science and Implementation Organizational Interventions
- Self-directed Interventions
- Disenfranchisement
- Organizational theory
- Socio-legal studies
- Examining how street-level workers negotiate organizational change and the impact their decisions have upon policy and practice
- Qualitative research methods (particularly ethnography)
- Quantitative research methods (including advanced techniques such as latent variable modeling, meta-analysis, etc.)