Book review: Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better
| Author | Nick Tilley |
| Published date | 01 July 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895813489636 |
| Date | 01 July 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
356 Criminology & Criminal Justice 13(3)
Underground to Neil Young. Also absent were more contemporary films such as
Trainspotting (1996) Blow (2001), 28 Days (2002) and Traffic (2000) and the vast body
of hip hop music that consistently has as its focal point the drug industry, drug-related
cultural references and drug consumption. The breadth of available material makes a
treatment such as Boyd’s hard to contain in a single chapter. Warren’s legal case analy-
sis notes the potentially important role that social and structural disadvantage play in
individuals’ ability to avoid involvement or implication in drug trafficking activities.
These arguments would, however, benefit from a more explicit account of how gen-
dered dynamics of power and vulnerability can and should be accounted for in judicial
proceedings and sentencing decisions. Similarly, Duke’s call for enabling environments
for harm reduction in prison settings fails to outline how this perspective could translate
into improvements in harm reduction service provision, access and acceptance in incar-
ceration environments.
Organizationally, while the division of the book into three sections makes theoretical
sense, diffuse foci within these sections produce a meandering overall thematic thread.
The absence of a concluding chapter compounds this issue. Nevertheless, The Drug
Effect makes a number of notable contributions to the literature, adding innovative per-
spectives to conventional debates, valuable methodological insights on the production of
knowledge in drug use research, and perhaps most notably, a theoretical alternative to the
tension between positivist and constructivist perspectives for social science research in
the field. The chapters individually and collectively advance a number of debates and
will certainly be of interest to students and researchers alike.
Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It
Better, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 196 pp.: 9780199841622, £11.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Nick Tilley, Univer sity College London, UK
The core argument in the book is dead right and is also dead important. It is this: even the
most trustworthy finding that an intervention worked there and then is insufficient to be
confident that it will work here and now; we therefore need evidence about what made it
work there and then to decide if it has a fighting chance of working here and now. And
Cartwright and Hardie have many useful suggestions about what we can call on by way
of evidence to come to better judgements about whether or not we can go from there and
then to here and now and what might be involved in doing so.
Cartwright and Hardie refer to a variety of established warehouses cataloguing what
has been found for there and then. For those of us working in criminology and criminal
justice the Campbell Collaboration (CC) materials are most relevant. These are largely
taken by Cartwright and Hardie to be authoritative sources on what has been found to
work at particular places and times. The CC and its counterparts often privilege rand-
omized control trials and their close cousins. Cartwright and Hardie accept the validity
of such trials, when well conducted, although they also indicate other methods of finding
out if something worked. Their crucial point, however, is that trials warehouses
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