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Norval Morris Project Overview

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The Norval Morris Project is a dedication to Dr. Norval Morris, who passed away in 2004 after many decades of work in the fields of law and criminology. At the time of his death, Norval Morris was the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School. He was an internationally recognized expert on the criminal justice system and prison reform, regarded one of the most influential writers in the field of criminal justice. He authored, co-authored, or edited 15 books and hundreds of articles during his 55-year academic career and was instrumental in founding NIC. Dr. Morris’ desire to see more effective use of research and evaluation in correctional policy and practice through improved collaboration in and outside of corrections is the major inspiration for this project.

Shortly after Morris' death, the NIC Advisory Board asked the NIC Executive Staff to develop a program to honor the life and contributions of Norval Morris, including the notion of bridging research and criminal justice policy, practice, and programs. Project developers recognized that simply improving the content and availability of research knowledge is not enough to promote its application. Active strategies are required to insure that emerging knowledge reaches the field in a form that will lead most directly to its use. The Norval Morris Project is designed to be more than a memorial for a true leader and interdisciplinary thinker.

A Morris Project started by bring together information and people both inside and outside the corrections field to develop interdisciplinary approaches and draw on professional networks that cut across academic, private sector and public sector boundaries. The project began by undertaking a broad and systematic information gathering effort to identify the range of issues and promising areas for possible future development. That information gathering effort was supplemented with interviews of thought leaders in a variety of professional fields. Respondents were identified through the use of a snowball approach in which each person interviewed was also asked to identify others. This process generated a list of over 120 people and formed the pool of leading experts in a wide variety of areas of potential relevance to correctional issues.

From this original pool, a select group of people were recruited to serve on the project’s steering committee. Given the expansive vision of the project, a unique group able to “kick start” the search for innovations was needed and because this group was so essential for creating and maintaining the project’s overarching vision, it was called the Keystone Group. The first Keystone Group meeting took place in September 2008. It involved 19 thought leaders - half of them corrections practitioners - plus NIC senior and project staff. The retreat itself was designed to be emergent, without preset limits on the group’s scope of work, design, or strategy. The Keystone Group’s function was to identify emerging topics and knowledge which could be imported into the corrections field, advise the project on how best to translate this knowledge to inform correctional practice, and assist the project in disseminating the results to the field in innovative ways.

The first meeting of the Keystone Group, in September 2008, used the Open Space technique, an approach to conducting meetings that is designed to maximize the creativity of a group by allowing them to be self-organizing and essentially create the agenda for the meeting on the spot. Out of that process, two provocative questions were developed. They were: “How can we transform correctional leadership and the workforce in ways that empower staff to reduce recidivism and promote prevention?” and “How can we safely and systematically reduce the correctional population by half?”
The next step of the process, which began immediately after the Keystone Group meeting, was to assemble Topic Teams. Structured similarly to the Keystone Group, the Topic Teams functioned as stand-alone working groups and focued on the broad topic areas the Keystone Group identified. During most of 2009, the teams continued to develop, refine and expand on the topics. In September, 2009, the two topic teams met to finalize their work to pass back to the Keystone Group the material they had developed.

On November 20-22, 2009, a second meeting of the Keystone Group took place with 16 members attending. The group met to follow up on the Topic Team meetings held in September with the goal of reviewing and prioritizing the action plans developed by the two topic teams on Reducing the Corrections Population and Transforming the Correctional Workforce. The meeting was designed as a strategic planning session to elicit dialogue and discussion between participants. The Keystone group continued conversation on the two areas, discussing possible ways to use these tools to achieve the project goals. The group concluded by determining the top six strategies for Population Reduction and the top five strategies for Workforce Transformation.

Following the second Keystone Group, NIC and project staff began another round of engaging the field to plan next steps. Based on these consultations, NIC outlined a strategy for the future of the project that would involve an “implementation phase” to build on the work done over the previous four years. This strategy was executed through two separate awards from NIC; the first was a cooperative agreement with Justice Assessment and Training (J-SAT) in Boulder, Colorado and the second is a cooperative agreement with Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. The two awards have been designed to work in tandem to draw on the strengths of each organization.

Shortly after these awards were made, the opportunity arose for NIC to do a project with the state of Virginia. The arrival of a new director of corrections, Harold Clark, who had been previously involved with the Norval Morris Project, allowed NIC to work with the AV DOC to develop a project on workforce development. This project has been designed to reinforce the work, already under way, in Virginia as part of the Adult Reentry Initiative. The Department of Corrections plays an integral role in Governor McDonnell’s re-entry initiative to improve offender transition from state facilities back into communities in Virginia. As part of this initiative, the Department is implementing improved practices including the development of individualized case plans based upon a risk and needs assessment and providing programs identified by research to be effective in preparing offenders for their transition to and stabilization in the community.

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