John Ursino is a research specialist in the ARC Lab. His research interests focus on evaluating and constructing risk-need assessments, addressing prison and jail overcrowding, and advancing correctional policy reform. He has assisted in creating a pre-trial risk assessment for King County, Washington; evaluating prison crowding within Nebraska facilities; conduct outcome evaluations of prison programs and examined strategies to reduce bias within risk-need assessments. His work has appeared in journals such as Justice Quarterly, Crime and Delinquency, and Journal of Criminal Justice.

John’s ongoing projects include:

1. Decarceration Policy in Washington State: Longitudinal analysis of strategies to reduce incarceration rates without compromising public safety.
2. Prison Population Dynamics: Using longitudinal modeling to visualize system flows and institutional responses to policy changes that can offset population reduction efforts.
3. Jail Population Forecasting: Combining data from different agencies across the justice system to create long-term forecasts of jail populations and simulate the impacts of different avenues of reform.
4. Risk-Need Score Changes and Recidivism: Examining the relationship between changes in risk-need scores and recidivism trends.
5. Misconduct Risk Assessments for Washington State: Supporting the development of a tool to predict and mitigate misconduct within the corrections system.
6. Evaluating LSI-R and ORAS: Assessing the predictive accuracy and identifying potential biases in these widely used risk assessment tools through a multi-state dataset.