From the Washington Monthly:

In light of the  success of the Hawaii HOPE program, which brought attention to the application of Swift-Certain-Fair (SCF) principles in community corrections, and the spread of such programs nationally, the Bureau of Justice Assistance authorized a large-scale, four-site field trial (the Demonstration Field Experiment, or DFE) to examine how well such a program would do in other jurisdictions. Those results are now in – in the form of a paper by Pam Lattimore and her colleagues at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI)- and the findings are not especially favorable. It appears that HOPE probationers committed no fewer new crimes and spent on average somewhat more time confined in jail or compulsory residential treatment. The authors conclude that “HOPE/SCF seems unlikely to offer better outcomes and lower costs for broad classes of moderate-to-high–risk probationers.”

The journal decided to make the Lattimore et al. paper freely available, but chose not to do so for the other papers in the same issue, including a number of commentaries on Lattimore et al.,  two of them sharply critical.”