There is a gap in interpreting findings in academic research and practitioner policy development since policymakers may have difficulty interpreting research results. Research materials may be written in a hard-to-read language that may be difficult to understand.
Sometimes practitioners face a lack of support from leadership in their initiatives to use research. Different training of policymakers and researchers contributes to this problem. No special staff is involved in studying research literature, so practitioners may be lost in the number of works published; the funding of criminal justice research is inadequate.
Finally, criminal policymakers rely in their recommendations on decisions concerning particular criminal acts and can be called event-driven, which is incompatible with long-term research.
To close this gap, a department of transitional criminology has been established; it aims to connect criminal justice research to policy outcomes. Within this initiative, the data from peer-reviewed articles can be analyzed and sent to policymakers responsible for this or that criminal justice decision.
Other initiatives include making scholarly articles more accessible, better funding for criminal justice research, and making it data-driven and easily applicable, cross-training for researchers and policymakers.