New York City officials introduced SDP as an incentive scheme to encourage the city's six district attorneys to accelerate the disposition of those criminal cases that most contributed to the city's chronic jail overcrowding problem. Under the incentive system, substantial financial rewards are given to those district attorneys' offices that manage to dispose of their oldest felony cases, those cases that involve "long-term detainees." This book is not a comprehensive evaluation of SDP. Rather, the authors use SDP as an interesting policy initiative to illuminate broader issues raised by using monetary incentives to achieve organizational change in the criminal justice system and to suggest considerations to guide both future research and subsequent attempts to use incentives in other areas. This study found that SDP failed to achieve its primary objective, i.e., to reduce jail overcrowding. The authors note, however, that if the expenditure of the money for the incentive system was inevitable, any improvements attributable to the program, whether programmatic or political, could be considered indicators of success. SDP did succeed in establishing a precedent for tying additional resources to the performance of district attorneys. The analysis distinguishes between two broad categories of explanation for the failure of SDP and assesses their respective utility: deficiencies in motivation and deficiencies in capacity. A discussion of the implications of SDP addresses design considerations and when to use incentives. A 103-item bibliography and a subject index