The Curious Introvert
A weekly podcast covering societal taboos & cultural blind spots. Join host Meredith Hackwith Edwards as she deep dives with curiosity & nuance into philosophy, society & culture with expert guests.
Episodes frequently feature philosophers, researchers, historians & journalists.
The Curious Introvert
Ep. 350: Are We Rehabilitating Criminals … or Just Recycling Them?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Does “tough on crime” actually work? Could Ban the Box policies backfire?
Jen Doleac, PhD, is Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy maximizing evidence based policy & minimizing injustice. She is an economist & the author of The Science of Second Chances who prefers the reliable lens of data over personal values & has a particular interest in how measurable data can give rise to positive societal change.
In this episode, she breaks down when prison actually works versus when it just creates more prisoners & walks through how the minefield of rules in probation may not prevent new crime in the way we think. You’ll also hear the re-entry policies that worked vs flopped & the real life results from policies developed through data.
If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 195: ROUNDING UP SUSPICIOUS WOMEN? THE AMERICAN PLAN
Guest:
Book: https://a.co/d/0aZzqCMt
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdoleac/
https://www.probablecausation.com/
Newsletter https://probablecausation.substack.com/
Sponsors:
https://www.historicpensacola.org/about-us/
2:44 Homicide is basically a coin flip
4:36 Probability vs. severity of punishment
5:56 The evidence against harsh sentencing
8:15 Are we confusing retribution with safety?
9:03 Digital crimes and the Undress Me app case
12:10 Policymakers blocking unfavorable research
14:47 "Tough on crime" politics vs. data
24:11 DNA profiles vs. 23andMe: what's actually stored
35:04 DUIs: breathalyzers and officer discretion
37:56 South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety program
40:43 Re-entry: Ban the Box backfires
42:51 Hiring bias and insurance as a fix
45:06 Rehabilitation certificates work
47:24 Housing barriers and halfway house surprises
49:16 Mental health gaps post-release
50:14 Medicaid's inmate exclusion
52:14 Reentry waivers and continuity of care
54:43 Head Start, prevention, and crime
58:15 Lead poisoning and the serial-killer hypothesis
1:04:08 The four reasons we punish people
1:06:10 Book, podcast, and what's next for Jen
Request to join my private Facebook Group, MFR Curious Insiders: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BAt3bpwJC/
Follow me in all the places:
https://www.meredithforreal.com/
https://www.instagram.com/the_curiousintrovert/
It may not surprise you that the US represents roughly five percent of the world's population, but twenty to twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners. And it would be logical to assume that this means that the crime clearance rate is relatively high. That's logical, but wrong, especially if the crime is burglary or property damage. So what's not working here? My next guest is executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy maximizing evidence-based policy and minimizing injustice. She's not a lawyer or a psychologist, but an economist who prefers the reliable lens of data over personal values. She's also the author of Science of Second Chances, a revolution in criminal justice. Today we're going to explore criminology reform through the lens of evidence. As we ask the question, are we rehabilitating criminals or just recycling them? This is the Curious Introvert Podcast with me, Meredith. Around here, we explore taboo questions and societal blind spots. Please help me welcome the woman replacing what feels right with what actually works. Fighting crime with data, Dr. Jen Doliac. Thanks for being here. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So I feel like this is gonna be such a good recalibration because so many of us grew up on law and order shows where they solve crimes in 45 minutes with four commercials. And, you know, this is so we need kind of a reality check. And I think the first question that might on-ramp us to that reality check is like with the internet and cameras everywhere now. How is it that in the US that this crime clearance rate is so bad?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a great question. I think the the main answer is that we just haven't focused on it very much. I think, you know, for a very long time we we think of crime rates as being the main metric. And so everybody expects to know what the crime rate is in their city, and the police department can tell them that, and that's easily available on the internet. But if you go and ask what the clearance rate is in your town or city, you might not be able to get that information. Not every police department provides that information. And even then, the clearance rate is basically just the number of arrests for a certain crime over the number of reported crimes that happen. It's not even convictions, right? Which you might think would be a better metric, but it's kind of even clearance rates are sort of an imperfect proxy because we we haven't really focused on this very much. But yeah, the result is that in the United States, homicide, which is the crime that gets the most attention uh when it comes to solving crimes, only 50 to 60 percent of homicides result in an arrest. Which is why it's a coin flip, right? It's a coin flip if you commit murder, whether or not you will be arrested, much less convicted.
SPEAKER_01Like who would think that in the United States? You know, you would think that even, I mean, crime shows aside, still you would think, no, this is the United States. Like we have consequences for actions.
SPEAKER_00Right. Right. And and I think most people who who live in neighborhoods and communities where a lot of this violent crime happens, they know that that the probability of getting caught is very low. Um, and so I do think that that is part of what contributes to cycles of violence in a lot of communities is is not trusting that law enforcement's gonna come in and actually hold people accountable. So yeah, so homicide, it's super low, but other crimes are even worse. So if you think about um violent crime on average, just across the board, uh reported violent crime, about 40% of those are cleared. Uh, that includes homicide, but also includes things like rape, where it's more like 25 to 30% of reported rapes are resulting in arrest. And I think that crime especially highlights that these are reported crimes. We know there are a lot more crimes that are never reported to police, and those aren't obviously solved either. Uh, when you talk about property crime like burglary or motor vehicle theft, it's more like 10 to 15% results in an arrest. Um, so you know, I often joke we should all be stealing more cars based on those numbers, right?
SPEAKER_01Like it's you're not gonna get caught. Well, that's funny that you say that because I was like, okay, is this why the police departments are not giving out this data because it could be encouraging of criminal activity?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think the reality is that people who are, you know, on the margin of committing crime, like they know, they know these numbers. They think that it's very unlikely that they're gonna get caught. And that's a problem because we know from lots and lots of evidence that the thing that really changes behavior is the probability of reliable consequences. It's not the severity of consequences. So I'm an economist. I think a lot about how people respond to incentives. There are two ways we could increase the cost or the expected cost of committing a crime. One is increase the probability you get caught. So that's the clearance rate, essentially. The other is increase the uh severity or length of punishment that you would receive if you do get caught. And we focused all of our attention for the last many decades in the United States on that second lever, on just making prison sentences longer and longer. But what you have is essentially like a negative lottery, right? You have a very small number of people who get really unlucky and get that long sentence. And that's simply not what changes behavior. No one's thinking that far ahead. Um, and so the small threat of a long sentence just isn't changing behavior on the ground, but increasing the probability of getting caught that does have big consequences and in terms of deterring and preventing crime.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's hard to think of this stuff in like a non-emotional way, right? Especially if you yourself have been a victim of a crime or a family member. The idea of not focusing on the harshness of punishment is like visceral visceral. You know, you you think like, oh, I can't do that. What's the best evidence that supports what you're saying that harsh harsh consequences don't deter it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I think there are um, there are a bunch of studies looking at things like sentencing guidelines where there's a uh a threshold, and if you have a certain um score and it puts you just over the threshold, you get a longer sentence. So you can compare people just below and above that threshold and see what happens to them later. There are also policy changes like there have been a ton of papers looking at this big mass pardon in Italy of people incarcerated in Italy many years ago. All were let out because of big overcrowding issues. There are a bunch of kind of shocks like that, where you can then see, okay, what happens to people afterwards based on how much of a sentence they might face if they reoffend. And just across the board, there might be a small deterrent effect, but it's not very big. And the reason for this is that, you know, we all focus more on the present than we do on the future for a variety of reasons. The future's uncertain. But the type of person who's on the margin of committing crime, the type of person we're trying to deter, they're even more present-focused than average. So the threat of a longer sentence, you know, changing the punishment from one year to two years to five years to 10 years, none of that really makes a difference if the person's not thinking past this week or this month. And then on the flip side, you know, another reason we might lock people up for a long time is what researchers call an incapacitation effect. So if you take someone out of the community, put them in prison, they cannot harm the community anymore, right? And that jail and prison will always play a valuable role for that reason. But it turns out most people who commit crime are young and they age out of crime really quickly. It turns out we all do reckless and impulsive stuff when we're when we're younger and we're teenagers, and then we grow up and our frontal lobe fully develops and we are less, we are less impulsive and we do less dumb stuff, right? And we're less um subject to peer pressure and all of those things. And so if someone, you know, even commits a terrible crime when they're 17, 18, 19, by the time they're 30 or 40, they're very likely a completely different person. And so keeping them in prison until they're 30, 40, 50 years old, that is entirely based on just retribution. Like that's because we want to see that person suffer. It's not because it's actually having a public safety value. And that, I think those two goals are often confounded in people's heads. We think we're doing it to reduce crime, but it's a really expensive way to get not very much bang for a buck.
SPEAKER_01That's why I find your work so interesting because uh, you know, I I told you in the pre-chat that I I find you like on the border of philosophizing. Like you seem kind of like a philosopher to me, but what you just stated is more like sociology. And and I love things that recognize that existence isn't you know, waffles. It's not bento boxes, like it's messy spaghetti, and we're all here and we're trying to sort through this together. And so that's why I think your work is is so interesting. But I'm wondering, like, let's presume that people do in fact reduce their criminal behavior when the likelihood of getting caught is higher. How then does that apply to digital crimes? Because right now, of all the crimes that are not prosecuted or are prosecuted incorrectly, like we had an example here locally where a an 18-year-old boy in high school um had made naked pictures of about 30 of his female classmates with the Undress Me app. His ex-girlfriend got upset about something and shared images of those, you know, to get him in trouble. And she ended up getting sentenced and not him. In fact, it's actually very hard to find his name in in records. I found it, but like, you know, so we have a lot of this going on. So if people are more likely to get caught conducting physical crimes, would they not redirect that energy to digital crimes because they're not going to get caught?
SPEAKER_00I mean, possibly. I mean, to some extent, this comes down to, you know, what someone's skill set is, what, you know, where they see the opportunities. The type of person who is really good at stealing cars might not be the type of person who's really good at at committing crime online, but they might be, right? Kind of depending on what their motivation is. But yeah, I mean, there are a ton of stories, and I mean, have there have been for many decades. As long as the internet's been around, I think there's been, I think a lot of victims and survivors have been really frustrated that law enforcement often doesn't seem to understand or take seriously crimes that happen online, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, sex crimes, that's the big one, yeah. Is that people are, you know, their images are being captured and then manipulated with AI, or just, you know, in the case of this 18-year-old boy, it was just an app.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it didn't require any skill.
SPEAKER_00Right. And, you know, I've been, I was talking to someone recently who's at one of the big tech companies where they have a responsibility to if they see illegal content online, then they need to report it, right? And they're not allowed to have ownership of it for any period of time because that alone is illegal. And they are really frustrated that even when they hand over cases to the feds, those cases are not prosecuted. And I think, you know, I think the the reason is just a lack of resources. It's just not those cases aren't given the resources they should be. But what I would expect based on all of the evidence we have everywhere else is that because the likelihood of consequences is so low for those types of crimes, the incidence of those crimes is much higher than it would be otherwise. Like this is this is how you deter and prevent crime is increase the probability of consequences. And the consequences don't need to be 20 years in prison, right? It just needs to be like anything worthwhile that the person would take seriously. But simply just looking the other way or not giving law enforcement the resources they need to actually be able to move these cases forward is is really harmful.
SPEAKER_01Well, thankfully, there's more public demand for closing of digital crime cases. And so that may be the thing that helps to shine a light on these other clearance rates. But like you said, they're they're kind of hard to come by. In your book, you said, quote, many policymakers are hesitant to share data when they can't control the results of the study and can't block unfavorable results from being published. Have policymakers said this outright to you as a reason that they won't, your research is not welcome.
SPEAKER_00Yes, in one way or another, right. As soon as, as soon as like many conversations with practitioners kind of they're interested, they're open to sharing data, and then and then they say, okay, and we would obviously like we would get to approve the study before you released it, release it. And someone like me would say, absolutely not. Like that's that's you know, not in line with science, right? The goal here. My reputation as an academic, as a researcher depends on on me publishing this regardless, right? And that's basically what you're signing up for. And there are ways to kind of soften it in the sense that like we don't have to name the jurisdiction necessarily, right? You can say like a large city in the Midwest rather than Chicago. But yeah, a lot of practitioners um will at that point just say, okay, no, this isn't gonna work for me. And so, so when I was writing about that in the book, I was talking about one prosecutor in in Massachusetts who did give us the data anyway, which was incredible and enabled us to do a really cool study as a result.
SPEAKER_01Do you think some of the resistance is partially because of how some counties and municipalities benefit from the labor that prisoners do? So they want more people in prison.
SPEAKER_00Oh, interesting. You know, I I'm sure, I'm sure that's a factor in some places. I think the vast majority of people that I talk to who are working in corrections are honestly just overwhelmed. Um, the uh jails and prisons across the country are incredibly understaffed. I think that's that's partly a result of, you know, no one likes spending more money on prisons. And so, um, and so they're they're struggling um with staffing, but it's also just a really tough job. I mean, it's prisons are currently extremely violent, partly because they're understaffed, and then people quit because it's such a terrible working environment, and then it gets even worse for everybody who still stays there. That's bad for the corrections officers. It's also really bad for the inmates, right? It's really bad for everyone there. And so we're starting to see groups on on both sides of that conversation, those representing corrections officers, those representing inmates coming together to demand better conditions. So look, I'm confident there are facilities where there is that sort of corruption and cynicism. But um, most of the conversations I hear are from corrections leaders, like they're genuinely trying to do a good job in a very tough situation.
SPEAKER_01Well, one knock below, you know, true corruption and cynicism is just popularity, because it's popular to be, you know, zero tolerance policy. It's popular to be, quote, tough on crime. And so I kind of wonder if if another motivating factor within their resistance to share that data is it doesn't look great. And so it might politicians I love that you point this out in your book. They don't like to fail. And yeah, and you said actually, we need to fail just faster, guys. Come on now. And I liked that a lot because that's so true. It's like we teach kids that, we teach that in business, but somehow, as soon as you cross the threshold to be an elected official, you get amnesia.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, it's true. It's we're we're so used to doing this in other areas of life and in other industries. But yeah, in the policy space, and voters can can share some of the blame here, right? That's what we want in our elected officials is someone who's going to come in and say, I've got the solution, and then implement a policy and say, Great, I fixed it. Let's all go home, you know? And and we as voters need to hold them accountable and say, like, well, we know this problem's hard to solve. How will we know if what you tried worked? And then what are you going to try next if this doesn't work? Right. And just kind of have make it more of a conversation with a focus on the goal, keeping our eye on whatever ball it is that we're trying to keep, you know, keep in the air or catch or whatever the metaphor is here. Um but you know, we're not necessarily trying to just pass this policy. We're trying to solve a problem. And the question should be, did we solve that problem or not? Are people better off? But yeah, I think there are a lot of people who don't want to know that they failed. Sometimes they just genuinely don't see the value of research aside from it feeling like an audit, you know, like someone coming in to catch you doing something wrong. And I think a lot of researchers like see themselves as genuinely like, I'm just trying to help you iterate on your impact and maximize your impact. And if if someone on the practitioner side has never worked with a researcher before, there's a lot of just like trust building that has to happen, that there's, you know, you're not just trying to catch me doing something wrong. Um, you're actually here to help me. But yeah, if no one's expecting evidence of impact, then there's no downside to not having it. And then in participating in the study can only bring downside risk, then, right? If everyone thinks that what you did worked, then having a study isn't going to help you and it can only hurt you if it turns out it didn't work as well as you told people it did.
SPEAKER_01I feel like you just use like economist trade-off logic less than, you know, to explain that the general public. And I agree with you. I hope certainly that voters would encourage their own appetite for nuance so that we can ask these questions. But I I was reading your book, I was like, wait a minute. They don't use data to make those policies help. So that's my next question is like, if they're not using data to create these policies and to continue them, then what are they doing? Is it based on, you know, feelings?
SPEAKER_00You know, one of the, so I've been in this job for about three years. And when I first took it, I was an academic for a long time before this. And when I first took this job and would be working more in the policy space, I expected most of the conversations with policymakers to be along the lines of, you know, they don't believe data, they don't believe evidence, they, you know, they know they speak to the community. The community wants this, so we're gonna do this. And it turns out most of the conversations I have with, especially state lawmakers, so where most criminal justice policy is made is the state level. State lawmakers typically work part-time. They don't have a staff. Most people I talk to genuinely would love to do something that works, but they just don't know. Like they're just one person. And so they're talking to everyone who's in their network, but they don't know any researchers, right? And they just need help. And so someone like me can come in and say, if you're worried about crime rates in your community, focus on solving more crimes faster rather than these other things. And they're like, oh, that's interesting. That makes sense. Wait, how would we do that? Do you have a model bill? And it's really, it's it's really amazing to see the openness to the ideas and the data and research. But I think it's genuinely just kind of a network problem. Like they would love to have data, but the data aren't easy to find and they don't know anyone who can get it for them. Now, there are other institutional barriers. You know, the data should be easier for I've talked to lots of lawmakers who've been trying to get data from their courts for years and they can't get them. And so there's there's a lot we could be doing better. But I think part of this is just researchers don't know policymakers and policymakers don't know researchers. And if we can just get these people in the same room talking to each other, we could solve a lot of problems.
SPEAKER_01So, what models are working?
SPEAKER_00In terms of solving more crimes faster, there are a few things. So we know that DNA databases are really effective. And that's one thing that's been studied, including by me. I have some research on this from my academic days. Um, and so law enforcement DNA databases basically include DNA profiles from people who are convicted of or arrested for particular types of crimes. And every state has different laws about which groups of people or which groups of charges or convictions require you to be added to the database. And so there's a DNA profile that's just a string of numbers. It's not useful for anything except matching to DNA from crime scenes. And so the database includes a whole bunch of offender profiles and a whole bunch of crime scene profiles, evidence from crime scenes from unsolved crimes. And it looks for matches. And it basically helps law enforcement identify suspects in cases where they might not have been identified otherwise. And basically what this means is if you go in the DNA database, you're much more likely to get caught if you re-offend than if you weren't in the database. And, you know, that sounds good in theory, but how big is the effect in practice? I was able to use data from Denmark, which has incredible administrative data. And so you can link to all kinds of cool stuff and a natural experiment, which is what economists like myself use to measure the impacts here. And the idea here is that on a particular date, the DNA database is expanded to include, in this case, everyone charged with the equivalent of a felony. Let's say that goes into effect on June 1st. Anyone who is charged with a felony May 29th, May 30th, doesn't go in the database. Anyone convicted of the same crimes, June 1st, June 2nd, June 3rd, they do go in the database. But nothing else is changing at June 1st. These are not different types of people. Everything else about the criminal justice system stays the same. The only thing that's different is that the second group of people are in the database and they're much more likely to get caught if they re-offend. And so then we can say, okay, let's follow those groups of people over time, see what happens to their recidivism. It turns out in that context, the people were who were in the database were 42% less likely to reoffend, to come back with new charges in the future. And that's a huge effect on recidivism. Huge. In context where most of our reentry programs don't work, you know, most of the programs we we invest a lot of money in wraparound services, like. All of these extremely well-intentioned policies and programs that sound really good typically have zero impact on recidivism. And just adding people to the DNA database reduces recidivism by over 40%. So expanding DNA databases is one thing lots of states are considering now.
SPEAKER_01So let me follow up with a question on that. Because my immediate reaction is like, okay, love that. Easy. Little Q-tip swab and learn business. Okay, simple. Because a lot of those other services are quite elaborate. So this is very straightforward. But the privacy part of it, I'm like, I don't know. Databases get hacked all the time. Speaking of DNA, 23andMe was hacked in 2023. Uh, the national public data, the Florida-based background check company was hacked in 2024. United Healthcare, that's kind of major, 2024. So, I mean, how do we calculate that trade-off?
SPEAKER_00This is basically the conversation to be having is like, okay, there might be public safety benefits from tools like this, any kind of technology that can increase the probability of getting caught. And this is there are only gonna be more and more of these with facial recognition and you know, all kinds of AI stuff. Um, with the DNA database in particular, the key here is that this isn't 23andMe. And so 23andMe includes like they kind of sequence your whole genome, they tell you all these things about your health and your predispositions and who your family members are and all that stuff. The DNA database basically, and it's heavily regulated by the FBI and which is super conservative in the rules that states have to follow in order to participate in CODIS, which is the national database that links all the states. And so it's really just a string of numbers that is based on non-coding portions of your DNA. And it sort of looks for there's certain places in the DNA where it's sort of instructions for like what your genes are supposed to be doing with other other information, and it counts the number of repeats of certain things. And that information just turns out to not be useful for anything like, you know, who your family members are, what health your health conditions are.
SPEAKER_01But about race, tell you what race you are.
SPEAKER_00It can't, it's not telling you race, right? So I think I think these databases include maybe uh sex, but not um, but not not race, not anything else about you. It's really just a string of numbers that is, it's almost, I think of it as like a social security number where each of the individual numbers doesn't mean anything, but together they uniquely identify you. And so a lot of people who work in this space actually put that string of numbers, like their DNA profile on their business card because just as like a, you know, oh, it's a bit of a flex, but it's sort of it's like, it's like um, you know, it's to really demonstrate like this this information has no value to anyone except to match to crime, to, to other DNA that you find elsewhere. So it's really just like a fingerprint. Like you can't do anything with a fingerprint, right? Uh except match to other fingerprints. So in this case, I actually think the privacy costs are much lower than most people think because they have in mind it's 23andMe. Now, there are other kinds of technologies that we consider where surely the privacy costs are much higher. Putting cameras everywhere, right, would also is also really effective as a way to improve public safety. That's more invasive, right? And so I think then the conversation becomes how do we implement these tools in a way where that communities are comfortable with, where you have safeguards on who can access the information, on different levels of security to minimize the risk of hacking. You can kind of keep key information in separate databases. So if this gets hacked, it's less useful. There are ways we can use technology uh responsibly. And that's going to only become more important going forward. But I really do think that's a solvable problem, despite all of the examples of big companies getting hacked. There, there are ways to do this better and to be able to safeguard data. I think one, I've heard that, you know, these DNA databases for the government have been around since the 1990s. And at this point, we do not know of any data breaches, probably because the information in them is actually not useful. It's like clearly, like there's a huge benefit to using these kinds of tools. We just need to figure out how to implement them in a way that safeguards everyone's privacy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And that's another reason why having all the people in the same room having this conversation is so major, which leads me to my next question about historians. You wouldn't think that would be a part of this conversation we're having. But I get nervous about policies that are created in times of crisis. And the example that always comes to mind is during World War I, the American plan was, you know, deployed. And that was in response to all of our soldiers getting venereal disease left and right and wanting to protect them from that. And but what it permitted is officials to round up, quote, suspicious looking women and incarcerate them. And so I I kind of wonder like is that is his history a part of the conversation in order that we don't repeat the the worst parts of it?
SPEAKER_00Yes. And I think my my primary interest and my my expertise is in really thinking about like, okay, what are the ideas, like where are we right now? And how what are some ideas for us to get to a better place? Whether it's fewer homicides or um lower racial disparities or lower incarceration rates or whatever it is that is your goal, like what are some ideas we could be trying to achieve that goal? And then how can we implement that idea or that policy or that program in a way that we can actually measure whether it worked? I'm pretty agnostic. Like I, of course, have plenty of ideas about things we should be trying, right? A lot of them because they come through my economist lens. Like I think about incentives, I think about changing incentives to change behavior. But if a sociologist or historian or a political scientist has different ideas because they have different experience or different training, great. We just need to be trying lots of stuff, but we need to be serious about the, you know, real likelihood that whatever we try is not going to work or could even backfire. And certainly learning from history, seeing what's happened in the past is a big way we can we can be testing what was the impact of this policy on the ground during this time period, huh? It really seemed to have a really detrimental impact. That doesn't mean like in a different, completely different context, it couldn't work, but it should give us pause, right? And just make us more humble. You kind of take in all the information you have, use it to come up with new ideas about things to try, and then go out there and try things and aim to fail fast instead of pretending we're not gonna fail.
SPEAKER_01You bring up such a good point because you're right. I mean, it did it would be helpful to have historical context when someone goes, Oh, raises their hand, I have an idea. And then the historians like pushes up their glasses, excuse me. Uh, we did that, and here's what happened. However, we could spend years pontificating. And you're right, just trying things is the most accurate and valuable data that we can, as long as like, you know, do no harm, of course.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think just recognizing that like sometimes a lot of our good ideas are gonna do harm, right? This is why it's so important to fail fast, is sort of, you know, you don't want to be negligent. If you have tons of evidence already that this thing that you want to try is harmful, then like the burden of proof is really on you about why we should try it again. But the situation we're typically in is that we have no evidence about whether something would work. And and I think a lot of people hear me and other researchers say we need more evidence on the impact as a call to slow down. And really, for me, it's a call to speed up. We have to be trying more things. If we want to change the status quo, we have to be doing things differently. I think where my worldview differs from a lot of people who work in this space is that I assume most things we try are not going to work. And so my goal is to like try as many things as quickly as possible, fail as quickly as possible, and find the few things that do work so that we can scale those. And I think other people working in the space assume most things that are well intended will work. And then being careful to implement it in a way where you've got a control group and everything else, it's just slowing you down then. That approach to policymaking has not served us very well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's why we can't prosecute digital crimes correctly. Right.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. Let's try some new things there. Yeah, let's, let's, yeah, yeah. We need to be, yeah, new solutions on the table.
SPEAKER_01Well, hey there. Since you seem to be enjoying this episode so far, double check that you've hit the follow button on your podcast listening app and subscribe on YouTube. And to join my free private Facebook group, search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. So let's talk about probation because this is such a um interesting data point because you're saying, all right, it's not the harshness of the punishment, it's the likelihood to get caught. When you're on probation, no other time are you more likely to get caught because the the rules are so wack-adoo, right? Like you must have a job, but you also must check in with your probation officer at these certain times. Like in our town, our public transportation's not great. You have to get to the probation office. It can't be like a video call and you know, random drug check checks. You have to do that in person, which but but don't miss your job. You know, like there's just all these in your book. Let's see, you called it like a minefield of technicalities or something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So why is it that that works in the overall scope of crime that you're likely to get caught, therefore you don't do it. But in probation, you're likely to get caught for things like you didn't even mean to. And yet we see recidivism rates actually increase during that process.
SPEAKER_00The key difference here is that on probation, you have a whole bunch of additional rules. The intent there is to keep you, uh, is to help guide you. If you don't drink and you don't use drugs and you check in with your probation officer all the time and you're not hanging out with other people who are recently released from prison, that should all help you avoid risky situations. And so that's the idea. And then anyone who's breaking those rules, the idea is that that's a signal that you are at high risk of committing crime. And so we should revoke your probation and put you in prison. Where it has gone a bit off the rails is that you have all these rules that it turns out, based on the evidence we have, don't seem to be good signals that you are at high risk of committing more crime. If you're missing your meeting to the probation officer, maybe it's not because you don't care about this and you're flouting the system and you're you're on the run. It's because you missed your bus, right? And that's or it's like a problem of poverty rather than, you know, active defiance. And so we have all these rules that then if you break, you get these technical violations that can put you back in prison, but it's not actually making the community safer because those rule breaks weren't actually good signals that you were a threat to society. So, so you're increasing the probability of getting caught, but the stuff you're getting caught for is not actually the thing we care about. We care about new crime, right? We're trying to avoid new crime, not missing meetings with the probation officer. There have been, remarkably, there have been a bunch of randomized trials in this space, which, you know, I that's the gold standard for research, right? Randomize people into treatment and control groups. It's so hard and so much of the public safety space, you can't randomly send people to prison. And so people like me use natural experiments to test things. But this is a place where somehow researchers convinced practitioners who are running these probation officers to actually randomize people to different supervision levels. So intensive supervision or moderate supervision or low supervision, and and no one knew they weren't supposed to be at the level they were assigned to. And so you have these beautiful randomized trials of different supervision levels. And in general, what they find across all of these studies is if you are unlucky and you get in more intensive supervision, you do break more rules because there are more rules to break. That's the minefield idea. Then you are more likely to go back to prison, but it doesn't actually reduce any new crime. What that means is that our probation system as it's currently constructed is costing a lot of money. We're doing a lot of stuff, but it's not actually having any public safety value. And so it's just a waste of resources. Like from an economist perspective, it's just a waste of resources. And so, based on all the research we have, we could have much less intensive supervision across the board while we're trying other things that could work better.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so what about DUIs? Because DUI probation is a good example where like strict rules would encourage rehabilitation. It's not quite the same as like the DUI or the probation we were already just talking about, but a lot of those rules fight against each other, you know, um, in the in the same way, but but you have potentially like an addiction kind of layered in with that. And even the the DUI charge itself, I thought was completely based on data. And because like a breathalyzer, okay, that's a scientific device, right? You know, well, it turns out like most of them are not frequently recalibrated, and a lot of the um arrest factors are based on officer discretion. I was just at a charity event for children. Alcohol was being served, all of those do-gooders drove themselves home afterwards and had they been pulled over in the state of Florida, and the officer said, Have you been drinking? And if you said, I had a glass of wine like four hours ago, the officer could use his or her discretion to then arrest you on charges of a DUI. So um, does that whole sector deserve its own look or does it basically um wash out to be about the same?
SPEAKER_00So we have it's funny, I think most of the research on DUIs is very separate from the research on other types of offenses. And I don't really know why that is, but but um I can think of like two big categories of studies that we have on DUIs. One is using that blood alcohol content cutoff, right? So, so as you said, in a lot of situations, um, there isn't uh a BAC test. They're not necessarily going down to the station and getting their blood drawn. It's more of a field sobriety test, but often there are breathalyzer tests or blood draws. And then basically, if you're if you're just over the 0.08, you're more likely to be convicted than if you're just of under the 0.08 threshold. And so there's a bunch of research looking at like, well, what happens if you are pulled over for a DUI and you're just over the 0.08 versus just under? And that means you're much more likely to have, you know, some real fines, some consequences. Well, in those cases, you actually do see a big recidivism drop for those people who are just over the 0.08. They're much less likely to come back with a new DUI in the future. So in that way, it seems very effective. And I think part of what makes DUIs interesting is it is it is a much larger population that tends to be affected by it. Um, it's less of, you know, a crime of opportunity or poverty or something like that. But the other, the other area where there's been a bunch of research, and I talk about a lot in the book, is the idea of like swift and certain consequences for people who are, say, on probation for especially repeat DUI offenses. And this program called 24-7 Sobriety was piloted in in South Dakota, where there is not a lot of public transit, not a lot of walking around. You have to be driving, right? So DUIs are a huge public safety problem in South Dakota. And the idea here is that if you are charged with or convicted of a DUI, part of the condition of that probation or even pretrial release is that you not drink for some period of time. And in practice, that was really, you know, you're not supposed to break that rule, but we weren't really watching. And so people drank, you know, a lot. And then every once in a while they get caught for it, and then that would be the technical violation. So the insight here was well, why don't we have everybody come in once or twice a day, do a breathalyzer? If you're you've been drinking anything, if it's not zero, then you're in jail for one night, right? Just swift and certain consequences that are reliable. And it turns out when they implemented that program, drinking went to almost zero to zero for almost everyone. It was like 99.9% compliance. And this was a huge surprise to a lot of people who really thought that, like, well, this is a problem of addiction, right? This is a substance use disorder. You need real treatment. A lot of people in the public health community like really hate this line of studies because it's really they're like, no, no, you what you need is real treatment. And I think what this means to me, the way I interpret it, is maybe a lot of people who are drinking and driving aren't actually addicted. They're just making poor choices. And if you have swift and certain consequences and reliable consequences, if you knew that every time you drank there would be consequences for it, then you stop. But part of it could also be the people who really need treatment now have a strong incentive to go get it. Maybe that treatment was always available, but they didn't, they didn't engage in it before because, you know, they just rather not. And so, so this can provide the incentive to actually go get the treatment. A lot of people who work in this space think of this program as also helping law enforcement triage, right? You can see most people, you know, immediately stop drinking when you do have the threat of just one night in jail as a result. But some people don't. Some people have a real problem and cannot stop drinking even with those consequences. And so then you know very quickly if someone, if this is not going to work for someone and they need something else. And so then you can like you can focus your resources and and especially treatment resources on that person. But this is an example of, you know, I think having having that swiftness and certainty of consequences can be a really useful tool if we target it in a in a smart way.
SPEAKER_01I have never been more excited about policy in my life than this moment. There's so much cool stuff, right? I mean, I'm like, okay, let's get to experimenting, you know. Yes. And we haven't even talked about re-entry and prevention yet. So let's go there now. So re-entry is another interesting one because if someone is has been listening to my show for a while, they know I interviewed um my cousin way back in it was like 20, early 2020, maybe even 2019, about his 11-year stint in prison. And and uh we didn't really even talk about what that re-entry was like for him in that episode. But that's why I have some sense of what it is a little bit like and the also the the technical minefields that that are there because one of the conditions of release is that you get a job. And sometimes when you have a record, um, you can't even get the interview. So what are some experiments happening there that are showing some good results?
SPEAKER_00This is a space that I spent a lot of time working in as an academic before, before I left uh three years ago. And I think, and the real motivation here is that the policies we've tried, things like ban the box, clean slate, where we see this sort of unfairness that a lot of people coming out of prison who have done all the work, ready to change their lives, now they can't even get a job interview because they check the box saying they have a criminal record and the employer just throws the application away, right? So that feels really unfair. How do we fix this? And the inclination, I think the human impulse in that situation is to say, remove the information. Well, if if we tell employers they can't ask anymore, then they'll just treat everyone equally. And then they'll, you know, they'll just hire people who are good fit for the job. And I hear about an idea like that as an economist, and I think, oh, this is totally gonna backfire. If someone can't ask for information they want, they're gonna try to guess. And then if someone, if an employer is trying to guess who has a criminal record, well, they're gonna guess that young black men with no, with lower education levels are probably most likely to have a recent conviction. Statistically, in the United States, given big racial disparities and who goes to prison. And so, you know, that's a theory, that's a hypothesis. What happened in the real world? Well, we now have a bunch of researchers, that's exactly what happened in the real world that employers, when ban the box went into effect, you see that young black men without a criminal record are now much less likely to get a callback because they can't signal their clean record out front. Employers just assume. And so you actually see racial disparities in employment widen after ban the box rather than shrink. And other researchers found it also doesn't help people with records who do get their foot in the door because eventually they do the background check and they don't hire them. Like there's something real, there really is something about this criminal record that employers worry about. And so what I'm much more excited about at this point is policies that can come up with ideas about what employers are actually worried about there and then come up with a way to directly address that concern. So, one example is employers will tell you they're worried about the risk associated with hiring some with someone with a record. Maybe that person is more likely to steal from them, for instance. And so, how do we deal with risk? We have insurance, right? And it turns out that most the insurance policies that employers buy to cover their employees, just general liability coverage in any organization, excludes people with criminal records. And so, yeah. So that's, you know, a good reason then for employers not to hire people from this group. It turns out there is a big federal policy that has tried to fill this gap for a long time, but it's not very effective for reasons. I will not get into. But this is something that my team and I have been thinking a lot about. Like, well, if we could pilot sort of a rider or something that can go on to that insurance policy, the basic insurance policy, but fills this gap, then maybe we can A collect data that can help insurance companies understand how to price this thing. Because one reason, because the question then becomes like, why doesn't the market just fix this? If employers would appreciate this, why doesn't the market provide it? It could be that insurers just genuinely don't know how to price the risk if they've never covered this population before. And so if, you know, a philanthropic organization came in and covered it for a year or two, collect the data, then we could help make the market happen. But there's also probably a role here always for government to subsidize this in some way, because part of the, the, the thinking here is that we all benefit, the entire community benefits if the employer is willing to give this person a chance. And so we should all then be chipping in to help cover that. So that's the kind of idea that I'm much more excited about in this space than trying to find ways to pilot in the years ahead.
SPEAKER_01What about the rehabilitation certificate idea? I had never heard about that until I read it in your book.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So this is an idea. It's been around for a little while, but now there are a bunch of states that offer them, which is super interesting. And the idea here is that if you, you know, have come out of prison or if you've you've got a conviction, you can go in front of a judge and provide evidence that you have been rehabilitated, right? You can provide, you can have character witnesses, you can show certificates of programming you've done. And basically, if the judge is convinced, they can give you this rehabilitation certificate. It's called different things in different places. And you can then provide that as additional information. So you have the criminal record, the employer can see, but you also have the certificate. And in studies, much like the studies of Ban the Box, where there's one where they actually sent out applications from fictitious applicants, applying for jobs, randomizing different things. In the study with the certificates, if you have a criminal record, you're called back at much lower rates. But if you have that same criminal record and a rehabilitation certificate, you're called back at the same rate as people with no record at all. Wow. And so it actually did the work that people thought or hoped Ban the Box would do, kind of get your foot in the door, right? And I think there are two reasons for this that it could be effective. One is it just provides more information. Like employers are grouping people with criminal records in the same category and non-criminal records in the same category. And of course, there are some people with records who'd make great employees, and employers just don't know how to figure out which ones they are. And so the certificate can help provide more information that can point them to those people. The other possibility is that it's about risk again. And so if you've got the certificate and the employer is worried about a negligent hiring lawsuit, for instance, well, if they have a piece of paper saying that this judge thought this person was ready to work, then like how could they have known that the person was still a risk, right? And so it can it can provide uh kind of protection against lawsuits. We don't have the real world world studies yet on like it impacts on actual employment and recidivism, but that's something I'm super excited to see.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's feels very creative. I like I said, I'd never heard of it. I was like, oh, I could see where that would do something. The other re-entry factor is, of course, housing, which can be a challenge because like you don't have a job history and even just moving from one state to another as a self-employed person, I found housing quite challenging. You know, you had to get find those off-the-record landlords who aren't the owned by the big companies. I was surprised to read that halfway houses assigned to prisoners upon release had an increase of 18% recidivism that feels like it would be reverse.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think most people think of being able to get housing like that as a benefit. And that's certainly the way it was framed in that in that particular state where the study was done. But I think the punchline here is that if you're released into a halfway house, and here the the there's a natural experiment. And so some people happen to get a uh kind of a case manager who is more likely to recommend this than others. And so you're it's it's really being randomized to different case managers essentially randomizes you to different likelihoods of getting a halfway house um a placement. And it turns out if you're placed in a halfway house, you're also just on a higher level of supervision than if you were not. And so it's more likely that you will get caught for these different technical violations. And so most of the movement is in you're just more likely to be you're to rack up these technical violations. It could also be part of it. I think they might have found some increase in um in violent offenses. You just got a group of people living together now who are all kind of struggling, right? Some of them might get into fistfights every once in a while. But a lot of it is the higher level of technical violations because you are being more closely watched with these different rules you have to follow. But regardless, yeah, it wound up being that if you kind of got lucky, quote unquote, and got assigned this halfway house, you were dramatically more likely to wind up back in prison than if you were not.
SPEAKER_01Well, the the social conflict also reminds me of the mental health piece because that is another huge barrier. Cause they, I mean, think about how hard that is to access just in regular life, like as a person on the outside. And then, you know, in prison, your condition may have worsened, you may have acquired complex PTSD, who knows? And then you get out. If you do have court-mandated counseling visits, there's some limitations there. Only three visits are covered, who knows? Um, and then on the flip side of that, which is kind of like something nobody talks about really, is some counseling centers are much more interested in their repeat customer business model than they are actual healing. And so you can get come in there as frequently as you want, invent about your day, but they're not actually helping you move the needle toward a measurable goal. Do you have any good ideas, Dr. Dolia? Is what I'm trying to say.
SPEAKER_00On the mental health side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is so this is an area I've been really excited about because there's more and more evidence that increasing access to mental health care really prevents crime, but also reduces recidivism. The question then is how do we do this, aside from just like expanding Medicaid, which is a big political football. And so there, there are kind of a few different points along along the spectrum, I guess, where you might want to try to intervene. So one is for young men, making sure that, you know, when they're teens and young adults, they have access to the care they need. You know, that could go through schools, it could go through technology. There are kind of a lot of interesting ideas floating around out there. AI could be helpful. But another, another place where there's a ton of policy action right now is helping people who are coming out of prison. And so their Medicaid has traditionally had what's called an inmate exclusion, uh, which means that it can Medicaid dollars cannot be used to pay for healthcare while someone is behind bars.
SPEAKER_01And surprisingly, that was a Clinton thing. This is why I was like fist pumping the air when I was reading your book, because I thought, how funny would it be to be a fly on the wall with you watching you explain all this stuff to people who think at first that you're on their team. You know what I mean? Because like a lot of this is like coding left, but then but then you're like, but Clinton put in this thing where you know you're not eligible for any welfare benefits, basically, if you have a felon. And so, and that's obviously coding right. So it's it's like it truly is a bipartisan issue that you have to take off your team hat. Like, take off your team jersey, guys. Sit down, let's work it out. Sorry, total rant there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, absolutely. And I I think, you know, a lot of the things I talk about do code left. So a lot of them code right. I think a lot of people are like, wait, which what do we do with this? You know, but I think then it at some point becomes liberating because people realize, like, oh, there are a whole bunch of ideas that aren't attached to a team yet. There's actually room to run here. We could implement a bunch of these, right? But yeah, so Medicaid re-entry waivers waive that in mid-exclusion and enable jails and prisons to use these Medicaid dollars to provide healthcare to people within 90 days of their release. So the the idea here is to help provide or increase continuity of care when someone gets out and is going back into the community. Um, so that, you know, you know, one big upside of being in prison uh potentially is that maybe you're getting treatment, um, stable treatment for for a mental illness that you hadn't been getting in the community. You know, we know the healthcare in many communities is not that great to begin with. And so, but at least being in prison, you've got the structure and perhaps are diagnosed with something you hadn't been diagnosed with before, and so can get treatment in a lot of facilities. But then when you are let out, maybe you have a one-month prescription and everyone's just like, good luck to you, and you have to find a new doctor and you have to find new health insurance and all those things. And so this is trying to solve that problem to kind of improve the continuity of care when you get out. It turns out it's a huge logistical lift to get the departments of correction to talk with the Medicaid agencies, these two giant bureaucracies in each state, right? And so there's just huge like data and logistical lift going on across in in many states now. Something like it's like there are like 20-something states, I think, that have that have these Medicaid waivers now. And Trump just uh announced the first one in his his second term in Louisiana. So Louisiana's gonna get a waiver, but uh, and we're hoping for more soon. But so all these states are trying to figure this out. I think this will be good for the people who are directly affected, right? Those who are within 90 days of release. But I think it could also have really big impacts on the broader facility because in order to have access to those Medicaid dollars, facilities have to make sure all their doctors are licensed in the way that Medicaid requires, right? Like when we all go to the doctor, we sort of assume there's a certain standard of care. And that's because that's what's required by for federal reimbursement for and like insurance. And and because there's no, there were no federal dollars going into these prison and jail facilities, they didn't have to follow those rules, right? And so now the the standard of care, I think for everyone is likely to increase. And that could be really interesting to watch. And so, yeah, this is a this is a place where like there's a lot of work to do, but it's a place where I think we could really look back at this and think it was a it was a big game changer for for a lot of individuals and communities.
SPEAKER_01In terms of prevention, especially like on the kid level, you said that Head Start programs and nutrition are really important. I don't think anyone is arguing with you, but I'm also pretty sure that we haven't made the connection between crime prevention and preschool. So uh walk us through that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, there are so many, so many interventions like this where I feel like I'm in mo in many rooms and the broken record kind of saying, could you add crime outcomes to that? Could you crime add crime outcomes to that study, like any housing intervention, education intervention, health intervention? If if you're trying to help a relatively disadvantaged population get onto a better path, you are likely keeping at least some of them out of jail and prison. And if that's the case, that program could pay for itself really fast, right? So thinking not only about things like educational outcomes, but also like what's the flip side and are we preventing that bad outcome? Um, so yeah, interventions like Head Start, so just, you know, high quality daycare for young children, um, you know, was rolled out during the war on poverty, uh, mid-century, many, many decades ago, and and was found to have, you know, big impacts on the kids themselves, but also big impacts on the next generation. So like their kids. And part of this is just you put those kids on a better path. And so then they have more income when they're an adult, and then their kids are better off because they are, you know, they're just in a better situation to be able to care for the kids. You know, there's a lot that's changed since the 1950s and 60s. And so would it still be effective today? And there are more recent studies that also look at, you know, use randomized trials to see does someone get into this, this kind of pre-K or um daycare versus versus not. And yes, still has big impacts on them. And you have to like, you know, wait 18 years or something or 15 years until they they grow up and could be arrested, but but you see those impacts on their criminal behavior later. And so it really does seem like investing in in young kids is really cost effective. You know, one reason I wrote the book is that for some reason in some circles and in the economics world where I come from, there are people who think, you know, the whole game is in is intervening in early childhood. And if you've missed that window, then it's too late, right? Like that's that's where you get all the bang for your buck. And if they're over five years old, like good luck to them, but there's nothing else we can do for you. And part of what I wanted to, you know, show in this book is there are lots of things we could do at each stage of the criminal justice system, even for someone who's in the system. But the reality is it is still much easier and much cheaper to prevent someone's first engagement with criminal, the criminal justice system than to pull them out of it once they're in it. And so the more we can do for young kids, for, you know, older kids, for teenagers, the better off we'll be. You also asked about oh, nutrition. So this is interesting because I think, yeah, so so the studies have been around like food stamps. Like if you get access to food stamps when you're a young kid, you're less likely to commit crime later on. It's linked to or people are starting to hypothesize that there's a link there with the evidence on exposure to lead and other toxins when you're a young kid.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I loved that you brought this up. I am so excited right now because Caroline Fraser, do you know who she is? The author?
SPEAKER_00I don't, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh. Okay. She wrote this book called Murder Land. She won the Pulitzer. I don't know she is kind of a big deal. Yeah, like she won a bunch of other words too. But she poses that the uptick in serial murders between 1960 and 1990 is to lead poisoning, especially in the Pacific Northwest. It is so fascinating. Um, I mean, it's fascinating from like an unexpected true crime entertainment angle, but it's also interesting that we can, through that hypothesis, plus your data, your research, connect health and safe communities. Like, how cool is that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So there's a ton of energy around lead abatement, especially in, especially outside the US. I mean, lead poisoning is a much it's a big problem in the US. Most people don't think we fixed it. You know, they think we took lead out of gasoline in the 70s, like problem solved. Turns out we didn't fix it. There's still lots of lead exposure, but it's a much bigger problem outside the US and in the global south. And so there is a lot of money kind of going into trying to address this, but most of it still approaches the issue from like a public health standpoint. Like, think about health outcomes. And that's important, super important. But I think different people would be interested if they realized there was also a public safety um uh angle here. And so, so yes, there is data looking, you know, one of the hypotheses for why crime fell so much in the 90s and early 2000s is that we removed gasoline or lid from gasoline in the 1970s. And then those kids grew up not exposed to lead when they were young kids, and then were less likely to be violent and aggressive later. Now, to someone like me, that's not a perfect experiment. There's a lot of stuff going on. Like I'm not sure if we'll ever nail that down. But we do have other evidence that is much cleaner, a much cleaner experiment that shows that that does show very compellingly that exposure to lead when you're a young child does lead to more violence and more, more um violent arrests, more violent suspensions from school, all of these things when you're a teenager or a young adult. We also have evidence that a CDC recommended intervention for those young kids, if you test at a kind of a dangerous threshold, is really effective. And this is where the cooling to nutrition comes in, because one of the components of that intervention is that you have a nutritionist that suggests that the kid drink a lot of milk. And the reason is that the lead is super harmful in the brain because it mimics calcium. And so it basically attaches to all the calcium receptors in your brain and affects brain development. Well, if you drink a lot of milk and can crowd out the lead, it can help mitigate the effects of that. And so there's some hypotheses swirling around that that might be part of the reason that food stamps are so effective for young kids, is that better nutrition just has a more protective effect against toxin exposure when your brain is in these like really sensitive developing phases. So it's just, I mean, you know, that is a hypothesis, but it's just so interesting to think about. It's like, wait, if that's the solution, like have all the kids drink more milk, like that's really easy, right? So there's just so much stuff like that where it doesn't, it does, we don't have to wait until someone is arrested. We should be using arrests and incarceration and probation as intervention points to put people on better paths, but there's so much we can do outside that system to put people on a better path too that makes that will make everyone safer. And yeah, I'm I share your excitement and enthusiasm for all of the opportunities here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it it is exciting, but I do I have like this, I don't know, like nagging thought that remains because when you were explaining, okay, so better health equals like these better essentially behavioral outcomes, I could just hear the Facebook Karen in my brain going, you know, arguing that poor decisions are decisions and that this is a moral breakdown and you know, we need fill in the blank with your favorite deity. And like that's the solution. And and so from a greater policy change perspective, I kind of wonder if that moral blanket of opinion is too heavy to sway the public to, you know, distance themselves from those cultural ties, also of like American individualism and um personal work ethic and pull up yourself by your bootstraps kind of thing. Um and and because as I mentioned earlier, policymakers are they get their job through being popular, essentially. That's what a vote is. And so they will be popular by saying the thing that's popular. And so I wonder if it would just be like a cycle of good intentions and bad outcomes that we just pretend not to see. I don't know, that's a little dark. But you had like some sort of um policy safety summit thing that really was very helpful. So maybe we should end on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think look, I have two answers to this. One is yes, there are lots of people who will continue to commit crime, even if we do every, we give them every opportunity not to, right? And that we will always need jails and prisons, we will always need police. Even Norway has police in prisons, right? Like we still there are like there are people who will continue to make terrible choices and that need us to protect the community from them. And also, and this is YoE, we host this public safety boot camp for state lawmakers, I think especially at the state level, because they are closer to their constituents. They have to balance their budget every year. Prison's really expensive, it turns out. And so, you know, just relying on prison will will bust your budget every time. You need other options. But in in those conversations, I often will kind of back up and lay out, like, okay, let's talk about why we punish people, why we put people in prison. And I put, I think there are four big reasons we put people in prison. One is deterrence. We hope that it will prevent them from committing crime again in the future and it'll prevent other people from committing crime. The second is incapacitation. We're physically removing them from the community so they can't harm the community anymore. The third is rehabilitation. It should at least be, we should at least try to make an intervention point to put someone on a better path. And the fourth is retribution. And that's just idea, this moral idea that just like you did bad things, you deserve for bad things to happen to you. Like that's that's justice, right? And the reason I like to talk about this is that I can then say, I as an economist have lots to say about the first three: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, like what the imperial, those are empirical questions. How much bang for a buck are we are we getting? I have nothing to say about how much retribution or on the flip side, how much mercy someone deserves, right? That is those are moral and political judgments. That's between you and your pastor or your God or whatever. And but I think that even for people who really value retribution and really, really do think people, you know, all L SQL, they'd like to see more, more, more suffering for bad, bad choices. Even those people probably want less crime for less money. So, you know, even if you have like, I have some moral views, different people will have different, you know, will come down on different places on the retribution question. But all L sequel, I think everyone still wants, would prefer their policies actually produce more public safety and at least want that information, right? So you can think about like, okay, what am I paying for with this additional year in prison?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Am I getting public safety out of it? Or is it entirely the retribution piece? And if it's the retribution piece, I as an economist say, fine, like that's your choice. I just want everyone to be clear about what we're paying for with the different tools in our toolkit and making the smartest choices we can based on the information we have.
SPEAKER_01Amen, sister. Thank you so much for this conversation. And honestly, I feel like I mean, it's just been so educational and so eye-opening. And dare I say hopeful. So I really appreciate it. Tell everyone where they can buy your book, but also your podcast, because you're doing really well with that. And it's such a perfect uh topic to unpack, you know, 45 minutes at a time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, so yeah, the science of second chances is the book. It's available in all bookstores wherever you buy books. And I do host a podcast called Probable Causation, which is this very wonky deep dive into a particular research study in every episode. I talk to the researcher and really kind of step through not only what we learned about a particular intervention, whether it worked, but how we learned it, right? To really help showcase these different methods economists bring to the table and be able to test things in the real world. And actually also just launched a sub stack with the same name, probable causation, um, to be able to talk more about what I'm seeing at this intersection of research and policy. So people can find me there too.
SPEAKER_01That's a lot. And and is anything next for you?
SPEAKER_00Well, I actually just announced, we're recording this in early June. I just announced I'm leaving Arnold Ventures after three years. I am, and this is mostly because I am just super energized by the opportunity in this space. And we've been doing some really good, cool stuff. But Arnold Ventures is really the only foundation that's playing in this, in this space. And I think we need to bring some other other donors in and grow the field. And that is my favorite thing to do, is that kind of field building and and matchmaking and putting people in the same room to talk to each other and learn from each other. And so I am really excited to to push on that in the years ahead. And so uh this is a relatively recent leap, so I'm still figuring things out, but I will I'll be posting about it in all of those different channels uh online, and I'm really excited to see where we can bring all of this.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm cheering you on, and I think my listeners are too. Thank you again.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for listening. Since you've made it this far, I'd like to invite you to be a part of my private Facebook group. And there I post content that I don't share anywhere else. You can talk to me directly about past and future episodes, and I even do occasional giveaways. Search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. If you liked this episode, you'll also like the one about the American plan, where the US government legally rounded up suspicious looking women and incarcerated them. That is episode 195. Stay tuned next week for a remastered favorite with a former physician of 20 years who has dedicated himself to revealing the truth about America's medical system. Until then, keep it curious.