Can Science Fix Criminal Justice?
5/29/20261 hr 7 min
America's criminal justice debate usually gets reduced to two options: abolish the system or lock everyone up forever. Economist Jennifer Doleac thinks the data point somewhere else entirely.
In this episode, Michael Shermer speaks with Doleac about what rigorous research can tell us about crime, punishment, deterrence, prison reform, and public safety.
Doleac argues that America has built much of its criminal justice system backwards: too little certainty of being caught, too much faith in long prison sentences, and not enough testing of what actually works.
Jennifer Doleac is the Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy focused on evidence-based policy. Before that, she spent over a decade as an economics professor, conducting academic research. She is a leading expert on the economics of crime and discrimination, and a vocal proponent of using rigorous research to inform policy. She frequently writes for outlets including The Washington Post, TIME, and Bloomberg Opinion, and she hosts the Probable Causation podcast on law, economics, and crime. Doleac holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Her new book is The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to libsynads.com, that's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.
Jennifer Doleac· Guest0:39
[ding] We put people in prison for several reasons, right? At least four reasons. One is we think it'll deter crime. We already talked about that. It doesn't really work as well as we thought. There's an incapacitation effect. If you take people who are an active public safety threat off the street, they can't commit crime in the community anymore. That is effective while, at least while they're still a public safety threat, not, probably not when they're 80 or 90. And then there's rehabilitation. There's an opportunity at least to use this as an intervention point to put people on a better path, get them mental healthcare, get them jobs training, you know, other things. We should be increasing the likelihood that anyone is caught if they do something bad. But we don't need to put, like the punishment doesn't need to be draconian, right? But it doesn't need to be that, you know, you can't get a job in the future and you're in prison for three years. Like that's, so how does that help? But if you keep doing it, then you can ratchet up the consequences, right? Then you could imagine having it be more severe.