Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
April twentieth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria. And as always, before
we dive into this week's episode, I want to thank
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You keep it going and you make it so that
I can do all my other jobs and still make
the show because I've got to pay my incredible team
to keep this going. So I want to start with
Chuck Blell, David J. E. Smith, Daniel Lang, Mary Neva,
Will DeFraine, David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabo, Jay Ulrika Hagman,
Pasqually Gilatti, and Joe Wilkinson, and of course so many more.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. All Right, so what
do I have for you this week? I have the
opportunity to speak with doctor Jennifer Doliac. She is the
executive vice president of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, which
is a philanthropy focused on evidence based policy. And before
moving into that space, she was an economic professor at
both Texas A and M University and the University of Virginia.
She's written for a bunch of different outlets and well
we'll talk about her academic training in a bit, but
she has a new book out. It's called The Science
of Second Chances, A Revolution in Criminal Justice. So, without
any further ado, here she is doctor Jennifer Doliac. Well, Jen,
thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk about your new book, The Science
of Second Chances, A Revolution in Criminal Justice. And for
folks who have been listening to the show for a while,
maybe not the whole time. Because this show has been
on air now for what like fourteen no, I think
longer sixteen years. I don't even know. I can't track.
It started as a pretty hard science show. I was
mostly covering like physics, biology, chemistry, some environmental science. As
I went back to school, finished my PhD, became a
clinical psychologist, and moved more into like social justice areas,
the show has definitely shifted in a lot of ways.
We still cover a lot of you know, kind of
hard science, but we've more and more been talking about
social justice issues. And lately, yeah, the criminal justice system
I guess we can call it a system as a
whole has become just increasingly interesting to me because it
is so fundamentally tied to so many aspects of our society.
So I'm just I'm I'm really excited to talk to
you about what's working, what's not working, how we as
a society are impacted, how change or reform is difficult,
but what you know, could be on the horizon. So
before we even get into all of that, I just
want to learn a little bit more about you. So
you are trained as an economist, right.
Speaker 2: That's right? Yes? And so I yeah, so I went
to graduate school for economics, and I really, you know,
I knew that I loved the intuition and the toolkit
that economics provides. But it really is a toolkit. It's
it's a way of thinking about human behavior in terms
of how people respond to incentives. But also economists have
really focused on developing an empirical toolkit that distinguishes correlation
from causation. So of all the social scientists out there,
were the most obsessed with questions, with causal questions and
causal inference. And so we use randomized trials like you
like the lab experiments that that you'll see in the
hard sciences, but out in the field of course, but
we also use natural experiments. So these are situation in
the real world that sort people into treatment and control
groups as if at random. So something that approximates that
ideal lab experiment that we wish we could run, but
that of course is a little bit messier because we're
dealing with human beings out in the real world. And
so those types of natural experiments are really the bread
and butter of a researcher like myself, and that has
really provided a cool and new opportunities to learn a
lot about what works in the criminal justice space and
how to make people's lives better.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think when a lot
of people think of economics they think simply of money,
or when they think of the economy, they think of
the money system. But what you're describing in a lot
of ways sounds like kind of economics as a field
of inquiry really is almost like a form of applied
psychology or applied sociology, sort of human behavior, how humans
make decisions, how they grapple with risk, how they grapple
with as you mentioned, incentives, uncertainty, and then how that
affects these larger maybe like political or social systems.
Speaker 2: Is that right, Yeah, that's right. I mean, I you know,
people sometimes give economists a hard time for encroaching on
other people's territory. We are certainly prone to doing that,
and I think in general most economists do think that
almost any topic is fair game. Economics is everywhere, you know,
people are responding to incentives all over the place. But
also that empirical tool kit I mentioned is really useful
in all kinds of settings, and it helps us really
quantify what the costs and benefits of different interventions are
different programs, different policies, and that's really useful for policy makers.
So if we want to know how to make people healthier,
make our healthcare system work better, if we want to
know how to make our schools better, if we want
to know how to make our prisons better, any of
these spaces, this empirical toolkit is really useful for helping
to crunch the numbers and get the biggest bang for
our buck. And so, as I said, economists are the
most obsessed with doing those kinds of calculations, and so
we tend to be useful in many kinds of conversations.
Speaker 1: And so I'm curious. You know, you studied at Stanford,
and then you were a professor at both A and
M and the University of Virginia before moving into a
sort of like philanthropic policy space when you were a
graduate student, and then when you moved on into your
academic appointments, what were some because it does sound like
like ECON as a whole is like such a broad field,
what were some of your kind of personal areas of
interest and inquiry?
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first went to graduate scho we, I
think I assumed I would study education or the economics
of education or higher education, probably because that's where I'd
spent most of my life, right like, that's you know,
that's the system I knew best. I'd been a student
for a really long time, and so it really wasn't
until it was later in my graduate training where I
and all of my colleagues were hunting around for these
natural experiments that we could apply our new toolkit to.
And I read a newspaper article about law enforcement DNA databases,
and the point of the article was that, you know,
it seems really arbitrary that in some states, all you know,
states are determining the rules about which groups of people
convicted or arrested for certain crimes are required to provide
DNA to the database, and so the rules differ from
state to state, and that sets up situations where you
could have identical people convicted of the exact same crime,
you know, one state apart, and one since in the
database and the other one isn't. And the point of
the article is, isn't this silly, you know, And isn't
this bad policy? And it might be bad policy, and
it might be silly, but it's great for research. And
so that's exactly the kind of setup that where it
does feel arbitrary or even random that you know, identical
people have different treatments, and so that sets up that
natural experiment that someone like me is looking for. And
so I started looking into, well, what do we know
about the impacts of these law enforcement databases. They're used
across the US, they're used around the world, and we
really knew nothing. We knew nothing about the impact of
this extremely common tool, and so that became my dissertation.
And then I graduated in twenty twelve and was coming
out of my PhD at a time when there were
a few more senior economists who are really trying to
develop a cohort of more junior scholars to focus on
this topic crime and the criminal justice system, because economics
really hadn't focused on this much previously. Economic or education
and health and development economics and all these other topics
had been had been common in ECON for a long time,
but for various reasons, economists hadn't thought much about crime,
and so we were way behind other fields like sociology
and criminology in that sense, and so it was a
little bit risky for you know, a junior scholar to say, sure,
I'll embark and define myself, you know, in terms of
this field where you know, when it's doing this and
trying to build a career. Academia can be very traditional
in many ways, and so that's a risky paths to
go down. But there are just so many interesting and
important questions in the public safety and criminal justice spaces,
and the vast majority of them are questions where the
toolkit that I have to be able to answer cause
questions about what works and what doesn't and if something works,
how much does it work, how much does it move
the needle? Those questions are really crucial for for safety
in communities, for the directions of people's lives. And we
really know so much less than we should given how
important those questions are. And so you know, here I am, uh,
you know, over a decade later, still still fascinated by crime.
And and so that's where I've focused my attention.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so you've you've written for several outlets. But
is this your first full length book, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So economics isn't really a book field, it's a
it's a journal article field. And so so this is
my first book and and it's written for a broad audience,
and there's no there's no professional incentive to write for
other academics in this this format, and and I and
you know, my goal here was really to write something
that could communicate all of the ideas that are swirling
around in academic circles to that audience of you know,
interested citizens, policymakers, practitioners who want more information about how
to help put people on a better path, who are
who were involved in the criminal justice system, how to
reduce recidivism and reoffending after people are convicted or spend
time in prison for a crime. And my sense was
really that and still is that the cable news conversation
about crime and criminal justice is really divorced from from
the evidence and from what scholars talk about in the
academy and the types of interventions that we're excited about
and that we're seeing or effective. I think in the
cable news space you have the you know, this traditional
argument between kind of the far left saying we need
to defund police and defund prison and just you know,
invest in social services and that's how we reduce crime,
and the far right is saying the only way to
reduce crime is to just lock people up at their
first the first sign of moral weakness, and you know,
some people are just bad people and there's nothing you
can do. And I think the middle ninety percent of
the country looks at those those two proposals and they're like,
those are our options, you know, and it's just really
unsatisfying and someone like me coming into the policy space,
as you said, I joined Arnold Ventures about two and
a half years ago, which is a philanthropy that focuses
on evidence based policy. So now I spend a lot
more time in the policy space and talking to lawmakers
and practitioners. And the conversations that my colleagues were having
that I'm hearing from lawmakers, they're just so completely different
from anything we talked about in the research space. And
so I was really able to come into this space
with fresh eyes and much less wed to the traditional
that these conversations were had, and it just seemed like
an opportunity and still does. I mean, I think this
is most the most exciting piece of the work. That
there there are so many things we know do work,
and we know how to learn more. We have a
sense that there there probably are more solutions out there
we just need to find them, and so it makes
me very optimistic about what's possible in this policy space,
and my interactions with lawmakers continue to impress me and
continue to you know, support that optimism or they just
genuinely don't know and they don't know any researchers, and
so being able to connect these two worlds has tremendous upside.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm so excited about this conversation as somebody
who identifies as you know, like a scientific skeptic, a
science space or evidence space thinker. When I work in
another podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, where that's
basically what we do is we debunk suit pseudoscience and
we kind of teach critical thinking skills and neuropsychological humility,
understanding cognitive biases, all these different things. I'm curious, sort
of just at the tip, I guess of the of
the iceberg here, could you give us an example of
maybe an obvious situation in which there's something that's just
like well known to be evidence based when it comes
to criminal justice policy in research or academic circles, but
like within the political the public, you know, the media arena,
Like the conversations are just super divorced, like you mentioned,
like is there just an area or a specific talking
point where you're like, why does this persist? Like we
have evidence that it fully flies in the face of this,
Like could you give us an example of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a bunch of examples are coming to mind. One
that I spend a lot of time talking about now
because I do think it could really move the needle
if we can change the conversation is how we deter crime? Right,
And so you know, I'm an economist. I think people
respond to incentives. I think that, you know, the way
to change behavior is to change the cost and benefits
that people respond to. And so to get people to
commit less crime, you either have to reduce the benefits
of committing crime. That's hard to do, or you can
increase the cost of committing crime. And so that's where
the criminal justice system and law enforcement come in. And
there are two ways to increase the perceived cost or
the expected costs of committing crime for someone who's considering
doing so. One is to increase the punishment that they
would receive if they are caught, and the other is
to increase the probability that they are caught. So you know,
there's some chance that you're caught, and then if you
are caught, conditional on being caught, you'll face some punishment.
But if you're not caught, then you don't face any punishment.
And so it's a probability. You multiply the two together,
and that's how you get the expected cost of committing crime.
And for many decades in the United States, and you know,
the US is better than this at this than any
other country, we have really really focused on increasing sentences.
So really tried that that lever that rule. If we
wanted to ter crime, let's just make punishment harsher and longer.
Speaker 1: And so we had these like mandatory minimums, and we
had all of these policies for a long time that
were like really punitive.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and still I mean, I think you know,
even you know, the most recent during COVID, we had
increases in homicides and shootings and that scared everybody. And
so I think for understandable reasons, lawmakers are saying, we
have to we have to crack down on this, we
have to figure out how to prevent crime. We'll just
make sentences longer. And so you see, you know, all
of these sentence enhancements and truth and sentencing bills and
all these different types of policies that are really aimed
at locking people up for longer. This is the way
we're going to reduce crime. And but what we know
from lots and lots of research is that the thing
that changes behavior is not the long sentences. Although it's
perfectly reasonable idea, in practice, it turns out that most
people who are at risk of committing crime, the people
were trying to deter they're simply not thinking that far ahead,
and so changing a punishment from one year to two years,
to five years to ten years in prison, none of
that is registering if they're not thinking past this week
or this month. And so what does matter, though, is
increasing the probability of facing consequences. And so the swiftest
uncertainty of punishment is how it's often often phrased. And
so if you can increase the likelihood that people get
caught and face any consequences, that really moves the needle.
If you have consistent, reliable consequences that people know they're
going to face, and then it doesn't really matter how
long the person sentences. It's just increasing the likelihood that
they get caught, and that really matters because in the
current in the United States, the likelihood that you get
caught for crime is really low, and I think most
people are really surprised by how low clearance rates is.
How we typically measure this. This is basically the share
of reported crimes that results in an arrest. So clearance
rates in the US hover between fifty and sixty percent
for homicide. So if you commit a homicide, it's basically
a coin flip whether you get arrested or not.
Speaker 1: And that's just getting arrested, not convicted, just.
Speaker 2: Getting arrest exactly. So some of those people not being convicted, right,
So it's a coin flip even getting arrested for other
But that's the best case scenario any other crime, less
serious crimes. When you think about still felonies, think about
the theft or larceny, burglary, the probability of getting caught
or the clearance rate is about ten to fifteen percent.
Speaker 1: Oh god, And what about like I wouldn't say equally, well,
I don't even want to put a moral judgment on this,
but like severe crime like rape, isn't the clearance rate.
Speaker 2: Like oh my, Goshel abysmal because it is because even
those crimes, you have the double whammy of people aren't
reporting and then the share of the report. So all
we can see really is the share of reported crimes
that result in an arrest. And so of course if
people or communities don't trust that the police are actually
going to do anything, then they're going to stop reporting
the crime. So this is a well known issue in
gender based violence, like rape. It's also an issue for
like bike theft, right, Like I have a ton of
friends who had their bike stolen, and you know, after
they've had their first bike stone, they report to the police.
They don't do anything when their second bike stole on
they don't even bomber, right, And so there's a lot
of especially the low level crimes, you don't even bother
reporting to the police because you figure they're not gonna
it's not gonna be a priority they you know. And
in defense of the police, like they're triaging, they're trying
to figure out, you know, they're trying to solve the homicides.
But this does mean that we've set up a system
where the vast majority of our criminal justice funding is
going to keeping people in prison for a really long time,
and if we invested even a small share of those resources,
shifted those resources and that attention to helping police solve
more crimes faster, we would get a huge bang for
our buck and a huge reduction in crime. And again,
this is something like everyone in the academy knows. Researchers
know this. We've known this for a long time. The
evidence keeps getting better and better, but we've known this,
this basic concept for a long time. But we talked
to lawmakers about it and their minds are just blown
right and you can see it makes sense to you
once you explain it, and they're like, oh my gosh,
we've been doing this all backwards. It's like, yes, we've
been doing it all backwards. So that's a their until issue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are incentives, i think, to continuing to do
it backwards for a lot of simply because of the
way that our economic system functions in this country. It
does seem to be lower hanging fruit to get people
into the prison pipeline and keep them there as opposed
to changing or improving policing. Because we've tried to change
and improve policing a lot, and we've tried a lot
of things that, as you mentioned, don't really work. We
put we funnel a lot of money into policing, but
it doesn't seem to as you're saying, you know, have
the the outcome, like like we know what we want
to get out of it. Right, as you mentioned, less
kind of crime would be deferred better if we spent
less of our let's say, resources on keeping people in
prison longer and more of our resources on ensuring that
people who commit crime go to prison. But in practice
is that easy to do?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I agree. You know, we do spend
a lot of money on policing. We've tried lots of
things in policing, but my sense is that we really
haven't focused on this aspect of policing. So there's tons
of evidence at this point that hiring more police, putting
more police on the streets, that does reduce crime, and
that is primarily through deterrence. If you see a cop
standing on a street corner, you're not going to steal
the car right in front of him, right, you know
you're going to get caught. That's like that basic concept
and action increase the probability of getting caught, then you'll
reduce crime. But so most attention the policing world has
really gone into just patrol, like having officers out on
patrol to deter crime in that way, and there's been
much less attention and experimentation and learning around how to
solve crimes after they've happened. And so, for instance, it
turns out and this is something like I've been learning
a lot along with my team about all of this
as we try to think about how can we help
states and cities do better on this dimension? Because you're right,
there is a way in which, you know, for lawmakers
who care about this, it's really straightforward, just right into
statute that sentences for this crime are now longer than
they were before. Right, that's a really it just.
Speaker 1: Feels like cheaper and easier to do. So they're like,
let's do the easy thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so but it's not effective. And so it's like, okay,
so how can we help lawmakers do do things better here?
And so so there are our bills that many states
are considering where that would provide funding to law enforcement
specifically focused on interventions that would reduce that would that
would solve more crimes. So you can use the money
for forensic analysis or DNA analysis. You can use the
money for uh licensed play readers or new tech you
can hire, you can hire more detectives, say, But something
else that was I found really surprising and that has
motivated some some work that we're we're reding, is that
it turns out most detectives in the country don't really
get any training as detectives. They people tend to get
promoted to be a detective based on seniority or because
they seem to have good people skills or something like that,
but then they just are expected to learn on the job.
And so, you know, this is a really important crime
or a really important job, and so wouldn't it be
useful if they were trained in some way with the
skills they need to be able to do that job well.
And so we're partnering. We being Arnald Ventures is partnering
with PERF, the Police Executive Research Forum to develop a
training curriculum for detectives. And so basically, you know, could
we just create a detective school essentially, and then we're
going to roll it out as a randomized trial so
that we can learn what the impact is. But there's
just a lot of low hanging fruit like that out there.
Crime labs are super backlogged. We don't really prioritiz highs
evidence going through those crime labs in any sort of
useful way. There's just so much we could be doing
better that I think we just haven't. We haven't really
focused on it in the past, and so we haven't
learned what works.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious, just from a sort of evidence based perspective.
One of the things that you mentioned about deterring crime is,
you know, increasing the incentive not to commit a crime
or decreasing the incentive to commit a crime. And I
can't help but think about like recidivism as another knock
against these like long prison sentences, because I'm curious, if
you've looked at the data here, do people who end
up staying in prison for a very long time, are
they more or less likely to repeat My guess is
that they're not getting a lot of rehabilitation and they're
just languishing, and so when they get out, they're having
a really hard time re entering into society and there's
less incentive not to commit crimes. Then, But do we
know what the data show?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there has been a bunch of research using
natural experiments where you know, I'd love to know what
the effect of going to prison is on someone, right,
And so the ideal experiment is you randomly send some
people to prison and others not, and obviously which.
Speaker 1: Would be horrifically unethical laws you mentioned, but you're right,
you mentioned that there are places in the country where
like the well like, yeah, the laws are different.
Speaker 2: Yep, exactly. So this is a place where we use
these natural experiments. So either sentencing guidelines where people are
just above or below the threshold that puts them into
a different category, or there's a policy change, or something
that's very common is that cases are randomly assigned to
different judges, and different judgestural have different inclinations. Naturally, some
are more lenient and some are more harsh. And so
if you get lucky and you get a more lenient
judge who's less likely to send you to prison or
who sentences you to a lower sentence, we can compare
you to someone who got unlucky and got the harsher
judge and still got a longer sentence. And so through
all of that there's a general I think the the
interesting result that's coming out of this literature is that
the sentence like we can see in the data that
you know, if you are convicted and go to prison,
your employment rates when you get out are much lower
than they were before. They were already low, but they
you're much lower. And we know the recidivism rates are
really high, and so we can see that, you know,
at the very least, we're not doing a very good
job of using prison effectively as an intervention point. But
what's interesting coming out of the research is that most
of that impact on employment in particular, seems to be
coming from the conviction having a criminal record itself, having
something on your redtle, rather than the incorpration spell. Now,
the incarceration spell is I really think of as an
intervention point that we've got you, you know, in a
place for some period of time, often a long period
of time, where you have nothing else to do. Wouldn't
that be a great opportunity to make lots of education
available to mental health treatments, lots of you know, job training,
whatever it is that would help.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we know that doesn't happen, I mean only
in very ideal situation.
Speaker 2: So I think a lot of prisons they have it,
and I think the challenges we don't really have great
data on which programs are effective and which ones aren't
because the people who because the programs tend to be
held out for people based on good behavior, or you
select into them based on your motivation or your interest,
and so then it's really hard to tell what the
value add of certain programs is. So we're just starting
to get better data on like exactly which programs should
we have people taking, And does you know a college
degree actually help or does the criminal record itself is
that such a barrier that it doesn't matter what your
education is, and so are there are a lot of
open questions about you know, which types of programs are
actually good investments in terms of money, In terms of
time and scarce resources, prisons tend to be really understaffed,
so often these programs are the first thing that are
cut when they're really worried about safety and and don't
have enough officers on staff. And so so this is
all to say, like this is I think there's a
general perception that you know, there's Norway that does this
really well and has this really rehabilitative model, and that
US prisons have none of this, and that's not true.
They do. I mean prisons across the country do have
a lot of programming. It's just we could be doing
so much better. And there is a lot of variation
across different facilities, of course, and across different states, and
you know, the labor shortages are a huge issue. So
this is all to say, I think, you know, we
you know, we could increase the probability of getting caught,
But for the people who do wind up incarcerated, then
we a we know that long sentences are not having
the deterrent effect on future crime that we would like.
We also know that locking people up for long periods
of time doesn't really have much of what we call
an incapacitation effect. Like the other reason to lock people
up they're an active public safety threat is you want
to take them out. To take them out, there will
always be a role for jail in prison for some people,
right where there's some people where we're just going to
have to lock them up. But it turns out most
people who commit crime age out of crime really quickly,
Like people do a lot of dumb, reckless, impulsive stuff
when they're teenagers and young adults, and then they grow up.
And of course some people there are exceptions out there
who will continue to be violent into their you know,
adult years. But those exceptions really do prove the rule
that most people just do this stuff when they're teens
and young adults and then they grow up. And so
locking someone if someone's committed a crime when they're sixteen,
eighteen nineteen, locking them up for twenty thirty years, you know,
by the time they're forty or fifty years old, they're
definitely not a public safety threat anymore. At that point,
we're not getting any public safety for that money and
for that time and network out of the and so
so Yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities
to use prison in a more cost effective way, in
a way that is actually you know, putting people on
a better path, rather than just using it as a
holding pen. Right, that's a really expensive holding pa if
that's all we can get out of it, But it
is an intervention point for people who are clearly struggling
in their lives. Right, people don't wind up in prison
because everything's going well for them, and so it is
a chance to really help people level up and leave
better than they came in. And I think it's just
a really missed opportunity that we don't take that, don't
use that opportunity as much as we can.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, you know. I think when when we
think about some of the more progressive or liberal or
left wing reform, you know, rally cries. One of the
things that we talk about a lot is the sort
of you know, the new Jim Crow of it all,
the deeply racial components of our criminal justice system, and
the I think the fair amount of evidence that exists
out there that, whether we're talking talking about policing or
later about convictions and the prison system itself, that individuals
who come from poor backgrounds, individuals who are black or brown,
individuals from you know, certain neighborhoods, they do tend to
experience harsher treatment on the streets and also harsher punishments
for similar crimes. And I'm curious, you know, how much
of your work dives into the social justice and kind
of the racial components of our criminal justice system.
Speaker 2: I have studied that a bit myself. There are definitely
other researchers who spend a lot of time on it.
My view, so, you know, one thing about economists and
the economics tool get is I very much view my
role as saying, you know, you tell me what problem
you're trying to solve. You tell me what your goal
is and what your constructs are, and I will help
you optimize and optimize the allocation of your scarce resources
to meet your goal. So, for some policymakers, the only
thing they care about is reducing crime rates, and so, okay,
let's figure out how to reduce crime rates. For all
the other policy makers, the only thing they care about
is racial disparities. Let's reduce racial disparities. You know, others
will say both of those things matter, right, the harms
of the system matter, and public safety matters. I think
frankly that's most. That's the most law enforcement, I would hope.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, we can do both.
Speaker 2: Both matter, and we should be talking about both and
so and then it's just a matter of like, well,
how are we waiting these two things? And is there
a way? You know? I think I think this is
another place where the general perception is there's this like
we're in a zero sum situation where we can either
have more public safety or we can have less harm
from the system and less racial injustice. And we're just arguing,
like the left and right arguing about where on that
that like super efficient frontier, we are landing, but you
can't things. And the reality is there is so much
inefficiency throughout the system that we can have less crime
and less punishment and spend less money and reduce racial disparities,
and we can do all of these things and make
everyone better off because we're just we're just so far
from an optimal efficient system. And so what I wind
up thinking a lot about is more directly to your question,
is is what I find to be the more interesting
questions are less about like how do we simply minimize
disparities or what the disparities are, but how we can
actually like what interventions are actually effective at reaching those goals. Right,
So I think often people just sort of look descriptively
at data and see that you know, this court is
incarcerating black defendants at much higher rates, and that seems
really unfair and kind of like just like normatively saying
this is an unfair outcome. And there's certainly a place
for describing the problems with the system. As you said,
I think a lot of people now are familiar with
the new Jim Crow Like. I think we have a
sense at this point of like what the problems with
the system are. The question now is how to fix
it right? Like what do we do now? Like what's next?
And that's where I think things get really interesting because
a lot of our good ideas aren't going to work right,
a lot of the things that might be obvious what
the problem is. And even if we all agree on
what the problem is, that doesn't mean like our best idea.
If we all, you know, put our heads together and
think about our top our you know, five good ideas,
and we narrow it down to the one best idea
we have, I would put good money on that idea,
not knowing what it is that it's not going to
work because most things we try don't work. These are
really complicated problems. Human behavior surprises us, and so we
have to be out there trying things, but do it
in a do it with a lot of humility, so
that we don't become web to solutions before we know
if they're effective.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think I consider myself a really progressive thinker,
and I do hear these calls. Like you mentioned before
at the beginning of the show, I'm definitely not a
tough on crime. We need like stronger and Harsher. You know,
like approaches. I'm definitely probably tend to towards the left.
But when I hear the rallying cry of just like
fully defund the police, there's something in it that doesn't
feel like I imagine a world where we do have
incredible social systems, right, Yes, if in the United States
people didn't have medical debt or educational debt, and everybody
could afford a home, and you know, there were just
like more opportunities for individuals to exist within a middle class,
and there was no redlining, and there was no racial violence,
and there was no you know, obviously, if there was
a utopian world, there would be significantly less crime. I
think we can all agree on that. But the problem
is there would still be some crime. And when when
there's a threat to public safety, how do we make
sure that everybody is safe? And so I think, you know,
defunding the police maybe is an extreme cry. Maybe the
people who say defund really just mean dramatically reduce the
funding or alligate it towards other places. But you know
that really I guess brings us to that question and
sort of like where you're going, because I think that
is on the far left at least that is their
best idea that they've come up with, right, is, let's
look at all the data. The police are getting so
much of our money, and they're committing so many atrocities,
and nothing feels better, Everything feels worse. What would happen
if we had a dramatic change and we burned down
the system? But it sounds like what you're saying is
that's probably not the best approach to fixing all the
broken things that are in front of us, or.
Speaker 2: Even just I mean, I think my my perspective is
basically just a very pragmatic one that even if that
would work, And so, I mean, sounds great, Yeah, we
found a way to eliminate poverty. I do think that we.
Speaker 1: Exactly right, Like I think that would.
Speaker 2: Ave But but the but my question is like how
do we do that?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Like what is your people? What is like word step
what step B? Right? Like how do we get from
you know, how do we get there? And and there
isn't an actual plan for how we get to that utopia?
And so yeah, this idea, I mean, part of part
of the other reason I really wrote the book is
I think the other the other idea floating around in
the cable news ecosystem, is that the only way to
make meaningful progress on these these many problems we see
in the world and in the in the public safety
space specifically, the only possible solution that's going to be
that's going to have any impact is major structural reform.
It is to burn down and and I you know,
we just we have so much evidence of small incremental changes,
things that are implemented in states and cities right now
that could easily be implemented elsewhere that have really meaningful
impacts on behavior and on trajectories and people's you know,
uh future criminal behavior, on their employment outcomes, on all
kinds of good things that don't require big structural reform.
I also think big structural reform frankly, just isn't going
to happen. Like we're not going to burn it all right, right, And.
Speaker 1: It's too ideal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's just it's like, I appreciate the idealism,
but it's I ya, the pragmatist in me is like, Okay,
so are there are people who need our help right now?
So what are we doing for them? And I do
think there's a way in which those calls for structure reform,
really do let the perfect be the enemy of the
good and keep us from making meaningful change that we
could make today where we have evidence that would move
the needle substantially today. And and I think, you know,
saying well, none of that's going to work until we
until we have structural reform is just an excuse sometimes
to just not do anything. And I become very frustrated
with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so so let's talk about some of those meaningful,
like incremental evidence based, you know, maybe seemingly small changes
that we could be making that actually would have a
massive outcome. I mean, you did kind of touch on one,
like if there are more just like the presence of
more police, they don't even have to be doing anything right,
just like knowing that there are more public safety officers
and let's think of them that way at present helps
neighborhoods feel safer and it does deter people. We've all
been driving down the road and you see a cop
and you slow down, right, Like, that's it works. We
know it works. So there's one thing we know, not
keeping people in prison longer.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and so along the same along the same
lines as releasing increasing the probability of getting caught. There's
evidence on the impacts from some of my own research
on the impacts of adding people to DNA databases that
it reduces future recidivism by over forty percent.
Speaker 1: So like if you know that if you commit a
murder or a rape and there now your DNA is
in the system, like that, you will get caught. So
probably we don't do it again.
Speaker 2: And not just for murder rates, for all kinds of
like burglary, like lots of lots of lots of offenses
and so because the technologies evolved so much now, so
just increasing the probability that people get caught really does
change it. It's like that's the wake up call, that's
the nudge, you know, they need to say, Okay, I
better go get a job, I better go, like I
better stop hanging out with those friends. They're always getting
me into trouble, you know, and really it's a time
to clean up their act. And the effect is most
is biggest for younger defendants and younger, younger people who
are charged with crimes. And so I think that's also
really informative, Like the earlier we can get people into
these or have this type of intervention, whether it's a
DNA database or something else. People who are younger have
more opportunity to course correct, right, they can, they can.
It's still possible for them to take a different pace
half yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just harder when you when
you get older. So that's one is just increase the
problemate of getting caught like that. That has a big
detern effect which not only reduces crime, it actually it
improves the lives of the people who who are no
longer committing crime, right like they are, they're doing better things.
Speaker 1: And that's something I think that's really important not to
not to interject and like, you know, hold that thought.
I want to know the next the next thing. But
one of the things that that frustrates me is something
you mentioned earlier and then you also mentioned kind of
in passing here when you were like, you know, they're
you know, do something different, do something better, like get
the job. But our criminal justice system is built in
such a way that people who have committed felony crimes
have a harder time getting jobs.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So wouldn't that be like a massive policy change that
would have sweeping downstream effects.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is a place that I've I've spent
a lot of time and a lot of my own research,
and I find fascinating. So this is this is this
policy space is a great example of one where solving
this problem is much easier said than done. So it
is a huge like I think completely agree that figuring
out how to help people with criminal records get jobs,
like find employment, get get onto a more stable path,
this is super important. It's really difficult to imagine someone
living a stable, crime free life without stable without study employment, right,
like you need a job. And we also have lots
of evidence that employers routinely discriminate against people with criminal records.
There's something about that record that really worries them. They
don't want to hire them.
Speaker 1: Well, and we're like legally required to ensure that that
record is disclosed, right right.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I mean obviously that's changing in certain changing
changing policies, but I think so the approach here to
to solve this problem has been to go after that
that issue, that the availability of the information. Right, So,
if we see that employers are discriminating against people with
criminal records, we don't want them to. We wish they didn't, right,
it would be better for all of us who care
about that record. So let's pass a law that says
they can't ask anymore. And so that's banned.
Speaker 1: The box.
Speaker 2: So there's traditionally a box on a job application that
you check if you says, you know, have you ever
been convicted of a crime or do a felony conviction? And
if you check that box anecdotally, employers just throw your
application in the trash. They don't even give you a chance, right,
And that's really unfair, and that's really unfair, especially for
people who have done the work, have you know, turned
their lives around and really are serious and would be
good employees. That also, frankly, is bad for the employer
if they're missing out on good matches. Right. Anyone who
talks to small business owners knows like everyone's desperate for good,
reliable workers or in a show up on time every
day and they want them to start yesterday, right. And
so the fact that there are good potential employees out
there and employers aren't able to see them or identify them,
that's a market failure. In my that's like for economists,
that's like a blinking red light. That's a market failure. Right,
that's bad for everybody, and so there's something going on
here that's problematic. But anyway, so ban the box says,
let's take that box off the application. The idea will
be people with criminal records can get their foot in
the door, build or poor with you know, the employer,
and by the time that they employer does do a
background check at the end of the process, hopefully we
don't care about the record anymore, or they'll have more
context for it, and then the person will be more
likely to get a job. I heard about this policy,
and I'd spend a lot of time studying discrimination and
think about incentives. And I immediately and a lot of
my ECON colleagues immediately were worried this policy would backfire
because if employers are worried about a criminal record for
some reason, and we're not doing anything to change their
underlying incentives about that record, but now we tell them
they can't ask anymore, I would expect them to use
whatever remaining information they have to try to guess. And
then what we wind up and then so there's a
bunch of research now showing that winds up happening is
that it just increases racial discrimination. It essentially broadens the
discrimination from people with criminal records to like all young
black men.
Speaker 1: Like, let's just assume that you're a criminals.
Speaker 2: Let's assume and so so it's backfired and so you know,
and there's there's evidence coming out that that clean slate
which seals records, because then people are like, well, let's
the problem is the background check Let's let's take the
background check out, which wasn't the core issue. But but
clean slate is we don't have evidence on unintended consequences yet,
or maybe I might have seen one paper, but there's
definitely solid evidence that it's not increasing employment. It's just
not working. And be on the box. It didn't work
increase employment for those with records either. And so so
I take at this point is like, look, this is
a really important problem to solve. The first things we
tried didn't work, but we need to keep trying. So
like what's next. And my view where I'm really optimistic
is in thinking about, you know, take the employers and say, okay,
there's something about the criminal record they're worried about. Let's
figure out what they're worried about and directly address those concerns.
And so one example is you know, if what they're
worried about is that the person isn't going to be
reliable and they're not going to show up on time
every day, Well, how can we provide more information that
actually they would right to help make these matches happen.
So maybe it's a glowing recommendation from some re entry
program they went through something like that. Another example that
I'm super excited about is insurance. So employers will tell
you that what they worry about when they hire someon
when they're considering hiring someone with a record, is the
risk associated with that. They're worried that someone will continue
to come crime on the job, that they might you know,
assault another employee or a customer, they might steal from them,
and so and employers typically all employers typically buy commercial
insurance to cover their employees if they're theft on the
job or something like that. But commercial insurance standard policies
exclude coverage for anyone with a criminal record.
Speaker 1: And so, oh, there you go.
Speaker 2: Right, And so that kind of leads you down this
rabbit hole of like, Okay, well why do they do that,
and and why if the market so that we now
have some evidence that actually providing insurance that does cover
people with records really does move the needle. It does
get people, does get employers to hire people with records,
and so then the question becomes why doesn't the market
provide this, And it might just be that they genuinely
don't know how to price the risk. They've never covered
this population before. And so that's a place where you know,
I'm now out of the philanthropy. We could think about
what could we come up with some pilot product where
we can, like, we can cover the losses for a
little while, just to get the data to kind of
help make the market here. But that's the sort of
intervention where I think I'm much more optimistic that something
like that will be effective because it just it directly
addresses a concern and changes the incentives that employers are
responding to. And ultimately, employers are just they're just trying
to make a profit, right, These are the most rational
actors we have, and so tweaking the costs and benefits
that they're responding to should have a big benefit, should have.
Speaker 1: A big Yeah, Yeah, I agree, but it would I
would just think that it would need to be subsidized,
as you mentioned, like even if that type of insurance
is available, I don't see employers choosing to buy a
more expensive premium because it allows them to hire people
that they already wanted to discriminate against in the first place, right,
Like it would have to be subsidiz hopefully by the
funding that we're already putting towards our criminal justice system.
Like that seems like a fair way to monetize a
program like that, because it's actually a program that is
attempting to reduce recidivism.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, yeah, absolutely so. So you know, there's the
make more matches component here, and you know there might
be employers might be willing to pay something to have
access to employees to kind of shift the risk or
smooth the risk if they're just hiring one person. And
but I completely agree part of the other big market
failure here is that we have what economists would call
externalities to an individual decision. So the business owner is
making a decision about whom to hire based on who's
most profitable for them, right, who's going to be most reliable,
who's going to you know, help their business succeed as
best as possible. But we all benefit if they hire
someone with the criminal record because that person is less
likely to commit crime going forward. Right, there's a benefit
to the whole community, and it's completely reasonable that the
employer would not take into consideration that benefit to the
community when they're considering whom to hire. But so the
way to address that that is still that's a market failure.
They are social benefits that aren't being internalized. So the
way we can do that, the way we do that
in general with taxation and subsidies, is we can subsidize
the product. We can have our tax dollars chip in
to basically say, we will all benefit, so it's worth
it to us to chip in and help subsidize your
hiring of this person. So I completely agree that I
think going forward there'll be some subsidy from the government,
but just having the product exist in the first place
well will also be important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean, I hate to sound cynical about this,
but like, wow, what a liberal policy Like. That's the
thing that I think I struggle with here, is that
like the opposite side of externalizing cost or you were
talking about externalizing benefit, but is you know, we know
we live in a capitalist marketplace now where so many
externalized costs are not carried by the very actors that
are causing them, right, like a oil a gas and
an oil come a fossil fuel company, or a manufacturer
like a textile or dye manufacturer, anybody who's making you know,
synthetic chemicals. When we see these externalized costs on the environment,
on health and human safety, that cost gets passed on
to the people. It doesn't get until there's like a
lawsuit usually, but it's not built into the system for
the actual corporation or the organization to I think about plastic.
Plastic is a great example, like Coca Cola and Aquafina
are not paying for the cost of plastic in the environment.
They're making us feel like it's our fault, right, Like
they're just fully shirking the externalized costs of that. And
I just work that our system as it stands right
now is such an anti regulatory system that we aren't
interested in making policy changes like that. I mean, there
are people that are interested, you are interested in it.
There's a whole you know, political party that's you know,
always pushing for this. But I do worry about how
popular these types of evidence based changes can be when
we have politicians in front of us. When we have
what we think of as rational actors in front of
us and we go look at this evidence, Ultimately your
constituents will be happier because there will be less crime,
and they will have more money, and they will you know,
all these great outcomes. And they go, yeah, don't like
it doesn't make me sound tough. You know, there's still
a human psychology component here, right, that's like hard to
get passed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you know, when I first took this job,
I think that was my That was my fear about
most conversations with lawmakers. That was just going to be
like me saying the evidence says X, you should do it,
and they're going to say, I don't care. And that's
just I mean, just my I've been very pleasantly surprised.
So over the last few weeks, I was out in
Salt Lake City in Utah. I was just came back
from Phoenix in Arizona talking with lawmakers in both both
very red states, and this insurance idea people loved in
both places, right, I mean, I think part of it
is just sort of like recognizing employers as part of
the solution, right, and seeing this is just like, oh, yeah,
employers are trying to like hire people, how do we
make it easier for them to hire people that you know,
we all see as it's you know, it's better for
us if they can get a job. So this is
I I think ultimately it's just a you know, it
could have gone either way. I think I would have.
I was sort of expecting the kind of pushback you're
you're talking about. But my experience actually talking to lawmakers
at the state level, and that's where most criminal justice
policy happens, is they're just really pragmatic, like they have
to balance their budget. Prison's really expensive, you know, prison's
really expensive. And if that is the only way we have,
if that's the only tool we have to reduce crime,
then their budgets are busted every year. And so what
else can we be doing. What can we do to
increase efficiency, What can we do to help reduce crime
and get more public safety in a way that isn't
exorbitantly expensive, and having you know, even just having a
kind of approach like the insurance one that is sort
of based on incentives and markets does appeal to a
lot of conservatives and people from the business community, and
so I think in practice, like I just I have been.
I'm just so I all of my interactions with the
with the political system at this point leave me feeling
so optimistic about how much there is and how much
like the only constraint really is just like the bandwidth
of me and my colleagues and researchers. We know there
are so many lawmakers out there. They're just they work
part time, they have a date, a full time job
on the side, right because that's what that's what state
lawmaker roles are, and they don't have a staff, and
so they're just trying to figure out, like you know,
there are five hundred bills that are introduced this session,
how are they going to read them all and have
an informed opinion about them and which ones should they
be introducing next session? And they just need some help.
And so I find that that's much more of the constraint.
They just they're just looking for new ideas that could
actually work, and the cable news politics of it doesn't
enter into the equation as much as I had feared.
Speaker 1: That's so good to hear, because I would agree that ultimately,
I mean, I think it's part of why I'm so
drawn to the concept and the community around science base thinking,
whether it's science based medicine, science based social policy, you know,
fill in the blank. Ultimately, the more evidence we can
collect and the more we can show, you know, the
numbers can lie, the numbers can be made to lie.
But ultimately, over that's the scientific community is self correcting. Right.
The more we amass and the more people kind of
contribute to the story, the more a narrative comes out
that has higher and higher fidelity, right, that is more
and more able to approximate reality. And ultimately, yes, I
think there will always be bad actors who say, ideologically,
I have an agenda and I will only choose evidence
that supports my agenda. I will only operate from a
confirmation bias perspective. And ultimately what matters most to me
is that my policies, you know, my ideologies are backed.
But I think that a lot of people's ideologies and
poes can actually shift and change and adjust when they
feel like they have a good grasp of the nature
of reality. And a lot of the times the problem
is that we don't give people alternative ways of thinking.
We say, well, you're wrong, and they go okay, But
then what's right, and we go I don't know. And
so one of the best approaches is not to say
you're wrong, mean or meaner. It's to say, have you
thought about it this way? Have you looked at this
alternative way of thinking about it? Because if there's nothing
to plug in, we're always going to just see pushback. Right.
But but totally, you know, it's it's hard when you've
got to bipartisan like think tank, or when you've got
you know, individuals on multiple sides of an aisle saying well,
the evidence shows us this, so we all kind of
agree here, it's hard to say no, I don't want
to yeah, And.
Speaker 2: I also, I mean, in the criminal justice space, you know,
this desire for retribution is such a driving in so
many conversations why incurs ary people? And so I mean,
this is an example of a place where you know, data,
empirical evidence, the kinds of studies I can do, will
have no bearing on how much retribution or mercy someone deserves,
right and how you know what they deserve based on
moral or ethical grounds. But regardless of what your views
are about retribution, presumably we would all like less crime
for less money. And so you know, we can like
take your your desire for retribution is as given and
say like, okay, we can work with that. Like you
you wait that a lot and you get a lot
of value out of that. That's fine. Let's just be
clear about how much you're paying for that, right the
things that you could get instead, Like they're trade offs here,
their opportunity costs. If we're spending a zillion dollars to
keep this person in prison for an extra forty years,
that's a lot of money that we don't get to
invest in solving more crimes and DNA analysis or schools
or healthcare or whatever else we could use with those
tax dollars. And so it's just sort of you know,
getting I think my approach and perspective, the base on
all my training is to really you know, take take
people's preferences as given, like that's it's not my job
to tell people they should be more merciful or not,
but but to just get just to really help clarify
to the extent that what they do care about is
public safety. And I think everyone cares at least somewhat
about what the actual impact of these policies is on
the ground. We you know, that's those are empirical questions.
And some of our programs and policies work better than others.
And how do we maximize the ROI there so that
so that we can have more more good things, and
you know, people are happier and more productive and feel
safe for in their communities. And yeah, I feel like
there there's a lot of room for common ground here. Again,
We're just we're in such an inefficient place.
Speaker 1: There's so much room for improvement.
Speaker 2: Like we can make everyone better off and everyone happier.
This doesn't this is not a zero a zero sum fight.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's such a good summary and I
can't help. But like here in just the last couple
of minutes, kind of the thing that comes to mind
when when you describe this idea of like I'm not
going to change somebody's moral preferences or they're sort of
ideologic reactions. I think about the death penalty right, Like,
I am wildly against the death penalty from an ideologic perspective,
but I was raised in Texas and I didn't always
think that way. And I know people who I think
I agree with on a lot of topics. Who are
you know, on the fence or maybe they think other
you know differently, But ultimately, if a person is in
prison for the rest of their life without any chance
of parol, or they are you know, killed by the state,
they are removed from the public sphere, right they are,
they are no longer a threat to the citizenry. And
so at that point, I think you're right. Like whether
you feel like it's a retribution question or not, well,
is it more expensive to keep, you know, to kill. Weirdly,
it's very expensive to put somebody on death row. Like
it's surprisingly you'd think it would be cheaper, but it's not.
And so that's where those kinds of arguments I think
you're right can be so gripping for a lot of
people who maybe you do have a moral stance about it,
but ultimately, you know, let's look at the balance sheet
as well, and let's look at how your community could
be improved with that savings.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, most of our preferences in our desires
for justice and you know, whatever other moral and ethical
views we might have or not absolute, right, they're they're
you know, in conversation with other things we believe in
other trade offs, and so just helping people work through
the trade offs here I think can be really constructive.
Speaker 1: I love this. I love any conversation argument book that
evokes not just a sense of curiosity about a really
complex topic, but the discomfort that comes from being challenged
in your in your you know, kind of fundamental views
that the the discomfort that comes with sitting in the
in the unknown a little bit and saying, oh, the
evidence might not fully comport with what I what I
thought was reality. Like I'm I always so appreciate anytime
I feel challenged and I can grow and I can evolve,
especially in a field where I don't have any expertise,
and and you know, my perspectives are uh A an
amalgamation basically of just what I'm exposed to in life.
And so I feel like a thank you for the conversation,
but be for the amount of work that you've done
throughout your career and culminating in this wonderful book that
brings people to that place where they can go hmm.
You know, I think there's other layers of depth that
I can think about these these topics, or maybe some
of the people who pick this book up have never
thought about any of this at all, and that's that's
always a gift, right, is to just have a spark
and to start thinking deeply about things that we kind
of took for granted. So I just I so appreciate
the time that you spent with us today. I so
appreciate the book everybody. It's called The Science of Second Chances,
A Revolution in Criminal Justice by doctor Jennifer Doliac. Did
I pronounce that right, Jen?
Speaker 2: You did? Yes? O?
Speaker 1: Good? Okay. Thank you so so much for being here.
It was wonderful.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoy
this conversation and everyone listening.
Speaker 1: Thank you for coming back week after week. I'm really
looking forward to the next time we all get together
to talk. Nerdy m