Why Longer Prison Sentences Don’t Work

21:39Jennifer Doleac:Um, and so then the question is, okay, this is a hypothesis, right? What's the real world impact of this. And it turns out we can use the way that these databases are implemented and expanded over time as natural experiments, where we can compare people who committed the exact same crime, but one committed it just before the database was expanded, and the other one committed it just committed the same crime just after the database is expanded. That second person goes in the database, and the first person doesn't. So we can follow those two people over time and say what happens to their behavior.

22:12Jennifer Doleac:It turns out that the second person who's in the DNA database and so is much more likely to get caught if they re-offend, their recidivism drops dramatically. So I have a study using Danish data. Denmark has amazing data. So we're able to just get much more, much better information about what everybody's doing. And we're seeing drops in recidivism on the order of 40 % for this group. And so that's just, it's just a huge impact on behavior when you basically tell people you're now much more likely to get caught if you re-offend. That's the incentive a lot of people need, especially first-time defendants or people who are early in their criminal careers.

22:51Jennifer Doleac:That's the incentive they really need to clean up their act, make some different choices. And so yeah, it's just a much more effective tool, a much more effective policy move than making sentences longer. Yeah.

23:06Coleman Hughes:I mean, it occurs to me a few ways of understanding this psychological difference between most criminals and most non-criminals is like, if you imagine gamblers, right? Gambling is enormously addictive. Lots of people do it. Lots of people lose a lot because they do it. It's because you could lose your house, right? If you go on a gambling spree, you could also win hundreds of thousands of dollars. but if you were just like certain that you were going to lose a very small amount that same person probably wouldn't gamble even though the penalty if the penalty was only$1 I know I'm going to lose$1 playing poker that's the game I'm playing with 100 % certainty that person wouldn't gamble but they will gamble if there's a 10 % chance they'll lose their entire house and so there is a certain psychology which is insensitive to massive penalties, as long as they're lower probability and sort of abstract or far in the future.

24:13Coleman Hughes:And then the second touchpoint that occurs to me is a lot of the way that normal people encounter crime, I guess if you're lucky enough to avoid it on the streets, you don't live in a high crime city, is through television and movies. And the type of crime that we, I think, are most interested in movies is like The Wire or The Sopranos or Ozark or Breaking Bad. It's like these criminals that are extremely deliberate, not impulsive at all, have very long time horizons. And in fact, if you're in the New Jersey Italian mob as portrayed in The Sopranos, a short prison sentence is actually the cost of doing business for you.

24:56Coleman Hughes:And because you're looking at the longer time horizon of the money you're going to make over the next 30 years, as long as you keep your mouth shut and do your eight-month stint. And so if that's the portrait of the criminal underworld that you have in your mind, it's going to misfire pretty spectacularly when you try to apply it to the real world, where most criminals are doing something really impulsive that they think they can get away with.

25:23Jennifer Doleac:Totally. And there's actually a recent paper that came out looking at the impacts of longer sentences for white collar criminals, and they find that they're very effective deterrence. And so it's really, it's really, it's these like two sets of, of potential offenders, the super hyper-rational ones who are committing, you know, financial crimes and they've got it all calculated out. They are forward-looking, um, often, or at least much more forward-looking than your typical street offender, I guess. Um, but, but yeah, there's just a really large share of people who are committing violent crimes, property crimes, burglary theft, those sorts of offenses who either just naturally are just more impulsive than your average person, or they're struggling with addiction or a mental health issue that's just leaning them even more in that direction.

26:14Jennifer Doleac:So they just don't have that same time horizon. And so it's smart to adapt our policies depending on who we're trying to, whose behavior we're trying to change.

26:23Coleman Hughes:Okay, about 10 years ago when I was in college, I was reading all the articles about ban the box. And ban the box was all the rage. And what ban the box was, was if you have a criminal record, you're out of prison now, you're looking for a job. There's a box on the job application, which says, have you ever been convicted of a crime? And we've all checked these boxes on various forms, like visas quite often to other countries require you to check that box. And the criminal justice reform movement on the left at the time was very focused on getting rid of these boxes. You shouldn't have to tell your employer, they would say, that you have a criminal record.

27:01Coleman Hughes:And then I read your, I don't know if it was an article or if it was a paper and you can explain it, saying actually this hurts the very people that you're trying to help. How is that possible? How could it be possible that getting rid of the requirement to tell your employer that you've been convicted actually harms the people it was intended to help?

27:26Jennifer Doleac:Yeah. This is a classic case of unintended consequences, right? So as you said, this policy is aiming to help people with criminal records find jobs. We know, we have lots of evidence that employers are reluctant to hire people with criminal records. And so one potential solution to that is to just tell them they can't ask if you have a criminal record, at least not until late in the hiring process. So you can do a background check at the very end. But in the meantime, that person's gotten their foot in the door. They maybe get an interview. They have a chance to build some rapport with you. You get to know them as a person.

27:59Jennifer Doleac:And then when you find out they have a criminal record, maybe you don't care as much. Right. That's the theory. the potential problem is that if employers are worried about the criminal record for some reason and we're not you know we're not we're not interrogating in any way why they might be worried we're just saying we'll all accept employers are reluctant to hire someone with a criminal record they're worried about that record for some reason we're not changing any of the incentives that they're facing here we're not changing that underlying concern we're just telling them they can't ask. Then what I as an economist would expect is that they would take the remaining information they can see and try to guess who's likely to have a criminal record.

28:42Jennifer Doleac:And in the United States, because of big racial disparities in the criminal justice system, young Black men are more likely to have a recent conviction that might worry an employer than other groups are. And so an employer or an employer who's trying to avoid wasting their time interviewing someone that they're not going to want to hire on the back end might then just be much less likely to interview young black men, especially those with more limited education. And so, you know, that's the theory. That was my theory as an economist based on everything I knew and the way I thought about the world.

29:20Jennifer Doleac:But we wanted to see how it would play out in practice. And so I have a paper with Ben Hansen at the University of Oregon looking at the staggered rollout of Ban the Box policies across the country, across counties and states. And we're able to look at what happens to actual employment across different race and age groups. And we find that employment fell by about 5 % for young Black men with less education, exactly the group that we would have hoped that Ban the Box would help if it were helpful. Now, at the same time, there was a really awesome field experiment run by Amanda Agan and Sonia Starr where they sent out job applications from fictional job applicants randomizing race and randomizing whether the person had a criminal record before and after Ban the Box went into effect in New Jersey and New York City.

30:12Jennifer Doleac:And they found along the same lines that when Ban the Box went into effect, what had been no racial gap in callbacks widened to a substantial racial gap, which implied that – so basically, employers did discriminate based on the criminal record but treated white and black applicants the same if they had a record or didn't have a record. And then after Ban the Box went into effect, employers seemed to be basically assuming that the Black applicants were likely to have a criminal record, and they called them back at much lower rates than the White applicants. And so these two papers, side by side, painted a really compelling picture that this policy has big unintended consequences for a group that's really vulnerable in the labor market.

31:06Jennifer Doleac:And then subsequently, there were studies of looking at the actual group, the people with criminal records, and seeing, well, are they helped at all, right? So there might be big costs for young Black men without a record who now can't signal that to employers, and so they don't get callbacks anymore, and they're not getting jobs. But maybe we're helping people with records a little bit, and some people might think that that's worth it. And the research has just shown there's no benefit to people with records. And so what seems to be happening is employers just, you know, they check their record on the back end and they just don't hire them.

31:41Jennifer Doleac:They reject them at that point. So anyway, so yeah, this is just an example of a place where it's a really well-intentioned policy focused on an important goal. Like how do we reintegrate people back into society successfully? and it is just unfortunately completely divorced from the evidence at this point.

31:58Coleman Hughes:Tyler Cowen has a phrase he always writes on his blog, Marginal Revolution, solve for the equilibrium, right? And I think this gets at how economists think very differently from people in other fields. When you change one variable in an equation, the other variables don't just stay the same. And when those other variables are human beings, with rational interests, they quite often will adjust their behavior to meet the same goals they always have in the new environment. And I think a lot of the most interesting and counterintuitive results in economics come from applying that mantra, solve for the equilibrium, to various, especially politically charged issues.

32:45Coleman Hughes:Quite often, and I think, I don't know if this is true in my life experience is true that people first come to the political issues and public policy issues from the point of view of intentions. In other words, this policy is intended to help people with a criminal record. Therefore, I'm going to assume it helps people with a criminal record. But economists have been trained to just basically separate intentions from results fully, which I think is probably second nature to someone like you, but it really isn't second nature to most people that are thinking about politics for the first time.

33:26Jennifer Doleac:Yeah. Yeah, the other way I put it, I like Tyler's phrase, but I often feel like my main contribution as an economist in conversations is like when someone suggests doing something to say, and then what happens, right? Like then how will people respond? And then what happens after that? And then what happens after that? It's almost like we think we changed the policy and it's like, great, well, everyone will do what we say and our work here is done. And it's like, okay, but people are going to iteratively respond to whatever the change is until we get to some new equilibrium in Tyler's phrase.

34:04Jennifer Doleac:So yeah, it doesn't necessarily feel like a uniquely economic C intuition, but it seems to be economists who bring it to the table most often.

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35:28Coleman Hughes:One of the books I sign in the class I teach at University of Austin is, well, I actually signed two books, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and John Pfaff's book Locked In. These books have in some ways opposite theses. In some ways, John Pfaff's is like a refutation or an attempt at a refutation of Michelle Alexander's book. and The New Jim Crow you know it's probably the most the single most influential book in particular among Democrats for how to think about criminal justice reform it would surprise me if there was another book on that issue which had been bought by more people and so forth how does the thesis of each of these books hold up in retrospect

36:21um um

36:23Jennifer Doleac:Well, I found Faf's book compelling on the kind of the facts about, you know, was mass incarceration caused by the drug wars or caused by private prisons? He can kind of go through the data and say, you know, that's not what's really moving the needle here. So on those points, I, you know, I guess I side with John Faf. I think overall, it was striking to me as I was thinking about writing my own book and sort of thinking about, is there a place for it in the literature we have? There are lots of books out there about crime and criminal justice policy. It was really interesting that there are, you know, aside from Bap's book, they're really all the books are written by lawyers who do bring this very different lens to the to the table.

37:15Jennifer Doleac:And who are thinking about maybe some sociologists, maybe some others who are really just trying to say, like, here's the problem. Here's, you know, here's we're just going to lay out for you all the bad things that are happening in the world. and that certainly has a place and I think was probably a really important part of why we started having more serious conversations about how to reform the criminal justice system um but it can't be the end of the conversation right first of all I think it's just really depressing and just makes everyone feel like well we just have to burn it all down like there's no like where do we even go from here this is sort of such a mess um and that's just not how I feel day to day doing the research that I do and working in the spaces that I do, there is so much we could be doing that has a really big impact on behavior and could give us less crime and a smaller system at all at less cost and really change people's lives for the better.

38:14And I remember seeing

38:17Jennifer Doleac:in the new Jim Crow, the four, the like 20th year anniversary forward or whatever, whatever anniversary it was, this was sort of an FAQ about what questions she gets often and her responses to them. And one was, well, so what should we do about these problems? And her response in this forward was, I don't know, that's not my job. And I was just like, what? And part of me was just surprised that someone who's been clearly a leading thinker on this issue for decades at this point doesn't have ideas that she's willing to put in front of her audience. That just feels like a missed opportunity. And so I was really excited to write a book that's just full of solutions.

39:10Jennifer Doleac:And the other pieces, a lot of the books in this space are really focused on because they give you this burn it all down mentality. It's like the only solution possible that could possibly make a dent in the scale of this problem are massive structure reforms. We really just have to tear everything down and rebuild it from scratch. And anything short of that is a waste of time and energy. And again, from the research, I know that's not true. I know there are a lot of things we can do. They're feasible. They might be, you know, seem like very small interventions, but they'll add up and they'll have really big impacts.

39:53Jennifer Doleac:And also if we're just waiting for a big structure reform, I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm not sure how exactly we're going to get there. That seems to me to be more of a call for inaction than a call for action. And so I'm just a very solutions oriented person. And it's just like, I think we should just, let's go out there and try to make the world better and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

40:18Coleman Hughes:Yeah, that gives me a lot of thoughts. Okay, one is that, and I think Steven Pinker made this observation when he was defending his book Enlightenment Now about how much progress there's been, that intellectuals have an incentive towards pessimism because pessimism easily translates into charisma. I don't know why that is. I think it's just kind of a bug of human psychology that when someone is telling us the end of the world is coming, we experience that as profound. But if someone is telling us, well, actually the end of the world isn't necessarily coming, there's 50 micro solutions where we can make incremental progress and not only prevent the end of the world, but we can actually create a better world.

41:05Coleman Hughes:That's like super boring. Or we think they're trying to sell us something. So, you know, the new Jim Crow's of the world, the Michelle Alexanders of the world get very big and are seen as very profound without offering any solutions because the real solution is sort of to accept that the apocalypse is coming and to repent. But that kind of leaves you, that doesn't really leave you anywhere, right? Like the day after the apocalypse was supposed to happen, you're still alive and the problems are still there. And so like you, I'm attracted to people that tell me that there are micro solutions. We can make incremental progress.

41:44Coleman Hughes:I do notice also that national politics tends towards these massive narratives of, oh, burn the system down or the system's perfect. But one of the great things about America is that at the state level, state governments are pretty wide open to reform. If you're able to get the right lobbyists, that's kind of how the system works, or even just convince the right people, Republican and Democrat state lawmakers are super open to tweaking with the system and allowing you to study it. And those innovations get to spread. And they're shorn of the kind of hyper-partisan doom and gloom narratives that we see on the national level.

42:32Coleman Hughes:So maybe you can tell us a little bit about what is the most exciting state-based

42:40Coleman Hughes:results that you found in your research on reducing crime?

42:44Jennifer Doleac:Yeah, well, I'll just start by kind of echoing what you're saying about everything that's happening at the state level is much more exciting and fills me with optimism in a way Watching cable news about the federal system does not, right? And so there's just so much good stuff happening at the state level. And so many people really trying to solve real problems. They have to balance their budget, right? Like they have to make these trade-offs day to day. And so they're looking for solutions to these tough problems. Let's see. I mean, one example is thinking about how we are deciding when to convict someone of a crime.

43:26Jennifer Doleac:So in the book, I kind of stepped through how to intervene at each stage of the criminal justice system. In this chapter, I talk about just if someone's first offense, their first arrest and arraignment for a misdemeanor, their first arraignment for a felony offense, nonviolent, let's talk about nonviolent crimes, what should we do with them? Should we be throwing the book at them to make sure that they never come back? Or should we drop that case and essentially give them a warning and see if they'll course correct on their own? And this has been a big debate across the country, especially related to progressive prosecutors who've really been pushing policies like the latter.

44:11Jennifer Doleac:And this is a place where you can kind of see it going either way. You could argue it either way. And so you really need data to tell you what will happen in the real world. And it turns out that we have some nice natural experiments that essentially randomize people to either have their case dropped or getting a deferred adjudication in the felony case. So if they complete a probationary period, then their charge is dropped. and very, you know, identical people who just get lucky and they get the second chance or they don't. And the people who have their, who avoid this first criminal record are dramatically less likely to come back than the people who got unlucky and, and have this conviction on their, their record.

44:59Jennifer Doleac:And it's, you know, it's, again, it's a huge impact. It's like 40, 50%. And it's something where I now know there are states that are thinking about expanding these deferred adjudication or deferred prosecution policies for felony offenses just to help them triage. Like who needs a criminal record? Who needs this punishment? And who, you know, can, because this was their rock bottom moment, they were arrested for a crime, they faced potential consequences. you know, that was enough for them to course correct on their own. They're thinking about expanding their, their deferred prosecution programs.

45:41Jennifer Doleac:And so these, these types of, I call it in the books are erring toward leniency for first-time offenders, that policies that can help push decision makers in that direction and dole out a first-time conviction more sparingly seems to have a really big benefit.

46:00Coleman Hughes:Interesting. So that suggests there's a type of person that will commit a crime once and only once if they are sort of allowed to get a mulligan. They'll be so shocked by their rock bottom moment that they'll never even touch that lifestyle again. And there's the rest of the category of first-time offenders that are just like sort of into the behavior and need to be deterred in other ways.

46:27Jennifer Doleac:Yeah. Yeah. Obviously this isn't going to work for everyone. And so then when people come back, we'll see like, okay, we need to do more for this person, but it's enough of a drop. Like basically the way we've been, if our default is just to convict and throw the book at everybody, we are, it's just an own goal in a way, right? We're actually increasing recidivism rather than letting them reduce it on their own with less intervention. I do want to flag like this doesn't mean there are no consequences for the crime. I think a lot of people hear this and they're saying like, oh, you think we should decriminalize trespassing or decriminalize shoplifting?

47:03Jennifer Doleac:And that's definitely not what this means. People have been arrested. They've been probably booked in jail. They had to take time off work. They're worried about what's going to happen in their case. And if this is your first offense, like that is all like that will, would be a rock bottom a moment for a lot of people, right? And it's kind of a wake up call that you've really got to change what you're doing here. And so I think just, I think the lesson here is just to learn from that, that that is, that's enough of a punishment and we don't need to also put a criminal record on someone's record, which it turns out, which, you know, we're talking about ban the box, clean slate policies are the same way where we're trying, we're trying to all these different ways to undo the effect of a criminal record down the road and none of those policies work.

47:50Jennifer Doleac:And so it's just really hard to undo the effect of a criminal record. And so if we can just be more sparing in when we put a crime on someone's record to begin with, it turns out that gives them the room they need to keep their job, keep their housing and course correct on their own and avoids pulling them into the system. So it is sort of interesting. I think this is an example of where, you know, the increasing accountability, increasing the likelihood that people get caught might be a place where people on the right get it a little bit more correct. This is a place where people on the left have gotten it a little more correct, that the system, you know, was pulling people into the criminal system more than it was deterring them.

48:36Jennifer Doleac:And these are places where just data is really helpful for helping us figure out which ideas are right and which need a little bit more iteration.

48:46Coleman Hughes:How big of an issue is recruiting talented police officers? Because the seems to me logical implication of increasing the likelihood of getting caught, and that being more important than long prison sentences, means we should have more police officers. Now, I don't know if more police officers straightforwardly always translates into a higher clearance rate for crimes, but it seems to me there's probably some relationship. And I know recruitment has been an issue since 2020. You had a kind of mass retirement of police officers in the wake of the defund the police movement and the Black Lives Matter protests.

49:27Coleman Hughes:And now, we're seeing, and we don't have to get sidetracked on this issue, but from my perspective, the incompetence of ICE officers in Minnesota and how they're handling situations much worse than the Minnesota Police Department would handle analogous situations just reinforces the importance of just how crucial it is to have cops that are actually good at their jobs. And so how big an issue is recruiting talented cops in deterring crime? Yeah, really important.

50:07Jennifer Doleac:And to one of your earlier comments, I mean, there is now a lot of research showing that hiring more police officers, just on average, without thinking about like some are going to be better than others, just on average, hiring more police officers and increasing police presence in communities reduces crime. especially violent crime. And I think that's mostly coming through this deterrent effect of increasing the probability of getting caught, right? So it might not translate into actual higher clearance rates because the crime never happens. So this is one of those challenges. We could have a whole other wonky discussion about clearance rates and what it's measuring and all of that.

50:43Jennifer Doleac:But you're not going to steal a car right in front of a cop, right? Like you're very likely to get caught if you do that. And so just I think that's the intuition there is that you're increasing the probability that you get caught. And so police reduce crime. Um, lots and lots of evidence that's true now. And also, as you, as you said, we are now in a situation where the vast majority of police departments are understaffed. The way they try to handle that is like poaching cops from each other, right? Which is not, not, you know, a scalable solution. Uh, that's not going to help anyone kind of long-term.

51:16Jennifer Doleac:Um, and so we need to think about how to help recruit and retain, um, more and different people. Like just by definition, If we want more than we have right now, we're going to have to widen our net and think about and try to bring in people who wouldn't have thought about being cops before. And I do think this is the type of profession that a lot of people think they have a full understanding of what the job is day to day based on maybe what they watch on TV. And the reality is probably a bit different. And, you know, there's a lot of just, you know, de-escalation and just trying to, you know, help people settle arguments.

51:56Jennifer Doleac:And it's just there's a lot to the job that is different from just, you know, pointing a gun at somebody and making arrests. And so I think finding ways to communicate that. But, but it's hard. I mean, I think this is this is something my team is working a lot on. I mean, we are we do see more and better policing as being a really important component of of public safety. and this is a place that police departments across the country are eager for help to recruit and retain officers. And I'm not sure that there's a magic bullet here in terms of what, you know, being able to have some intervention that's going to dramatically increase the number of officers available.

52:41Jennifer Doleac:And so where attention has shifted is trying to help make the best use of the resources we have. So we have a certain number of officers. How can we use technology to help them become more efficient? You know, AI is affecting policing like every other industry. It's helping, you know, take better notes, generate reports so that you don't have to spend all your time, you know, writing them up after your shift. And then we've got different, you know, high tech tools that help solve cases faster. So everything to be able to help, everything's, you know, potentially useful be able to help officers do more with the hours and the day that they have and with the personnel that they have.

53:22Coleman Hughes:I remember seeing a paper once, I think Alex Tabarrok had reposted it, which claimed to show that, I think it was, maybe it was convicted criminals or people awaiting trial or something. It was some natural experiment where people who had committed a crime, some of them also were about to become fathers. They had impregnated someone essentially. And the fathers who had impregnated someone were vastly less likely to re-offend or something like that. Do you recall that paper? What was the finding and is it a solid one?

54:01Jennifer Doleac:I don't remember the specific paper, but there is a bunch of work, especially from sociology, looking at these turning points. so you're much less likely to uh commit crime after you have a child or after you get married um so those are some those are pretty consistent findings um i think our data is getting better so that's nice you can kind of like pin it down even more and you see these big drops which you know are those like are those true natural experiments um they're well so this is that maybe maybe it's going to get to sort of my my hesitation to put too much weight on them is is it's not, it's not clear what we do with the information.

54:40Jennifer Doleac:Right. So I think it's, it's, I believe the papers that like after someone, like, I think it's probably, um, well, it's, yeah, let me back up a little bit. I think, um, I believe, I believe those studies that show that, you know, after you, you just, after you, you have a child, you're much less likely to offend. I don't think there's something, um, you know, biasing that data in some way. I think the problem is like, well, so how do we, if what we want to do is figure out an intervention we can use to get people to offend less, telling everybody to have more children could work. I mean, maybe that's one hypothesis that comes out of this, but it's not random here who's having children, right?

55:27I mean, these people are presumably on a different path in some way already.

55:32Jennifer Doleac:They're in a relationship or something. and especially if the paper is showing like if you get married you're less likely to commit crime it's like well that's a choice right and so so there can be a bunch of stuff going on in your life that is leading you to making different decisions about risky behaviors related to crime as well you're not going out and getting drunk with your friends every night and those are the sorts of things that you know that's the behavior that leads to bar fights and graffiti and all kinds of things that you get arrested for. And yeah, I just, I think I just, I struggle with what to do with research findings like this, because it's like, it's interesting.

56:12Jennifer Doleac:Intellectually, it's just like, huh, that's interesting that people have these turning points in their lives. But if what we want is a policy intervention we can use to try to like speed up that process, or the maturation or the growing up that people do and try to just spark a turning point in someone's life, these papers are not telling us that, right? And that's what we really want to know for a policy perspective.

56:37Coleman Hughes:So what about age? I think, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the solid findings in this research is that as people age, in particular men, maybe women too, but as men age, they are less likely to commit violent crime for probably hormonal and physiological, biological reasons. Yet, if a 25-year-old guy commits an assault, presumably everything else held equal, he's treated the same by the criminal justice system as a 45-year-old guy that committed an assault, even though their predicted horizons for future crime may not be the same. um what do we know about the relationship between age and crime and are there policy implications could there be for that yeah yeah so you're right so there's this this general relationship referred

57:32Jennifer Doleac:to as the age crime curve so crime your your propensity to commit crime increases through your your mid-teens to late teens to early 20s and then starts falling and after age 25 or so which coincides roughly to when, you know, your, your brain is fully developed. Uh, you become less impulsive and less reckless and crime falls as well. So, so in general, crime is a young man's game and, and most people are going to grow up and stop doing dumb stuff, uh, that gets them arrested. Um, I think, um, and, but I think the, the policy implications are even it's the policy situation is even worse than you're describing.

58:16Jennifer Doleac:It's not just that 25 and 45 year olds are treated the same. Typically youth is held as a mitigating factor in sentencing. I do think that most judges know this, right? They know that young people are likely to grow up and so they're not held as culpable for their actions because it's just, you're not thinking straight when you're young and your brain isn't fully formed. And so people, there is a mitigating effect. Youth can have a mitigating effect in sentencing. And I think that's right from a perspective of, say, like retribution or mercy or like what people deserve, which is not a matter of what data say.

59:03But those younger people are the ones

59:06Jennifer Doleac:who are at the highest risk of continuing to offend for at least in the short term, right? And so if you have someone who is, if all we cared about was reducing crime, then locking up people when they're younger would be smarter than locking people up when they're older. And that is counter to the way we usually think about callability for offending. So it's just sort of this interesting tension in what we are using prison and punishment for. and then it coincides with this. It interacts with this age crime curve in a way that, yeah, leads to complicated policy implications.

59:52Coleman Hughes:Okay, I also recall one study I read years ago which said that just placing floodlights in a public housing installation at night reduced crime by like 10 % or something like that. Is that a solid finding?

1:00:08Jennifer Doleac:Yeah, pretty solid. I mean, it was a real, so that was a randomized trial in New York City. And it was small, small study. So that's the only caveat, but otherwise it was a really cool randomized trial. It's consistent with other evidence that, that just increasing the level of ambient light. So if you look at like before and after daylight saving time, when you're shifting daylight from the morning to the evening, that reduces crime right during that hour. And so we know that, again, along the lines of just increasing the probability that people get caught, that's what deters and prevents crime.

1:00:45Jennifer Doleac:If it's easier to see, if it's easier to see either a potential threat or to be able to identify the perpetrator or if witnesses are able to see what's happening to you, that is all going to have a big deterrent effect on crime. And so at this point, I think the evidence is pretty solid that if we improved street lighting, that would be really beneficial. And I gather there are people working on helping government officials do that in practice. It seems like a really easy thing to do. But a lot of people who are in leadership positions in cities, for instance, don't necessarily know, you know, where where's the overlap between high crime areas and where the street lighting is really bad.

1:01:26Jennifer Doleac:And so if you can just help them with the data and overlaying those maps, they can quickly get out there and kind of add some more streetlights. So there's some people who are trying to just help on a more on the technical side, I guess, of just how do you implement this in practice. But yeah, definitely a good thing to do.

1:01:44Coleman Hughes:Okay, final question. I forget which year it was of the first Trump administration that he passed the First Step Act, which was a surprising and bipartisan effort to make sentences more lenient in the federal system. and I think Jared Kushner and Van Jones had something to do with that. How does that reform look to you a few years out? And is there anything in the federal system that you would look for new legislation to solve in the next few years? Yeah.

1:02:27Jennifer Doleac:Yeah. Well, so the piece of the First Step Act that I've been most excited about, and I know a lot of my team has been most excited about, is helping. It's more on the back end of figuring out how long do people actually need to be in prison and when could they be released on electronic monitoring to essentially house arrest. Um, and there is a lot of evidence that using electronic monitoring as an alternative to incarceration, either for, for part of someone's sentence, or even as an alternative to the entire sentence, that that is a really smart approach. It's cheaper than prison and it reduces recidivism because you avoid some of the, um, you know, prison as a school of crime effects.

1:03:12Jennifer Doleac:It's just school, you know, prison kind of had a bad, have a bad effect on people. And so it produces less crime at less money or for less money. And so everybody likes that. And so that was a piece of the First Step Act was being able to release people for earlier to home confinement using electronic monitoring. And my understanding is that the current Bureau of Presence under the current leadership is trying to fully fund and implement that. It has not been fully implemented yet and is something that we're really excited that the current administration is focusing on. um so yeah i mean i think you know as we were talking about earlier so much of the action in this space is at the state level and there is a lot of movement there especially related to thinking about how to increase the probability of getting caught as a way to bring the two sides together um i think you know the the left is traditionally like kind of the fringe left talks about abolishing prisons and police and you've got the fringe right that is focused on just throw people in prison and throw away the key.

1:04:16Jennifer Doleac:And I think, and that's, those are really the only perspectives you hear on cable news and the middle 90 % of the country is like, those are our options. Those are terrible. And the reality is there's so much more we can do. And so increasing the probability that you get caught as a way to deter crime is one of the bipartisan ideas out there that actually can bring both sides together. Like everyone can get on board with that, right? Like if someone has committed murder, we should arrest them. Like no one, no one is, is opposed to that, brings justice to victims, and also it will have a deterrent effect if we get increased clearance rates.

1:04:47Jennifer Doleac:So we're seeing a lot of action like that on the state level. At the federal level, things tend to be more signaling. I don't want to say just symbolic, but the federal system is just so much smaller because so much criminal justice policy happens at the state level. Like if you're arrested for homicide, that is a state level crime. That's not a federal offense. And so So we're interested in things like FBI guidance on the use of DNA and having the Bureau of Presence implement some of these policies that can set a really good example for states and be piloting things that states might want to pick up on afterwards.

1:05:29Jennifer Doleac:But there is definitely still work to do to fully implement the First Step Act.

1:05:33Coleman Hughes:Awesome. Okay, Jennifer Doliak, thank you so much for your time and your book, which I highly recommend, is called The Science of Second Chances, A Revolution in Criminal Justice. Thanks so much.

1:05:46Jennifer Doleac:Coleman, thanks. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this.

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