Interview
Preventing crime without police & prisons | Jennifer Doleac (2020)
- Rob Wiblin anticipates that momentum for criminal justice reform will persist longer than previous movements and expects the FBI to eventually standardize police killing data collection.
- Speakers speculate that reducing U.S. incarceration to Western European levels could yield net public safety benefits, though cultural differences and gun prevalence may necessitate a higher optimal rate than Europe.
- Jennifer Doliak expects that reducing incarceration will generally be positive even if the precise optimal rate is unknown, noting that releasing marginal offenders may not harm public safety.
- Doliak expects procedural justice training similar to Chicago's program to be valuable, suggesting staggered rollouts as a model for implementation and measurement while noting repeated training could help.
- Increasing police force diversity by hiring more Black and female officers is expected to build community trust, while expanding the applicant pool would allow departments to be more selective and easily fire poor performers.
- Preliminary data suggests police unions formed in the 1950s increased killings by around 10% without reducing crime, leading to speculation that disbanding departments like Camden could reduce union bargaining power.
- Body-worn cameras are predicted to fail in reducing use of force, with randomized trials showing null effects or increased force, and policymakers remain concerned that budget cuts may raise crime rates.
- Hiring more officers is estimated as a cost-effective method to reduce crime through deterrence, with a 1% increase in police generally leading to a 0.1% to 1% crime reduction.
- D.C.'s triaging of medical calls to nurses is expected to serve as a model for testing non-police responders, while the existence of 18,000 departments facilitates learning through varied local experiments.
- Doliak fears a "safety-in-the-herd" mentality if all departments adopt identical policies without evidence, whereas strict rules limiting discretion are predicted to reduce racial bias.
- There is little research supporting implicit bias training, and Doliak hopes corporations will be evaluated on actual effectiveness while Denmark's broad DNA database expansion is noted for its huge effect on offender behavior.
- Criminals are not expected to shift crimes to morning hours due to daylight saving time, and society is urged to invest in lead abatement, education, and teen summer jobs as more cost-effective preventive measures than recidivism reduction.
- Specific interventions such as expanding Head Start, government transfers for child well-being, and banning criminal records from government assistance are predicted to lower future crime or increase recidivism respectively.
- Increasing diversity in the economics profession is expected to generate testing of neglected hypotheses, with the profession's ability to address its own diversity issues seen as critical to the validity of its social science toolkit.
- Gender-neutral tenure clock pauses are suggested to have unintended consequences that increased tenure rates for men without helping women, while the U.S. criminal justice system is predicted to improve significantly in 10 years driven by state and local reforms.