THE SCIENCE OF SECOND CHANCES

A behavioral economist looks at crime and punishment, with sometimes surprising results.

There are any number of reasons why people prefer pat formulas—get tough on offenders, keep an eye out for broken windows—over science when addressing crime. Science is hard. Yet nonscientific outcomes are, as social scientists say, suboptimal. In the vein of Freakonomics, Doleac turns to scientific method to test a number hypotheses, arguing, “I…see a lack of rigor as unethical.” As any economist might do, she weighs reward versus punishment as incentives for behavior. One insight is that, yes, there are plenty of people who belong in prison, having committed violent crimes such as rape and murder. But a related insight is that most people who enter the justice system are “more sad than scary,” perpetrators of misdemeanor offenses such as shoplifting and drug use. Given that most crime, by Doleac’s account, is not well thought out in advance and that much crime goes unpunished, there are remedies such as building a vast, national database of DNA—which, she maintains, has a greater deterrent effect than the threat of imprisonment, since DNA evidence can help improve the likelihood of identifying those who commit a crime quickly and thus act as a strong disincentive. (For privacy advocates, she notes that such a database is accessible only to law enforcement.) “This intervention breaks the incarceration cycle rather than perpetuating it,” Doleac argues. Perhaps counterintuitively, she also advocates for lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes, given experimental results that show that leniency “reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent.” Other remedies are more counterintuitive still, such as providing air filters in school classrooms, which “have a meaningful effect on pollution exposure, in a way that has big real-world benefits”—including reducing crime.

Essential reading for anyone concerned with criminal justice reform.