How to get people to quit crime

An interview with Arnold Ventures' Jennifer Doleac

Most of the person-hours of incarceration in the United States are served by people who’ve been found guilty of serious violent crimes. But most of the arrests are for lower-level offenses that carry lighter penalties. Meanwhile, the typical serious offender has, in fact, been arrested previously, served time, been released from the system, and is now out re-offending.

One possible solution is to hand out ever-increasing sentences for smaller crimes, but this carries enormous costs — direct fiscal costs, humanitarian costs, and indirect costs in terms of incarcerated people’s lost participation in the economy.

I sat down with Jennifer Doleac, Arnold Ventures’ incoming executive vice president for criminal justice, to talk about her research on evidence-based strategies to reduce recidivism at a lower cost than marginal increases in incarceration. The ideas range from improving access to drug treatment services, expanding the supply of mental health professionals, improving our evaluation of job training and education programs, to increasing demand for construction labor. We also talk about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to reducing barriers to employment for people who’ve been convicted of a crime.

And we talk about the idea of improving deterrence by improving detection — if you catch one more offender, incarceration goes up because you have an extra person in prison. But if you dramatically increase the odds of detection, then incarceration goes down because fewer people commit crimes in the first place.

The audio is here, as well as in the Slow Boring podcast feed, and the transcript is below for paid members.