June 3, 2026 • 36 mins
For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point.
Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Justice at the Niskanen Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy .
In this episode, we talk about why the criminal justice system may have been built around the wrong theory of deterrence, why certainty matters more than severity, and what it would look like to design a system focused less on increasing punishment and more on increasing the likelihood that crimes are actually solved.
Greg Newburn is director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center. His previous positions include state policy director and Florida director for FAMM and chair of the Florida-based 'Yes on 11' political committee. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
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(00:00):
I'm Jeff Asher, and this is theJeffalytics Podcast.
(00:05):
For decades, the response torising crime has been fairly
predictable.
Increased penalties, increasedsentences, and hope it all works
out.
My guest today says thatframework misses the point.
Greg Newburn is the director ofcriminal justice at the Scannon
Center, where his work focuseson reducing both crime and
punishment at the same timethrough evidence-based policy.
In this episode, we talked aboutwhy the criminal justice system
(00:27):
may have been built around thewrong theory of deterrence, why
certainty matters more thanseverity, and what it would look
like to design a system focusedless on increasing punishment
and more on increasing thelikelihood that crimes are
actually solved.
We get into clearance rates,mandatory minimums, state
capacity, and the politicalchallenge of building policies
that are both effective andsustainable over time.
This episode is a conversationthat explores what changes when
(00:48):
the goal is preventing crime,not just punishing it.
Let's dive in.
My guest today is Greg Newbern.
Greg, thank you so much forjoining me.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thanks for having me.
So, first question, same toevery guest, but Greg, what what
is your background?
What brings you to us today?
Oh, yeah.
So I'm the uh director ofcriminal justice at the Niskanon
Center, which is a nonprofit,nonpartisan think tank based in
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Washington, D.C.
Niskanon just celebrated its10-year anniversary last year.
The criminal justice departmenthas been around since uh about
this time in 2021.
So we're about five years old.
And uh our work is essentiallywhat we like to describe it as
trying to minimize the cost ofcrime and punishment
(01:32):
simultaneously.
So we're looking to try tofigure out evidence-based ways
to improve criminal justiceoutcomes across the entire
criminal justice system with aneye toward trying to minimize
crime and violence andvictimization while
simultaneously minimizing theamount of punishment we have to
impose to achieve thoseobjectives.
(01:53):
What is sort of your role in notjust your role, but the Niskanon
Center's role that you see it insort of advancing these smarter
criminal justice policies?
You guys, I think, are much moreWashington like developing the
policies and working to actuallyimplement them than other places
that are more outwardly focused.
How does that work?
Yeah, I would describe it in twoways.
So I came to Niscannon fromfamilies against mandatory
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minimums, which became FAM.
Uh so it was FAM when I left.
And I spent a little more than adecade working there on
sentencing reform policy, mostlyat the state level.
And and the almost the entiretyof the scope of our work was on
sentencing and some prisonreform stuff.
But it was on that part of thecriminal justice system.
And during my time at FAM andbeing part of what I would call
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sort of professional criminaljustice reform movement at the
time, for again, a little morethan a decade, it became
frustrating to me that thereform community could very
easily identify all of theproblems with the criminal
justice system, all of theexcesses of the criminal justice
system, sentencing that was tooharsh or severe, and so on.
But we had very little by way ofan affirmative crime control
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agenda.
So if we went to talk to alawmaker and we said, hey,
listen, you know, you don't needthis sentence to protect public
safety, they'd say, okay, well,what do what should we do for
public safety?
And there was very little thatwe could offer on that.
And so part of the reason wewanted to start this program at
Niskanon is to develop a crimecontrol agenda that's rooted in
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good, solid evidence that is notjust more of the same reflexive,
intuitive, ratchet up sentencesand hope it works model, which
is how we've perceived theevolution of criminal justice
policy over the last severaldecades.
So the first component of thatto me is the theoretical
framework of how we approach theissue.
As I said before, we don't seecrime and punishment as two
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separate problems to be solved.
We think they're two sides ofthe same coin, right?
It's it's trivially easy tosolve crime in isolation.
It's trivially easy to solveover punishment in isolation.
It's much, much more difficultto solve both of them
simultaneously.
But in my mind and in Niskanon'smind, it that's the problem that
needs to be solved.
And nobody was really working onit in a rigorous, systematic
(04:02):
way, at least in the as we sawit in the criminal justice
reform world.
So we wanted to do that.
We wanted to create a frameworkfor how to think about criminal
justice policy that takes bothcrime and punishment seriously.
So I think that's one of theroles is offering a new and
different philosophical andideological framework for how to
approach criminal justiceissues, which is to say a
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rejection of the sort ofleft-right, well, punish them
more, punishment left them lessideas, and more of a
system-wide, what does theevidence say?
How do we improve outcomes?
So that's number one.
And then number two, like yousaid, I think part of what we do
is just develop the ideas thatwe think should work and then
pitch them directly to lawmakersand staff and to practitioners
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to try to test as many things aspossible, to try to develop a
rec uh rigorous evidence base,to figure out what works, scale
it as much as we can, and thenkeep doing that until we get the
the outcomes that we want.
I'm gonna ask a very bigquestion, which is uh piece that
you have on Niskanon's blog thatyou recently wrote calls for uh
what I think you called adeterrence agenda.
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One, what is that?
Two, how do you propose, how doyou propose going about it?
And three, kind of what is thestrategy to implement it if you
kind of separate those from whatis it, how should states do it,
and how does Niskanin and how doyou approach getting them to
actually do that?
It's a big question because it'sa big problem.
Um, part of the theory in thepiece that you just cited is
(05:28):
that, or the implication uh ofthe theory behind that piece is
that we've sort of built thewrong criminal justice state.
So we we had this theory that ifwe if we threatened penalties
that people would not commitcrimes.
And if we threatened them withreally severe penalties, they
would just stop committingcrimes because they would be
afraid of the penalties, of the,of the punishment.
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And because that was the theory,the subtext of that is like,
well, we don't really need to doanything to stop crime.
We don't need to build anyinstitutions that are actively
trying to deter crime becausethe threat alone is what's going
to do it.
And so if that's your theory,that if the threat alone is
going to scare people fromcommitting crimes, then again,
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you don't need to build a stateto do that.
I think that that model has beenproven to have totally failed,
right?
You see 25 years of crime andpunishment rising in tandem from
the mid to late 60s through theearly 1990s.
This concept developed as likethe response to murders going
up, we've got to do something.
Right.
And and not just murders, right?
Like any drug abuse and whateverthe crime was, whatever the
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spike was, the response was justto sort of double down on this
strategy of just, well, ifthere's a crime, then what's the
response?
There was no rigorous thinkingabout how to do this, except for
the idea, which by the way wasreasonable, I think at the time.
I don't think it wasunreasonable to think, well, if
we increase the penalties, weshould have less of the crime.
That's that's not anunreasonable proposition.
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It just didn't work out thatway.
And so what we had was a systemthat was not ready to fulfill
the threats that they made,right?
Like we can make the threats,but we have no institutions
really to make good on thosethreats.
And so now you've got a lot ofcrime and you've got to do
something with a lot of thepeople who are committing those
crimes.
So that's when you see the rapidprison buildup and the
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incarceration boom.
And so we're we're left withthis equilibrium of really high
crime and really highpunishment, which is roughly the
opposite of where you want tobe.
And so when I say the deterrenceagenda, essentially what I'm
trying to say is that we've gotto reset our entire way of
thinking about how best tocontrol crime.
Rather than merely hoping thatthreats of long sentences will
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deter people, we actually needto build a state that is capable
of actively doing that.
And the elements of that uh are,well, and they're still sort of
TBD because we haven't taken thetime to really build a rigorous
evidence base, but there aresome things that we sort of know
that should work, right?
Like increasing the number ofpolice officers is one way to
(08:02):
deter crime effectively.
And so that would be one placejust to start there.
And then there are other things,like Gend Doliac's got great
research on how DNA databasescan reduce crime.
Which we've talked about on thepod.
A lot of it is rooted in theidea that if you can increase
the perceived certainty ofapprehension, you can actually
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change behavior in ways thatsimply changing the severity of
the punishment will not.
So the deterrence agenda isessentially trying to figure out
all the ways throughout thesystem where you can improve the
perceived certainty ofapprehension for criminal
behavior and therefore get thedouble dividend that the folks
who were using severity wanted,which is reduced crime and
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victimization and reducedpunishment.
And the theory behind this is,like Thomas Schelling's theory,
that the most effective threatis one that never has to be
carried out, right?
If you can signal crediblethreats that you will be
punished if you commit thiscrime, then that person will not
commit the crime for fear of thepunishment.
And then now you've got lesscrime and you don't have to
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impose the punishment.
Whereas if you're threateningsomeone and the threat is not
credible, all you're doing isbluffing them.
And then they are going tofigure out that you're bluffing
them and they're going to keepcommitting crimes.
And then now we've got this bigpool of people who are actively
committing crimes, and we'regoing to figure out some tiny
fraction of them to pull out ofthe pool and punish them, but we
haven't done anything to shrinkthe pool or change the behavior
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or anything else, right?
So that in a nutshell, thedeterrence agenda is trying to
figure out how to improve thecertainty of apprehension, to
change the incentives forcriminal behavior, to get less
of it, and then also to get lesspunishment.
To your second question aboutwhat states should do.
(09:56):
Again, I think because we werecaught in this place where we
had this check that we didn'tthink we were going to have to
pay.
And then now, when forced to paythe check, we're like, we don't
know what to do.
So we again we just build allthese prisons and put people in
them and hope that it works out.
And we've left that systemrunning now for four or five
decades.
And so there's a lot of inertiaaround that.
(10:17):
Changing the calibration of andthe distribution of your public
safety spending, I think, isnumber one.
And you've really got to focusless on the punishment side of
things and more on the activedeterrence.
That could be something likebuilding swift, certain, and
fair sanctions programs forprobation violations.
Again, it's putting more policeon the streets.
Something that's near and dearto my heart, and I think
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probably yours is to improveinvestigative outcomes to signal
that if you if you engage inthis behavior, you really will
get caught for it, which I thinkcan pay dividends and deterrence
in any number of ways.
Again, DNA databases is anotherone.
So there are things that you caninvest in to say we can spend
$100 million enforcing threestrikes, or we can spend$100
million on all of these thingsthat would improve the certainty
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of apprehension.
Our opinion, and what we try totell lawmakers, is to put that
money into deterrence ratherthan punishment.
To the third question about howto actually implement it, well,
that can probably take anotherhour of a podcast.
And we are working on that.
Niskanon's got an entire statecapacity project.
I think there are very fewpeople working on the state
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capacity and the implementationpart of all of this, but we are.
I think it's it's finallystarting to filter out to the
larger criminal justice reformuniverse that agency behavior
and state capacity andimplementation are first order
problems, right?
That that we have to focus onthose just like we're focusing
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on what interventions might workand not work, because they they
go hand in hand, right?
Like dysfunctional agenciescannot implement even promising
and evidence-based interventionswith fidelity or with enough
support to make them work.
And so we've got to focus onboth of those things.
It's a very difficult problem,but the first part of it is just
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to start talking about it as afirst-order problem and get
people to work on it.
And Adam Gelb, who was on acouple of weeks ago from Council
on Criminal Justice, was sayingthat exact point that we think
about these frequently on thefederal end and then also at the
local level, and that the stateshave such an important role to
play.
In theory, I would think thateverybody wants murders locked
up.
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People want murders solved, andimproving the murder clearance
rate, the violent crimeclearance rate, should be a very
popular bipartisan approach.
Do you ever run into sort of thepolitical end of, well, the
prison complex isn't going towant fewer prisons.
They don't want less moneydedicated to them.
They want more money to buildmore prisons and have more
guards and things like that.
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Is that an overcomable problem,or is it just the random
politics of states?
So, in the handful of stateswhere we've worked on violent
crime clearance rates, that'sTexas, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Ohio, Utah, and a handful ofothers probably, we have not run
into any ideological oppositionto the idea of improving
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clearance rates.
The bills that we have helpeddraft and find sponsors for are
universally bipartisan.
They tend to sail throughcommittees without a single no
vote.
There are probably someexceptions to that, but by and
large, these are overwhelminglybipartisan affairs.
The polling that's been done onimproving clearance rates is
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very consistent, that this is80, 90% of people who are polled
across all demographic areaswant to catch more murderers.
Right.
I'm surprised it's not 100%.
Give or take the number ofmurderers.
You have to poll the murderersas well.
Exactly.
If you if you bracket out themurderers, then it's 100%.
That's just overwhelminglypopular.
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And that's reflected both againin the polling and also in the
in the enthusiasm that bothRepublicans and Democrats have
shown for the specific reformmechanisms that have been
introduced in their states.
We we just had a bill out inUtah that was signed by the
governor there, bipartisan billto create a new grant program to
focus on clearance rates.
They're going to put money intothat program.
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And Arnold Ventures, I believe,is going to support some of that
as well.
So we're building this movementtoward certainty and clearance
rates in a steadfast andsuccessful manner over the last
couple of years.
And I'm excited to see where itgoes.
The pitfall is not thatanybody's opposed to solving
more crimes.
It's just that it's a verydifficult fiscal environment
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right now.
So it's hard to find new moneyto do even very important
things.
But I do think that eventuallypeople are going to come around
to the idea that it's a pennywise and pound foolish not to
invest some money up front intrying to deter some of these
crimes.
You're either going to pay forthe deterrence or you're going
to pay for the punishment.
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You might as well pay for thedeterrence, which is cheaper,
and you avoid the victimization,and you can reduce your murder
rate and the number of peoplewho are shot in your
jurisdictions.
People get that, and I thinkwe're going to be even more
successful in the short term,getting getting some states to
get on board.
I'm in Louisiana, so I have theopposite experience of sort of
dumb on crime is sort of theapproach because there's been
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this massive reversal of thestate's criminal justice
policies that were implementedalmost a decade ago.
What do you how do you approachpeople that are politicians,
especially that are saying thatthe approach, the smart approach
is, you know, reducing probationand parole, reducing good time,
increasing incarceration,increasing sentences as a
legislative political approach?
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So this goes back to what I wassaying earlier about there not
being an affirmative crimecontrol agenda on offer for
people who care about reducingcrime.
The reforms in Louisiana and thejustice reinvestment stuff
across the country, primarily,that's not about crime control.
That's about improving systemoutcomes.
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It's about reducing your prisonpopulation safely and so on.
But it's not primarily aboutcrime control.
You can say, well, you can doall these things and it won't
affect your public safety, butthat's a step removed from the
thing that the lawmakersactually care about, which is
crime control.
Whatever amount of money theyneed to spend in order to reduce
their crime rate, they don'tcare how many people are in
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prison or how much it costs ifthey believe it translates into
lower crime.
None of the other factors matterif they believe that crime
cannot be controlled with thisset of things in place.
And so again, like that, that'sthe work that has to be done, is
you have to give them analternative to crime control.
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If you don't have anything thatsays this is affirmatively how
you go about reducing your crimerate, then of course they're
going to fall back on theirintuitions and the thing that
they have just sort of learnedover the last few decades.
If you're faced with a problemand you have one solution on one
hand, imperfect as it may be,and then nothing on the other
hand, well, let's at least trythe one, imperfect as it may be.
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And so our goal and our missionin a lot of ways is to go to
those lawmakers and say, we toohave a, and this is important, a
genuine commitment to crimereduction.
Here's how you should do it,right?
We don't try to lie to them andsay this is, you know, a
conservative idea, even thoughit was cooked up in some liberal
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think tank 20 years ago oranything like that.
We're not in the business oftaking progressive criminal
justice ideas and then dressingthem up as conservative
ideological wins.
We are in the business of tryingto figure out what reduces
crime.
And it is our opinion that thebest evidence and the best
theory about how to reduce crimeis not to ratchet up sentences
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and put people in prison for aslong as you can.
We think that just runs into ahost of problems.
But that is not primarily ourgoal.
Our goal is not decarceration,which is, again, trivially easy
if you don't care about crime.
Our goal and our theory of thecase is that if you can control
crime, you can also controlincarceration, right?
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So you start there and then youcan get the other win.
Whereas if you're going in thedirection of how can we reduce
incarceration, well, if youagain, if you don't have a
theory of crime, that can onlygo so far when someone cares
about crime.
And so I think that's exactlywhat you saw in Louisiana.
You had a lot of this buy-in foruh for reform, all of it in good
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faith and and all of it probablyon solid ground in terms of
evidence and what it's and itsimpacts and so on.
But when crime starts to spikeand there's nothing else on
offer, that's gonna go, right?
I mean, there was never thatthat consensus.
And that's what we saw.
Well, what was frustrating hereis you saw it implemented well
in advance of the spike in 2020.
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And we didn't see a spike aftersort of these justice
reinvestment acts were passed.
And then crime horrific, youknow, bad everywhere.
It's always worse in Louisiana.
It got really bad.
And then, yeah, there was therewas this like knee-jerk
reaction, but it it'sfrustrating because the
knee-jerk reaction happened ascrime was already going down in
that 2024 timeframe.
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And so by the time we wereresponding to the spike, we were
responding in such a way thatwasn't actually responding to
something that was actuallyhappening.
That's just me getting it.
I think the politics always lagsthe actual on-the-ground crime
realities.
But it's it's just again, not tobeat the dead horse here, but if
you are a rational politicalactor and crime is spiking, or
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at least the political responseto a prior crime spike is
salient and your voters want youto do something about it, well,
you're gonna go to your shelf ofoptions and you're just gonna
pull something off the shelf.
It's too late at that point tofigure out a new way, right?
I mean, it's it's the moment ithas arrived.
And so you're going to reach forthe thing that is available to
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you and what was available tothem at the time, in part
because the criminal justicereform community just completely
dropped the ball for 10 plusyears.
It was, there was just nothingelse available to them.
Now, imagine a world in whichyou've done G JRI uh the way
Louisiana did it, in a in acomprehensive, very impressive
fashion.
And in the meantime, for thethat entire time and maybe even
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before, you had developed arobust theory of crime control
that you have also been pitchingto the same lawmakers.
Now that we're doing this onthis end of the system, let's
also do this.
If you've if you have that inplace and you've got that buy-in
and you can give them somethingto do, they can pull that off
the shelf instead of repealingthe thing, right?
They can point to that.
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Instead of saying, oh, I'm gonnarepeal JRI, I can say, I'm gonna
invest in a thousand newdetectives across my state,
right?
Or I'm gonna do, I don't knowwhat Louisiana's DNA database
situation is, but you can do DNAor rapid DNA or or whatever it
is, right?
I'm gonna do these things.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna put 5,000more police on the street,
right?
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I'm gonna spare no expense to dothese things.
That is something that you canpitch to voters and it has the
added benefit of being true thatyou are actually doing something
about crime.
And and like you said, theclearance rate stuff is popular.
If you give them something topull off the shelf in those
moments, those unforeseeablepolitical moments, it's gonna be
less likely that they're gonnareverse course on some smart
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thing they did a few years ago.
What's frustrating about beingin Louisiana, amongst other
things, is the data is so bad.
And again, we're coming backmore to my element.
The the data is so bad.
I think right now the mostup-to-date data on the state UCR
program is the a PDF from the2023 crime in the US report.
So it's hard for policymakerswhen the the infrastructure and
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the reporting is so backwardsthat they're not able to even
know.
Well, should we be in crimecontrol because we're spiking
mode or reform becauseeverything's working and we can
maybe loosen the reins a littlebit mode?
So that's a real frustration.
It's not everywhere.
Texas is great, Pennsylvania'sgreat.
Um, a lot of the places younamed have really strong data.
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Places that don't are at a realdisadvantage.
I feel like.
And if you were trying to triagewhat to do here, that's probably
number one, right?
Like if you were in the pitversion of crime control and you
were trying to figure out whichpatient to handle first,
improving your crime datainfrastructure along the lines
of the real-time crime index, bythe way, right?
(22:18):
Like figuring out what ishappening in real time has got
to be priority number one.
And in part, that's the thingthat allows you to do all of the
other things down the line,right?
To to be able to test whetherwhat you're doing is working, to
evaluate a particularintervention rapidly, which is
critical and almost impossiblein a lot of places now.
(22:38):
So yeah, I mean, it's it reallyis it's frustrating to go to a
place and say, what's happeningwith the murder rate?
And you realize the best datathat's out there is from 2021 or
whenever they shifted datainfrastructure.
And people have made this pointbefore, but and I'm sure you
have made this point before.
But the idea that we can know somuch about so much, right?
(22:59):
How many home runs did so-and-sohit yesterday?
We know that, right?
We know that immediately.
You know, fantasy football datais updated in real time, fantasy
baseball in real time.
John Arnold talks about thenumber of pigs slaughtered in a
day.
Yeah, you're right, right,right.
But we don't know how manypeople got shot in New Orleans
yesterday.
Although we might now, sinceyou're you're doing it.
(23:19):
We we have some ideas.
Yeah.
We we it it is improved.
Uh Jacob Kaplan was giving asent me a slide from his talk at
Princeton.
Uh Jacob Kaplan, who runs thecrime data tool and has done a
lot of work with the RTCI and hegave a talk talking about the
golden age of crime data.
So we're in this weird worldwhere this is the best it's ever
been, and in a lot of placesit's still not very good.
Right, right.
(23:41):
To that end, what are sort ofthe metrics for success?
Obviously, legislation andstates coming on board.
Is there something beyond justclearance rates to measure
deterrence, to measure how wellwe're doing in reaching that
agenda?
Aaron Powell Well, in reachingthe agenda, I think the more
people who can just buy into thelarger deterrence framework and
certainty framework is thebetter.
(24:03):
And in terms of legislation, youknow, we ran a bill here in
Florida where I live that wouldestablish uh a pilot program for
swift, certain, and fairsanctions for community
supervision violations.
We're looking into expandingelectronic monitoring, home
confinement, and that sort ofthing, uh, to try to figure out
ways that judges can usedifferent levels of monitoring
(24:26):
in order to deter crime.
So as far as metrics go in termsof legislation, I think it's,
you know, it's number of bills,the scope that those bills have,
and the general buy-in left,right, and center for what we're
trying to do.
I think a lot of times folkslike us who live this in this
world full-time, I think we takefor granted what we expect other
(24:47):
people to know.
And it is absolutely notunreasonable for a randomly
chosen lawmaker to not know whatSwift Certain Fair sanctions
means, right?
It is, it's not unreasonable.
A lot of these legislatures arepart-time, most of them are
understaffed.
These folks are very busy intheir professional, in their
personal lives.
(25:07):
And so for us to just assume,like, oh, you you haven't read
this or that.
So it's our job to educate themabout these things.
And it is intuitive, it'splausible to think if I if I
move this from a misdemeanor toa felony or from a third-degree
felony to a first-degree felony,or I put a mandatory minimum on
this, or whatever, it isplausible and intuitive to think
(25:28):
that that's going to work.
And so I don't hold it againstthese lawmakers for thinking
that this is the right way to doit.
And it's our job to educate themon why there's a better way.
And what I've found is whenyou're sitting in those rooms
and you actually are educatingthe lawmakers who, to a person,
are acting in good faith anddesperately trying to get a
(25:50):
problem under control.
And you can show them theconnection between the theory
and the evidence and theoutcomes, to a person, they are
open to it.
And you can see their mindschanging in real time.
And once you learn this stuff,you can't unlearn it.
Once you start to see thetrade-off between severity and
certainty, once you see the factthat a dollar spent on locking
(26:13):
up a 90-year-old is a dollarthat can't be spent on a cop,
you can't unlearn those things.
And it's it's impossible not tostart looking at the margins and
at trade-offs and trying tofigure out how much public
safety you're buying for yourmarginal dollar and so on.
And again, once you start tothink about the system in those
terms, rather than, by the way,the dominant way that it is
(26:36):
portrayed to lawmakers, which isthrough a culture war lens,
right?
It's not really on its ownterms.
It's not crime on its own termsor incarceration on its own
terms.
Those things are proxies forlarger culture war fights,
racism, poverty, you name it.
But if you start to talk aboutit on its own terms in a little
bit more technocratic and youcan explain the evidence, they
get it.
You can see their minds change,and then now they want more of
(26:59):
that, right?
And then they're amenable tosaying, oh, yeah, okay, I can
see what you said there.
What can we do?
Well, have you looked at yourclearance rates?
Have you looked at thesupervision violations or the
responses to them?
Have you looked at caseloads ofyour probation officers and so
on?
And then you're cooking withgas.
You gave a great answer.
I should have stopped you in themiddle of it because you you
brought up something that Iwanted to ask, because I know
(27:21):
you're a passionate advocate forthis and have worked in this a
lot.
Can you describe for people thatdon't know like what are
mandatory minimums and why arethey so bad?
Sure.
I think it's a critical point.
And I think we don't haveanother hour and a half to go on
this, but I I think it's soimportant and it's such a
knee-jerk reaction is you know,what is our response?
Well, this crime happened.
(27:42):
The sentence is four years.
What if we made it six years?
We could prevent that fromhappening in the future.
And it's such a poisonous, Ithink, approach to things.
So I was Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so you're you're you'regoing back a few years.
If there was a time uh where Icould probably go on for an hour
just on that.
But I think uh a couple ofreasons.
Number one is the one you justdescribed, right?
(28:04):
It it reflects an approach tothe problem that I think has
long been discredited, which isagain, if you just ratchet up
the severity of the punishment,you're going to get a comparable
deterrent effect.
That's just a wrong-headedapproach to this for any number
of reasons, right?
So a person who is going tocommit a crime when the
(28:24):
punishment is five years is notgoing to suddenly not commit the
crime if the punishment is 10.
The punishments are distant.
They're far removed from theoffense, they are intermittent
and random in a lot of ways.
This, again, what motivatespeople is not the potential
punishment, but whether they'regoing to be caught.
(28:45):
And you can double from 10 to20, but if you don't change the
perception that they're going toget caught, you're going to get
similar levels of violations.
Now, obviously there areexceptions to this.
It's not a universal rule, butby and large, this is how
deterrence operates.
And it's something we've knownfor 200 plus years, right?
But it just is not reflected inour criminal justice policy.
(29:06):
So number one, it's just areflection of poor thinking
about deterrence and therelative mechanisms of severity
and certainty to achieve that.
And the second is morepractical, right?
I mean, it it just inevitablycreates injustices when you have
a mandatory minimum that isdisconnected from the behavior
of the person or the crimeitself.
(29:27):
I mean, and and at FAM we toldthese stories every day, whether
it's for a drug crime that'sbased on weight, so you get a
cliff effect, right?
Like one person gets 10 yearsfor having a handful of pills.
A person who has one more pillgets 25 years.
So, you know, 15 extra years forone additional pill is totally
irrational and unjust, and soon.
(29:47):
The practical effect of thesethings is to generate injustices
in individual cases.
The work of mandatory minimumreform is not about reducing the
prison population or anythinglike that.
These are outlier cases, butthere are still injustices in
those individual cases that haveto be rectified.
And it's an inevitable outcomeof a sentencing scheme that
includes mandatory minimums.
(30:08):
And so that's why you see reformefforts that are across the
ideological spectrum.
People who care about theincapacitation benefit of prison
are in favor of mandatoryminimum reform.
People who think that sentencingshould be based only on moral
desserts are in favor ofmandatory minimum reform.
So I think everybody has kind ofcome around to the idea that
(30:28):
mandatory minimums are at bestan inefficient and largely
ineffective response to crime.
But once again, it has been thedominant reaction to crime
spikes for 40 or 50 years now,right?
I mean, Rockefeller drug lawswere 1973, Michigan 650 Lifer
was 1978, uh, the feds gotinvolved in the mid-1980s, and
(30:49):
then the states started doing alot in the 80s and 90s.
And so it's just been theintuitive, reflexive thing that
you do in response to a crime.
And we're still seeing it today.
I there were a couple of yearsago when catalytic converters
were being stolen withregularity, and that spiked.
The response was, okay, well,let's just increase the penalty.
The laziest, least creative wayto attack a problem that you can
(31:13):
conceive of.
Especially like auto-basedvehicle burglaries and auto
thefts, where you're like, wehave a 4% clearance rate.
Exactly.
Yes.
Right.
But we could give a billion-yearsentence for each crime and it's
still gonna have no effectbecause they know that there's a
one in 25 chance of gettingcaught.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
So uh I've been asking all of mymy guests this question.
I'm very curious if you've givenany thought to this.
(31:35):
How is AI gonna change your jobapproach?
Have you guys worked in thatenvironment?
Or do you have any thoughts onsort of how do how would you
change the perceptions of AIadoption going forward?
I know this is completely out ofleft field on this interview,
but curious.
Well, it is tough because everyday you wake up and there's a
sea change in the the functionalcapabilities of various AI
(31:58):
systems.
So as soon as you think you havea handle on something about AI,
it changes so significantly thatyou've got to just sort of
almost start over in how you'reordering your thinking about it.
And so I I am still trying tofigure out how it should work.
I mean, I think there's atremendous amount of
possibility, and you can justimmediately see it, right?
(32:19):
I mean, imagine AI looking atvideotape to look at when the
blue car passes thisintersection at 2 a.m.
rather than a person having tospend his or her time doing the
same thing.
That's just an immediatepersonnel multiplier in an
investigation or sifting throughhundreds of pages of a file in
(32:40):
seconds or minutes rather thanhours, days, or weeks to figure
out, you know, what are thepatterns and what am I missing
and so on.
So you can see a lot of benefitpotentially in clearance rates
and investigative outcomes andin policing and so on, making
policing smarter, trying tofigure out where your hotspots
are, who are the gangs that arebeefing with one another at any
(33:02):
given time.
You can you can see how AI canbe really useful in those.
And at the same time, you cansee how it would be really
subject to abuse, right?
And so I I think trying tofigure out that balance of the
productive uses and thepotential for abuse, I don't
think we're anywhere close tofiguring out what that
equilibrium looks like.
And again, it changes every day.
(33:22):
So even if we were close, wemight not be close tomorrow or
the next day.
I think that there's also apossibility for, and I I haven't
heard anybody else talk aboutthis, but it's been my it's been
a project of mine for a longtime to try to figure this out.
Like sentencing disparitiesbased on similar crimes and so
on.
I feel like we could, with theright AI tool, every sentencing
(33:43):
judge in the country could haveaccess to every other sentence
for that crime with a similardemographic, similar facts of
the case, and so on.
So we can figure out how do weeliminate uh disparities that
are unnecessary or unjust.
And also we can evaluate did the10-year sentence, was it
necessary?
What were the five-yearsentences just as good?
(34:06):
Did you need 15 years and so on?
We can we can compare it torecidivism data and and housing
and unemployment and all thesethings and try to figure out for
the first time ever, is there anoptimal sentence for this crime
committed in this way, in thisplace by this person if our
outcomes, if our desiredoutcomes are X, Y, or Z.
So again, I can I can really seea lot of uses for it, but I'm
(34:26):
I'm happy to do that.
That's a fascinating use case.
Cool.
Greg, this has been fantastic.
I really appreciate it.
What is next for you andNiskanin?
Yeah, we've been fortunate thatwe've been able to grow the
department.
Uh, we we started with just uhtwo or three of us back in 2021,
and then a couple of years ago,we brought on a state affairs
manager, we brought on some moregovernment affairs folks, we
(34:47):
brought on researchers.
So we've been able to expand ouroutput, our original research.
We're looking to further expandthat.
We want to get into more states,and we just want to keep making
the case for certainty ofapprehension to try to get the
deterrence agenda in as manyplaces as possible.
So, in a lot of ways, we're justgonna keep doing what we're
doing and hopefully doing moreof it.
(35:08):
Greg, I really appreciate yourcoming on.
Fantastic conversation.
And uh, where can people followyou?
Follow Niskanon?
Yeah, NiskanonCenter.org.
I'm one of those folks who hasabandoned social media with
enthusiasm.
So you won't find me on any thesocial media sites.
I I guess LinkedIn we have tohave, but other than that, you
won't find me.
But you will find NiskanonCenter on Twitter and on
(35:30):
Instagram and those folks.
So go go find Niskanon.
When I send you the email withthe episode link and ask you to
share on your socials, you canignore that request.
It'll go right on LinkedIn.
It'll be the second thing I'veever posted, probably.
Fantastic.
Greg, thanks so much forjoining.
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks for listening to theJeffalytics Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe and tolearn more, head on over to
(35:52):
ahdatalytics.com for moreinformation and previous
episodes.
If you like what you heard,please leave a glowing review,
which will help others todiscover the show.
Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.
I'm Jeff Asher, and this is theJeffalytics Podcast.
(00:05):
For decades, the response torising crime has been fairly
predictable.
Increased penalties, increasedsentences, and hope it all works
out.
My guest today says thatframework misses the point.
Greg Newburn is the director ofcriminal justice at the Scannon
Center, where his work focuseson reducing both crime and
punishment at the same timethrough evidence-based policy.
In this episode, we talked aboutwhy the criminal justice system
(00:27):
may have been built around thewrong theory of deterrence, why
certainty matters more thanseverity, and what it would look
like to design a system focusedless on increasing punishment
and more on increasing thelikelihood that crimes are
actually solved.
We get into clearance rates,mandatory minimums, state
capacity, and the politicalchallenge of building policies
that are both effective andsustainable over time.
This episode is a conversationthat explores what changes when
(00:48):
the goal is preventing crime,not just punishing it.
Let's dive in.
My guest today is Greg Newbern.
Greg, thank you so much forjoining me.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thanks for having me.
So, first question, same toevery guest, but Greg, what what
is your background?
What brings you to us today?
Oh, yeah.
So I'm the uh director ofcriminal justice at the Niskanon
Center, which is a nonprofit,nonpartisan think tank based in
(01:11):
Washington, D.C.
Niskanon just celebrated its10-year anniversary last year.
The criminal justice departmenthas been around since uh about
this time in 2021.
So we're about five years old.
And uh our work is essentiallywhat we like to describe it as
trying to minimize the cost ofcrime and punishment
(01:32):
simultaneously.
So we're looking to try tofigure out evidence-based ways
to improve criminal justiceoutcomes across the entire
criminal justice system with aneye toward trying to minimize
crime and violence andvictimization while
simultaneously minimizing theamount of punishment we have to
impose to achieve thoseobjectives.
(01:53):
What is sort of your role in notjust your role, but the Niskanon
Center's role that you see it insort of advancing these smarter
criminal justice policies?
You guys, I think, are much moreWashington like developing the
policies and working to actuallyimplement them than other places
that are more outwardly focused.
How does that work?
Yeah, I would describe it in twoways.
So I came to Niscannon fromfamilies against mandatory
(02:13):
minimums, which became FAM.
Uh so it was FAM when I left.
And I spent a little more than adecade working there on
sentencing reform policy, mostlyat the state level.
And and the almost the entiretyof the scope of our work was on
sentencing and some prisonreform stuff.
But it was on that part of thecriminal justice system.
And during my time at FAM andbeing part of what I would call
(02:34):
sort of professional criminaljustice reform movement at the
time, for again, a little morethan a decade, it became
frustrating to me that thereform community could very
easily identify all of theproblems with the criminal
justice system, all of theexcesses of the criminal justice
system, sentencing that was tooharsh or severe, and so on.
But we had very little by way ofan affirmative crime control
(02:57):
agenda.
So if we went to talk to alawmaker and we said, hey,
listen, you know, you don't needthis sentence to protect public
safety, they'd say, okay, well,what do what should we do for
public safety?
And there was very little thatwe could offer on that.
And so part of the reason wewanted to start this program at
Niskanon is to develop a crimecontrol agenda that's rooted in
(03:17):
good, solid evidence that is notjust more of the same reflexive,
intuitive, ratchet up sentencesand hope it works model, which
is how we've perceived theevolution of criminal justice
policy over the last severaldecades.
So the first component of thatto me is the theoretical
framework of how we approach theissue.
As I said before, we don't seecrime and punishment as two
(03:40):
separate problems to be solved.
We think they're two sides ofthe same coin, right?
It's it's trivially easy tosolve crime in isolation.
It's trivially easy to solveover punishment in isolation.
It's much, much more difficultto solve both of them
simultaneously.
But in my mind and in Niskanon'smind, it that's the problem that
needs to be solved.
And nobody was really working onit in a rigorous, systematic
(04:02):
way, at least in the as we sawit in the criminal justice
reform world.
So we wanted to do that.
We wanted to create a frameworkfor how to think about criminal
justice policy that takes bothcrime and punishment seriously.
So I think that's one of theroles is offering a new and
different philosophical andideological framework for how to
approach criminal justiceissues, which is to say a
(04:24):
rejection of the sort ofleft-right, well, punish them
more, punishment left them lessideas, and more of a
system-wide, what does theevidence say?
How do we improve outcomes?
So that's number one.
And then number two, like yousaid, I think part of what we do
is just develop the ideas thatwe think should work and then
pitch them directly to lawmakersand staff and to practitioners
(04:45):
to try to test as many things aspossible, to try to develop a
rec uh rigorous evidence base,to figure out what works, scale
it as much as we can, and thenkeep doing that until we get the
the outcomes that we want.
I'm gonna ask a very bigquestion, which is uh piece that
you have on Niskanon's blog thatyou recently wrote calls for uh
what I think you called adeterrence agenda.
(05:05):
One, what is that?
Two, how do you propose, how doyou propose going about it?
And three, kind of what is thestrategy to implement it if you
kind of separate those from whatis it, how should states do it,
and how does Niskanin and how doyou approach getting them to
actually do that?
It's a big question because it'sa big problem.
Um, part of the theory in thepiece that you just cited is
(05:28):
that, or the implication uh ofthe theory behind that piece is
that we've sort of built thewrong criminal justice state.
So we we had this theory that ifwe if we threatened penalties
that people would not commitcrimes.
And if we threatened them withreally severe penalties, they
would just stop committingcrimes because they would be
afraid of the penalties, of the,of the punishment.
(05:50):
And because that was the theory,the subtext of that is like,
well, we don't really need to doanything to stop crime.
We don't need to build anyinstitutions that are actively
trying to deter crime becausethe threat alone is what's going
to do it.
And so if that's your theory,that if the threat alone is
going to scare people fromcommitting crimes, then again,
(06:11):
you don't need to build a stateto do that.
I think that that model has beenproven to have totally failed,
right?
You see 25 years of crime andpunishment rising in tandem from
the mid to late 60s through theearly 1990s.
This concept developed as likethe response to murders going
up, we've got to do something.
Right.
And and not just murders, right?
Like any drug abuse and whateverthe crime was, whatever the
(06:35):
spike was, the response was justto sort of double down on this
strategy of just, well, ifthere's a crime, then what's the
response?
There was no rigorous thinkingabout how to do this, except for
the idea, which by the way wasreasonable, I think at the time.
I don't think it wasunreasonable to think, well, if
we increase the penalties, weshould have less of the crime.
That's that's not anunreasonable proposition.
(06:57):
It just didn't work out thatway.
And so what we had was a systemthat was not ready to fulfill
the threats that they made,right?
Like we can make the threats,but we have no institutions
really to make good on thosethreats.
And so now you've got a lot ofcrime and you've got to do
something with a lot of thepeople who are committing those
crimes.
So that's when you see the rapidprison buildup and the
(07:17):
incarceration boom.
And so we're we're left withthis equilibrium of really high
crime and really highpunishment, which is roughly the
opposite of where you want tobe.
And so when I say the deterrenceagenda, essentially what I'm
trying to say is that we've gotto reset our entire way of
thinking about how best tocontrol crime.
Rather than merely hoping thatthreats of long sentences will
(07:40):
deter people, we actually needto build a state that is capable
of actively doing that.
And the elements of that uh are,well, and they're still sort of
TBD because we haven't taken thetime to really build a rigorous
evidence base, but there aresome things that we sort of know
that should work, right?
Like increasing the number ofpolice officers is one way to
(08:02):
deter crime effectively.
And so that would be one placejust to start there.
And then there are other things,like Gend Doliac's got great
research on how DNA databasescan reduce crime.
Which we've talked about on thepod.
A lot of it is rooted in theidea that if you can increase
the perceived certainty ofapprehension, you can actually
(08:22):
change behavior in ways thatsimply changing the severity of
the punishment will not.
So the deterrence agenda isessentially trying to figure out
all the ways throughout thesystem where you can improve the
perceived certainty ofapprehension for criminal
behavior and therefore get thedouble dividend that the folks
who were using severity wanted,which is reduced crime and
(08:43):
victimization and reducedpunishment.
And the theory behind this is,like Thomas Schelling's theory,
that the most effective threatis one that never has to be
carried out, right?
If you can signal crediblethreats that you will be
punished if you commit thiscrime, then that person will not
commit the crime for fear of thepunishment.
And then now you've got lesscrime and you don't have to
(09:05):
impose the punishment.
Whereas if you're threateningsomeone and the threat is not
credible, all you're doing isbluffing them.
And then they are going tofigure out that you're bluffing
them and they're going to keepcommitting crimes.
And then now we've got this bigpool of people who are actively
committing crimes, and we'regoing to figure out some tiny
fraction of them to pull out ofthe pool and punish them, but we
haven't done anything to shrinkthe pool or change the behavior
(09:27):
or anything else, right?
So that in a nutshell, thedeterrence agenda is trying to
figure out how to improve thecertainty of apprehension, to
change the incentives forcriminal behavior, to get less
of it, and then also to get lesspunishment.
To your second question aboutwhat states should do.
(09:56):
Again, I think because we werecaught in this place where we
had this check that we didn'tthink we were going to have to
pay.
And then now, when forced to paythe check, we're like, we don't
know what to do.
So we again we just build allthese prisons and put people in
them and hope that it works out.
And we've left that systemrunning now for four or five
decades.
And so there's a lot of inertiaaround that.
(10:17):
Changing the calibration of andthe distribution of your public
safety spending, I think, isnumber one.
And you've really got to focusless on the punishment side of
things and more on the activedeterrence.
That could be something likebuilding swift, certain, and
fair sanctions programs forprobation violations.
Again, it's putting more policeon the streets.
Something that's near and dearto my heart, and I think
(10:38):
probably yours is to improveinvestigative outcomes to signal
that if you if you engage inthis behavior, you really will
get caught for it, which I thinkcan pay dividends and deterrence
in any number of ways.
Again, DNA databases is anotherone.
So there are things that you caninvest in to say we can spend
$100 million enforcing threestrikes, or we can spend$100
million on all of these thingsthat would improve the certainty
(11:01):
of apprehension.
Our opinion, and what we try totell lawmakers, is to put that
money into deterrence ratherthan punishment.
To the third question about howto actually implement it, well,
that can probably take anotherhour of a podcast.
And we are working on that.
Niskanon's got an entire statecapacity project.
I think there are very fewpeople working on the state
(11:22):
capacity and the implementationpart of all of this, but we are.
I think it's it's finallystarting to filter out to the
larger criminal justice reformuniverse that agency behavior
and state capacity andimplementation are first order
problems, right?
That that we have to focus onthose just like we're focusing
(11:44):
on what interventions might workand not work, because they they
go hand in hand, right?
Like dysfunctional agenciescannot implement even promising
and evidence-based interventionswith fidelity or with enough
support to make them work.
And so we've got to focus onboth of those things.
It's a very difficult problem,but the first part of it is just
(12:05):
to start talking about it as afirst-order problem and get
people to work on it.
And Adam Gelb, who was on acouple of weeks ago from Council
on Criminal Justice, was sayingthat exact point that we think
about these frequently on thefederal end and then also at the
local level, and that the stateshave such an important role to
play.
In theory, I would think thateverybody wants murders locked
up.
(12:25):
People want murders solved, andimproving the murder clearance
rate, the violent crimeclearance rate, should be a very
popular bipartisan approach.
Do you ever run into sort of thepolitical end of, well, the
prison complex isn't going towant fewer prisons.
They don't want less moneydedicated to them.
They want more money to buildmore prisons and have more
guards and things like that.
(12:45):
Is that an overcomable problem,or is it just the random
politics of states?
So, in the handful of stateswhere we've worked on violent
crime clearance rates, that'sTexas, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Ohio, Utah, and a handful ofothers probably, we have not run
into any ideological oppositionto the idea of improving
(13:07):
clearance rates.
The bills that we have helpeddraft and find sponsors for are
universally bipartisan.
They tend to sail throughcommittees without a single no
vote.
There are probably someexceptions to that, but by and
large, these are overwhelminglybipartisan affairs.
The polling that's been done onimproving clearance rates is
(13:28):
very consistent, that this is80, 90% of people who are polled
across all demographic areaswant to catch more murderers.
Right.
I'm surprised it's not 100%.
Give or take the number ofmurderers.
You have to poll the murderersas well.
Exactly.
If you if you bracket out themurderers, then it's 100%.
That's just overwhelminglypopular.
(13:49):
And that's reflected both againin the polling and also in the
in the enthusiasm that bothRepublicans and Democrats have
shown for the specific reformmechanisms that have been
introduced in their states.
We we just had a bill out inUtah that was signed by the
governor there, bipartisan billto create a new grant program to
focus on clearance rates.
They're going to put money intothat program.
(14:11):
And Arnold Ventures, I believe,is going to support some of that
as well.
So we're building this movementtoward certainty and clearance
rates in a steadfast andsuccessful manner over the last
couple of years.
And I'm excited to see where itgoes.
The pitfall is not thatanybody's opposed to solving
more crimes.
It's just that it's a verydifficult fiscal environment
(14:31):
right now.
So it's hard to find new moneyto do even very important
things.
But I do think that eventuallypeople are going to come around
to the idea that it's a pennywise and pound foolish not to
invest some money up front intrying to deter some of these
crimes.
You're either going to pay forthe deterrence or you're going
to pay for the punishment.
(14:51):
You might as well pay for thedeterrence, which is cheaper,
and you avoid the victimization,and you can reduce your murder
rate and the number of peoplewho are shot in your
jurisdictions.
People get that, and I thinkwe're going to be even more
successful in the short term,getting getting some states to
get on board.
I'm in Louisiana, so I have theopposite experience of sort of
dumb on crime is sort of theapproach because there's been
(15:11):
this massive reversal of thestate's criminal justice
policies that were implementedalmost a decade ago.
What do you how do you approachpeople that are politicians,
especially that are saying thatthe approach, the smart approach
is, you know, reducing probationand parole, reducing good time,
increasing incarceration,increasing sentences as a
legislative political approach?
(15:32):
So this goes back to what I wassaying earlier about there not
being an affirmative crimecontrol agenda on offer for
people who care about reducingcrime.
The reforms in Louisiana and thejustice reinvestment stuff
across the country, primarily,that's not about crime control.
That's about improving systemoutcomes.
(15:52):
It's about reducing your prisonpopulation safely and so on.
But it's not primarily aboutcrime control.
You can say, well, you can doall these things and it won't
affect your public safety, butthat's a step removed from the
thing that the lawmakersactually care about, which is
crime control.
Whatever amount of money theyneed to spend in order to reduce
their crime rate, they don'tcare how many people are in
(16:15):
prison or how much it costs ifthey believe it translates into
lower crime.
None of the other factors matterif they believe that crime
cannot be controlled with thisset of things in place.
And so again, like that, that'sthe work that has to be done, is
you have to give them analternative to crime control.
(16:35):
If you don't have anything thatsays this is affirmatively how
you go about reducing your crimerate, then of course they're
going to fall back on theirintuitions and the thing that
they have just sort of learnedover the last few decades.
If you're faced with a problemand you have one solution on one
hand, imperfect as it may be,and then nothing on the other
hand, well, let's at least trythe one, imperfect as it may be.
(16:59):
And so our goal and our missionin a lot of ways is to go to
those lawmakers and say, we toohave a, and this is important, a
genuine commitment to crimereduction.
Here's how you should do it,right?
We don't try to lie to them andsay this is, you know, a
conservative idea, even thoughit was cooked up in some liberal
(17:20):
think tank 20 years ago oranything like that.
We're not in the business oftaking progressive criminal
justice ideas and then dressingthem up as conservative
ideological wins.
We are in the business of tryingto figure out what reduces
crime.
And it is our opinion that thebest evidence and the best
theory about how to reduce crimeis not to ratchet up sentences
(17:42):
and put people in prison for aslong as you can.
We think that just runs into ahost of problems.
But that is not primarily ourgoal.
Our goal is not decarceration,which is, again, trivially easy
if you don't care about crime.
Our goal and our theory of thecase is that if you can control
crime, you can also controlincarceration, right?
(18:02):
So you start there and then youcan get the other win.
Whereas if you're going in thedirection of how can we reduce
incarceration, well, if youagain, if you don't have a
theory of crime, that can onlygo so far when someone cares
about crime.
And so I think that's exactlywhat you saw in Louisiana.
You had a lot of this buy-in foruh for reform, all of it in good
(18:23):
faith and and all of it probablyon solid ground in terms of
evidence and what it's and itsimpacts and so on.
But when crime starts to spikeand there's nothing else on
offer, that's gonna go, right?
I mean, there was never thatthat consensus.
And that's what we saw.
Well, what was frustrating hereis you saw it implemented well
in advance of the spike in 2020.
(18:43):
And we didn't see a spike aftersort of these justice
reinvestment acts were passed.
And then crime horrific, youknow, bad everywhere.
It's always worse in Louisiana.
It got really bad.
And then, yeah, there was therewas this like knee-jerk
reaction, but it it'sfrustrating because the
knee-jerk reaction happened ascrime was already going down in
that 2024 timeframe.
(19:04):
And so by the time we wereresponding to the spike, we were
responding in such a way thatwasn't actually responding to
something that was actuallyhappening.
That's just me getting it.
I think the politics always lagsthe actual on-the-ground crime
realities.
But it's it's just again, not tobeat the dead horse here, but if
you are a rational politicalactor and crime is spiking, or
(19:27):
at least the political responseto a prior crime spike is
salient and your voters want youto do something about it, well,
you're gonna go to your shelf ofoptions and you're just gonna
pull something off the shelf.
It's too late at that point tofigure out a new way, right?
I mean, it's it's the moment ithas arrived.
And so you're going to reach forthe thing that is available to
(19:48):
you and what was available tothem at the time, in part
because the criminal justicereform community just completely
dropped the ball for 10 plusyears.
It was, there was just nothingelse available to them.
Now, imagine a world in whichyou've done G JRI uh the way
Louisiana did it, in a in acomprehensive, very impressive
fashion.
And in the meantime, for thethat entire time and maybe even
(20:12):
before, you had developed arobust theory of crime control
that you have also been pitchingto the same lawmakers.
Now that we're doing this onthis end of the system, let's
also do this.
If you've if you have that inplace and you've got that buy-in
and you can give them somethingto do, they can pull that off
the shelf instead of repealingthe thing, right?
They can point to that.
(20:33):
Instead of saying, oh, I'm gonnarepeal JRI, I can say, I'm gonna
invest in a thousand newdetectives across my state,
right?
Or I'm gonna do, I don't knowwhat Louisiana's DNA database
situation is, but you can do DNAor rapid DNA or or whatever it
is, right?
I'm gonna do these things.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna put 5,000more police on the street,
right?
(20:53):
I'm gonna spare no expense to dothese things.
That is something that you canpitch to voters and it has the
added benefit of being true thatyou are actually doing something
about crime.
And and like you said, theclearance rate stuff is popular.
If you give them something topull off the shelf in those
moments, those unforeseeablepolitical moments, it's gonna be
less likely that they're gonnareverse course on some smart
(21:15):
thing they did a few years ago.
What's frustrating about beingin Louisiana, amongst other
things, is the data is so bad.
And again, we're coming backmore to my element.
The the data is so bad.
I think right now the mostup-to-date data on the state UCR
program is the a PDF from the2023 crime in the US report.
So it's hard for policymakerswhen the the infrastructure and
(21:37):
the reporting is so backwardsthat they're not able to even
know.
Well, should we be in crimecontrol because we're spiking
mode or reform becauseeverything's working and we can
maybe loosen the reins a littlebit mode?
So that's a real frustration.
It's not everywhere.
Texas is great, Pennsylvania'sgreat.
Um, a lot of the places younamed have really strong data.
(21:58):
Places that don't are at a realdisadvantage.
I feel like.
And if you were trying to triagewhat to do here, that's probably
number one, right?
Like if you were in the pitversion of crime control and you
were trying to figure out whichpatient to handle first,
improving your crime datainfrastructure along the lines
of the real-time crime index, bythe way, right?
(22:18):
Like figuring out what ishappening in real time has got
to be priority number one.
And in part, that's the thingthat allows you to do all of the
other things down the line,right?
To to be able to test whetherwhat you're doing is working, to
evaluate a particularintervention rapidly, which is
critical and almost impossiblein a lot of places now.
(22:38):
So yeah, I mean, it's it reallyis it's frustrating to go to a
place and say, what's happeningwith the murder rate?
And you realize the best datathat's out there is from 2021 or
whenever they shifted datainfrastructure.
And people have made this pointbefore, but and I'm sure you
have made this point before.
But the idea that we can know somuch about so much, right?
(22:59):
How many home runs did so-and-sohit yesterday?
We know that, right?
We know that immediately.
You know, fantasy football datais updated in real time, fantasy
baseball in real time.
John Arnold talks about thenumber of pigs slaughtered in a
day.
Yeah, you're right, right,right.
But we don't know how manypeople got shot in New Orleans
yesterday.
Although we might now, sinceyou're you're doing it.
(23:19):
We we have some ideas.
Yeah.
We we it it is improved.
Uh Jacob Kaplan was giving asent me a slide from his talk at
Princeton.
Uh Jacob Kaplan, who runs thecrime data tool and has done a
lot of work with the RTCI and hegave a talk talking about the
golden age of crime data.
So we're in this weird worldwhere this is the best it's ever
been, and in a lot of placesit's still not very good.
Right, right.
(23:41):
To that end, what are sort ofthe metrics for success?
Obviously, legislation andstates coming on board.
Is there something beyond justclearance rates to measure
deterrence, to measure how wellwe're doing in reaching that
agenda?
Aaron Powell Well, in reachingthe agenda, I think the more
people who can just buy into thelarger deterrence framework and
certainty framework is thebetter.
(24:03):
And in terms of legislation, youknow, we ran a bill here in
Florida where I live that wouldestablish uh a pilot program for
swift, certain, and fairsanctions for community
supervision violations.
We're looking into expandingelectronic monitoring, home
confinement, and that sort ofthing, uh, to try to figure out
ways that judges can usedifferent levels of monitoring
(24:26):
in order to deter crime.
So as far as metrics go in termsof legislation, I think it's,
you know, it's number of bills,the scope that those bills have,
and the general buy-in left,right, and center for what we're
trying to do.
I think a lot of times folkslike us who live this in this
world full-time, I think we takefor granted what we expect other
(24:47):
people to know.
And it is absolutely notunreasonable for a randomly
chosen lawmaker to not know whatSwift Certain Fair sanctions
means, right?
It is, it's not unreasonable.
A lot of these legislatures arepart-time, most of them are
understaffed.
These folks are very busy intheir professional, in their
personal lives.
(25:07):
And so for us to just assume,like, oh, you you haven't read
this or that.
So it's our job to educate themabout these things.
And it is intuitive, it'splausible to think if I if I
move this from a misdemeanor toa felony or from a third-degree
felony to a first-degree felony,or I put a mandatory minimum on
this, or whatever, it isplausible and intuitive to think
(25:28):
that that's going to work.
And so I don't hold it againstthese lawmakers for thinking
that this is the right way to doit.
And it's our job to educate themon why there's a better way.
And what I've found is whenyou're sitting in those rooms
and you actually are educatingthe lawmakers who, to a person,
are acting in good faith anddesperately trying to get a
(25:50):
problem under control.
And you can show them theconnection between the theory
and the evidence and theoutcomes, to a person, they are
open to it.
And you can see their mindschanging in real time.
And once you learn this stuff,you can't unlearn it.
Once you start to see thetrade-off between severity and
certainty, once you see the factthat a dollar spent on locking
(26:13):
up a 90-year-old is a dollarthat can't be spent on a cop,
you can't unlearn those things.
And it's it's impossible not tostart looking at the margins and
at trade-offs and trying tofigure out how much public
safety you're buying for yourmarginal dollar and so on.
And again, once you start tothink about the system in those
terms, rather than, by the way,the dominant way that it is
(26:36):
portrayed to lawmakers, which isthrough a culture war lens,
right?
It's not really on its ownterms.
It's not crime on its own termsor incarceration on its own
terms.
Those things are proxies forlarger culture war fights,
racism, poverty, you name it.
But if you start to talk aboutit on its own terms in a little
bit more technocratic and youcan explain the evidence, they
get it.
You can see their minds change,and then now they want more of
(26:59):
that, right?
And then they're amenable tosaying, oh, yeah, okay, I can
see what you said there.
What can we do?
Well, have you looked at yourclearance rates?
Have you looked at thesupervision violations or the
responses to them?
Have you looked at caseloads ofyour probation officers and so
on?
And then you're cooking withgas.
You gave a great answer.
I should have stopped you in themiddle of it because you you
brought up something that Iwanted to ask, because I know
(27:21):
you're a passionate advocate forthis and have worked in this a
lot.
Can you describe for people thatdon't know like what are
mandatory minimums and why arethey so bad?
Sure.
I think it's a critical point.
And I think we don't haveanother hour and a half to go on
this, but I I think it's soimportant and it's such a
knee-jerk reaction is you know,what is our response?
Well, this crime happened.
(27:42):
The sentence is four years.
What if we made it six years?
We could prevent that fromhappening in the future.
And it's such a poisonous, Ithink, approach to things.
So I was Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so you're you're you'regoing back a few years.
If there was a time uh where Icould probably go on for an hour
just on that.
But I think uh a couple ofreasons.
Number one is the one you justdescribed, right?
(28:04):
It it reflects an approach tothe problem that I think has
long been discredited, which isagain, if you just ratchet up
the severity of the punishment,you're going to get a comparable
deterrent effect.
That's just a wrong-headedapproach to this for any number
of reasons, right?
So a person who is going tocommit a crime when the
(28:24):
punishment is five years is notgoing to suddenly not commit the
crime if the punishment is 10.
The punishments are distant.
They're far removed from theoffense, they are intermittent
and random in a lot of ways.
This, again, what motivatespeople is not the potential
punishment, but whether they'regoing to be caught.
(28:45):
And you can double from 10 to20, but if you don't change the
perception that they're going toget caught, you're going to get
similar levels of violations.
Now, obviously there areexceptions to this.
It's not a universal rule, butby and large, this is how
deterrence operates.
And it's something we've knownfor 200 plus years, right?
But it just is not reflected inour criminal justice policy.
(29:06):
So number one, it's just areflection of poor thinking
about deterrence and therelative mechanisms of severity
and certainty to achieve that.
And the second is morepractical, right?
I mean, it it just inevitablycreates injustices when you have
a mandatory minimum that isdisconnected from the behavior
of the person or the crimeitself.
(29:27):
I mean, and and at FAM we toldthese stories every day, whether
it's for a drug crime that'sbased on weight, so you get a
cliff effect, right?
Like one person gets 10 yearsfor having a handful of pills.
A person who has one more pillgets 25 years.
So, you know, 15 extra years forone additional pill is totally
irrational and unjust, and soon.
(29:47):
The practical effect of thesethings is to generate injustices
in individual cases.
The work of mandatory minimumreform is not about reducing the
prison population or anythinglike that.
These are outlier cases, butthere are still injustices in
those individual cases that haveto be rectified.
And it's an inevitable outcomeof a sentencing scheme that
includes mandatory minimums.
(30:08):
And so that's why you see reformefforts that are across the
ideological spectrum.
People who care about theincapacitation benefit of prison
are in favor of mandatoryminimum reform.
People who think that sentencingshould be based only on moral
desserts are in favor ofmandatory minimum reform.
So I think everybody has kind ofcome around to the idea that
(30:28):
mandatory minimums are at bestan inefficient and largely
ineffective response to crime.
But once again, it has been thedominant reaction to crime
spikes for 40 or 50 years now,right?
I mean, Rockefeller drug lawswere 1973, Michigan 650 Lifer
was 1978, uh, the feds gotinvolved in the mid-1980s, and
(30:49):
then the states started doing alot in the 80s and 90s.
And so it's just been theintuitive, reflexive thing that
you do in response to a crime.
And we're still seeing it today.
I there were a couple of yearsago when catalytic converters
were being stolen withregularity, and that spiked.
The response was, okay, well,let's just increase the penalty.
The laziest, least creative wayto attack a problem that you can
(31:13):
conceive of.
Especially like auto-basedvehicle burglaries and auto
thefts, where you're like, wehave a 4% clearance rate.
Exactly.
Yes.
Right.
But we could give a billion-yearsentence for each crime and it's
still gonna have no effectbecause they know that there's a
one in 25 chance of gettingcaught.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
So uh I've been asking all of mymy guests this question.
I'm very curious if you've givenany thought to this.
(31:35):
How is AI gonna change your jobapproach?
Have you guys worked in thatenvironment?
Or do you have any thoughts onsort of how do how would you
change the perceptions of AIadoption going forward?
I know this is completely out ofleft field on this interview,
but curious.
Well, it is tough because everyday you wake up and there's a
sea change in the the functionalcapabilities of various AI
(31:58):
systems.
So as soon as you think you havea handle on something about AI,
it changes so significantly thatyou've got to just sort of
almost start over in how you'reordering your thinking about it.
And so I I am still trying tofigure out how it should work.
I mean, I think there's atremendous amount of
possibility, and you can justimmediately see it, right?
(32:19):
I mean, imagine AI looking atvideotape to look at when the
blue car passes thisintersection at 2 a.m.
rather than a person having tospend his or her time doing the
same thing.
That's just an immediatepersonnel multiplier in an
investigation or sifting throughhundreds of pages of a file in
(32:40):
seconds or minutes rather thanhours, days, or weeks to figure
out, you know, what are thepatterns and what am I missing
and so on.
So you can see a lot of benefitpotentially in clearance rates
and investigative outcomes andin policing and so on, making
policing smarter, trying tofigure out where your hotspots
are, who are the gangs that arebeefing with one another at any
(33:02):
given time.
You can you can see how AI canbe really useful in those.
And at the same time, you cansee how it would be really
subject to abuse, right?
And so I I think trying tofigure out that balance of the
productive uses and thepotential for abuse, I don't
think we're anywhere close tofiguring out what that
equilibrium looks like.
And again, it changes every day.
(33:22):
So even if we were close, wemight not be close tomorrow or
the next day.
I think that there's also apossibility for, and I I haven't
heard anybody else talk aboutthis, but it's been my it's been
a project of mine for a longtime to try to figure this out.
Like sentencing disparitiesbased on similar crimes and so
on.
I feel like we could, with theright AI tool, every sentencing
(33:43):
judge in the country could haveaccess to every other sentence
for that crime with a similardemographic, similar facts of
the case, and so on.
So we can figure out how do weeliminate uh disparities that
are unnecessary or unjust.
And also we can evaluate did the10-year sentence, was it
necessary?
What were the five-yearsentences just as good?
(34:06):
Did you need 15 years and so on?
We can we can compare it torecidivism data and and housing
and unemployment and all thesethings and try to figure out for
the first time ever, is there anoptimal sentence for this crime
committed in this way, in thisplace by this person if our
outcomes, if our desiredoutcomes are X, Y, or Z.
So again, I can I can really seea lot of uses for it, but I'm
(34:26):
I'm happy to do that.
That's a fascinating use case.
Cool.
Greg, this has been fantastic.
I really appreciate it.
What is next for you andNiskanin?
Yeah, we've been fortunate thatwe've been able to grow the
department.
Uh, we we started with just uhtwo or three of us back in 2021,
and then a couple of years ago,we brought on a state affairs
manager, we brought on some moregovernment affairs folks, we
(34:47):
brought on researchers.
So we've been able to expand ouroutput, our original research.
We're looking to further expandthat.
We want to get into more states,and we just want to keep making
the case for certainty ofapprehension to try to get the
deterrence agenda in as manyplaces as possible.
So, in a lot of ways, we're justgonna keep doing what we're
doing and hopefully doing moreof it.
(35:08):
Greg, I really appreciate yourcoming on.
Fantastic conversation.
And uh, where can people followyou?
Follow Niskanon?
Yeah, NiskanonCenter.org.
I'm one of those folks who hasabandoned social media with
enthusiasm.
So you won't find me on any thesocial media sites.
I I guess LinkedIn we have tohave, but other than that, you
won't find me.
But you will find NiskanonCenter on Twitter and on
(35:30):
Instagram and those folks.
So go go find Niskanon.
When I send you the email withthe episode link and ask you to
share on your socials, you canignore that request.
It'll go right on LinkedIn.
It'll be the second thing I'veever posted, probably.
Fantastic.
Greg, thanks so much forjoining.
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks for listening to theJeffalytics Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe and tolearn more, head on over to
(35:52):
ahdatalytics.com for moreinformation and previous
episodes.
If you like what you heard,please leave a glowing review,
which will help others todiscover the show.
Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.
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