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We tend to live in this very reductive world, which I think is driven by the media in some
respects and driven by the demands of elected officials, where we look at new programs, we look
at criminal justice reforms, and we do tend to ask only a very simple basic reductive question,
which is "Did this work or not? Did this reduce crime or not?" But I think there's a host of
other things that we'd like to see the criminal justice system do. We'd like to see it be
cost-effective, for example. We'd like to see it be efficient. We'd like to see it be fair. We'd
like to see it treat defendants and victims with humanity and decency, and I think that in
general, we need to move beyond this kind of pass/fail approach to evaluating criminal justice
reform and ask these broader sets of questions if we're really going to develop a kind of
nuanced understanding of the field.
And in particular, I think it's really important to kind of look at criminal justice
experiments, and break down how they treat different populations. Sometimes an intervention,
it looks like it's had no effect, but if you take a microscope to it, it's actually had an enormous
effect for, say, high-risk population and a very poor effect with the low-risk population, and
so we're only going to find those kinds of things out if we broaden the lens and ask questions
beyond simply "Did this reduce crime or not?"