Kurt Nelson 0:07 Welcome to Behavioral Grooves, the podcast that explores our human condition. I'm Kurt Nelson, Tim Houlihan 0:12 and I'm Tim Houlihan. We talk with researchers and other interesting people to use behavioral science to help us find our groove. Kurt Nelson 0:20 Yeah, so Tim, when someone makes a serious mistake, what do you think is the best way to prevent them from doing that mistake again? Tim Houlihan 0:33 Well, I think isn't our instinct to just punish the daylights out of them, right? And then if that doesn't work, then we increase the penalty until they stop doing it, right? If if if a year in prison isn't enough, go to five years. If five years isn't enough, go to 10 years, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Kurt Nelson 0:50 Yeah, I mean, you you nailed it. That's what we typically think. Tim Houlihan 0:54 Yeah, Kurt Nelson 0:55 but you know, behavioral science suggests otherwise, right? Yeah. So research kind of shows that people aren't nearly as influenced by the severity of the consequences as they are by the certainty of that a consequence will happen. So it's not making that consequence worse, but the fact that hey, a consequence is going to happen, and and that's important, you know. And that shift can reframe how we think about crime, the motivation to do a crime or not do a crime, and even wait for Tim, your favorite thing-not music, but leadership. Tim Houlihan 1:45 Oh, I was thinking you're going to say leader. Okay. Well, our guest today is Jennifer Doliak, and she is an economist who uses rigorous data to find out what actually reduces crime and helps people rebuild their lives. So Kurt had the opportunity to speak with her about her new book, *The Science of Second Chances* where she asks an important question: If our goal is safer communities, are we focusing on the right incentives? Kurt Nelson 2:13 Yeah, and and what I love about Jennifer's arguments around this is they're arguments from evidence; they're not from ideology. I mean, it's an economist speaking, and you know, and and as we've talked with other economists, there, you know, she's looking at the evidence, she's looking at the incentives, what is driving these people, and whether it's discussing DNA databases or post-release employment processes, she keeps returning to this kind of key principle, I think, which is don't automatically default to what sounds tough. You know, focus on what actually changes the subsequent behavior. Tim Houlihan 2:56 Yeah. So we explore why first mistakes deserve a different touch, and why unintended consequences undermine good intentions, and why breakthroughs begin with better questions rather than just with harsher answers. Kurt Nelson 3:11 Well said, my friend. And and here's an idea that you can take to work with you: that these lessons aren't just for the courtroom or the jailhouse or the police station. They're about leadership. They're about incentives, about identity, and about the fundamental belief, Tim, that we as people can change. So sit back and relax with a strong pour of evidence-based ideas, and enjoy our conversation with Jennifer Doliak. Jennifer Doliak, welcome to Behavioral Grooves. Jennifer Doleac 3:55 Hello, thank you so much for having me. Kurt Nelson 3:58 Well, as for general listeners of the show, you'll realize that it's just Kurt today, so Tim is unavoidably absent, and we're gonna just go on and do it with with this. So hopefully, I will do okay as we're moving forward with this. But Jennifer, it is a pleasure to have you. But let's get started with our famous speed round questions. The first one is this: If you had to live a year without either your laptop or your mobile phone, which would you choose? Jennifer Doleac 4:36 Oh, the phone for sure. Kurt Nelson 4:38 Oh, you are a person after my own heart. All right, there you go. Jennifer Doleac 4:42 Not even a tough, tough decision. I often try to leave my like my phone is like in another part of the room. It's always on silent. Yeah, I like it when people cannot reach me. That's my ideal space. Kurt Nelson 4:55 I I mean I know there are certain people that that's just like I can't live without my phone. I'm like going no man. I could. I would love to be without my phone for for a year. So there you Jennifer Doleac 5:05 go. Kurt Nelson 5:07 All right. Are you a second speed round question? Are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker? Jennifer Doleac 5:14 Definitely a tea drinker. Kurt Nelson 5:16 Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And is is that a regular thing, or is there other drink of choice, or is it? Yeah, Jennifer Doleac 5:23 no, I I feel like I'm constantly-it's almost a crutch. I always have to tea with me. But yeah, when I was much younger, I drank a lot of coffee, and I feel like I almost like overloaded on it, and so made a made the switch in my early 20s to tea, and that is-it's hard to switch back and forth, and so I'm like, I'm I'm just I'm on the tea train now. That's the thing. Yeah, I I will have to Kurt Nelson 5:42 say I I had been on the tea and I got switched over to coffee and I I do occasionally go back and forth, but not. Do you have a special? Is are you a tea connoisseur? Do you have a special blend that you need? Is it just anything? Jennifer Doleac 5:57 No, I think I I feel like I'm the person in Starbucks that's like, could I get a refill on the hot water? You know, just like keep pouring it. It's it really is. It's almost like a crutch, rather. Yeah, I think I embarrass my. I was in London recently and I went and asked for went into like one of the like chain you know coffee shops and was like, could I get a green tea with some milk in it? And they just like looked at me like that's not how you do it. Like you're not allowed to have, and it's like, I can you just? I'm American. Can you please just do what I ask? Kurt Nelson 6:28 We have had there. There are they are very distinct. I mean, we've had arguments with people about like, all right, can you heat the water up in a in a microwave, or does it have to be poured over? And oh, I mean, it's amazing. The like England, you know, anybody from England has very, very particular opinions. Yeah, my Jennifer Doleac 6:48 my my tea drinking is very offensive to anyone who who is a real connoisseur. So I apologize to all of them. All Kurt Nelson 6:55 right, all right. Third third of our speed round questions: Can a simple saliva swab be more effective at deterring future crime than the fear of long prison sentences? Jennifer Doleac 7:08 Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. So this is the the opening in my my book. It's talking about DNA databases, and and really the core here is anything that increases the probability of getting caught, the probability of consequences, the swiftness and certainty of consequences. That's how you get behavior change. That's how you deter and prevent crime. It's not the threat of a long sentence, and this is something that you know is perhaps counterintuitive. It's certainly the opposite of the way we've built our criminal justice system, but we have lots of data now for many, many years and many contexts that that is the case. Kurt Nelson 7:50 Well, I'm sure we'll dive into that a little bit more. All right, I have the final and last of these, and and I have a bunch of these that I get to choose from. So I'm I'm looking over them, and I'm trying to figure out which is going to be the best of here. But I think I'm going to do this one. I think since you're you're an economist, right? And so as as we go this and and economists, we you know I have an undergrad in economists. I wouldn't call myself an economist by any way any means, but you know, we talk about that mythical free lunch, and so is erring on the side of leniency for first-time offenders, particularly for smaller crimes, is that maybe achieving that mythical free lunch? Is that is that possible? Jennifer Doleac 8:36 Yeah, it turns out economists are wrong that there are no free lunches out there. There are free lunches at least throughout the criminal justice system because we are doing so many things so inefficiently, and so in the case of erring toward leniency for first-time defendants, it turns out if we drop more of those cases or give more people a second chance, err toward leniency in that first that first case, then people are more likely to change course, not come back to the criminal justice system. So we get less crime for less money and less of a burden on the system. Win, win, win. Free lunch. Kurt Nelson 9:14 I think we're gonna we'll definitely dive into that, and and in particular, I think some of the other aspects that you talk about them, like as you said, maybe counterintuitive or not the way that the criminal system is set up, you know exactly right now, and maybe some of the reasons on that. But we are talking with Jennifer about her new book, The Science of Second Chances, and so just before we even get into what we're talking about the book, you're an economist. How did you get interested in this, and then what? What was the impetus for this book now? What was the the reason that you you went there? Jennifer Doleac 9:50 Yeah. So you know, I went to graduate school to get a PhD in economics many years ago now, and and and did. Because I love the toolkit that economics provides, I love the way economists think about the world, and and you know that is you know we we think a lot about how people respond to incentives. That's really fundamental theoretical lens that economists bring to most problems. We sort of imagine that everyone's doing a really complex math problem in their heads all the time, optimizing costs and benefits, and allocating their scarce resources to maximize their own happiness, and and so if you want people to change behavior, you have to change the incentives, and that just strikes me as true. Maybe not the full math problem piece, but that fundamental insight, and so and it turns out you can you can apply that insight in lots of different spaces. People are responding to incentives all over the place, and and often people think that economists only think about money. That's not not it, right? There are a lot of incentives that are not money that we respond to. You know, probability of getting caught, probability of you know a judge might be worried their face will be on the news if the person in front of them goes on to reoffend. They're worried about their own reputation. That's an incentive. There are lots of ways that people are responding to incentives throughout the criminal justice space. But yeah, when I went to graduate school, I really didn't know what I'd want to apply this this economics toolkit, both the theoretical lens, but also the empirical toolkit of distinguishing correlation from causation. Kurt Nelson 11:20 I Jennifer Doleac 11:20 didn't know what I wanted to apply that to, and then I read a newspaper article about law enforcement DNA databases in the third or fourth year as a PhD student, and the point of the news article was, gosh, isn't this crazy that across the U.S. all the states have different rules, right? Everybody has common rules about which group of of convictions or or require trigger someone being added to the database, so you can be convicted of robbery in one state and go in the database for that, and the next state over you don't go in the database for the same crime. And isn't that inefficient and crazy and totally random? And that might be true. It might be bad policy, but it's excellent for research, right? So, so economists are always looking for what we call these natural experiments that that give us these treatment and control groups as if we were in a lab, and that is a great one. And so, that became my dissertation topic: what's the effect of DNA databases on crime and criminal behavior? And you know, here I am, many many years later, still working on this topic. It's one that economists are pretty late to. Sociologists have been working on on crime for a long time, studying crime for a long time. Political scientists are also relatively relatively new to this field. Psychologists obviously have been studying this for a long time. But I finished my graduate education at a time where there are a few much more senior scholars who are really trying to build the field and really trying to convince junior scholars like myself to devote our time and energy to this topic. And so I kind of lucked into a time when there was this this energy going toward building a cohort of junior scholars to focus on this topic, and that was risky for all of us. But it is a super interesting and important area, life and death decisions being made, and there's a lot of work to do. So here I am. Kurt Nelson 13:17 There you go. It's a fascinating. Whenever we talk with people about how they got interested in things, there's oftentimes there's me search, other times there's opportunity, various different pieces. But I thought it was really fascinating that natural experiment that just kind of fell into your lap, as you said, from that newspaper article, which goes to the the speed round question that we had about you know getting a swab. Can you talk just a little bit about that? You start the book out with that. I want to get into more in depth on some other things, but I think it's a really good point to just say, hey, here is some of the research that we found. Just just talking about that. Jennifer Doleac 13:57 Yeah. So so yeah, the way the DNA databases work, you've got you take a saliva swab now. It used to be an actual blood draw, but the technology's improved dramatically, and so just a simple saliva swab, and and they go send to the lab. Actually, it can be totally automated now. It just goes in a machine, spits out a string of numbers. So it's not you know uploading your DNA to 23andMe, where you get all this health information. It's really, I think of it as like a hashed Social Security number, where each of the individual numbers don't mean anything, but together they uniquely identify you. And so that's sort of what that's what essentially the DNA profile is, and that DNA profile goes into the database and can be matched to DNA from crime scene evidence, and so what it means is if you're in the DNA database, you're more likely to be caught if you reoffend, right? You're more likely to be identified as a suspect in cases where police might not have identified you in some other way. So that's really helpful for increasing the probability of getting caught. Okay, so how do we know if it works, right? Like that should deter crime, but how do we know if it works? And so the the natural experiment I wound up using in in a couple of my my studies on this was that the the date of so these these databases are expanded over time in any given state. So they might start with people convicted of murder and rape, and then you add people convicted of robbery, and then you add people convicted of burglary, and then you go on down the list, and they get bigger and bigger. But that in each of those individual expansion dates creates its own natural experiment. So you wind up with someone who's convicted of robbery on you know may 30, and they don't go in the database. But then the law changes on june 1, and someone convicted of robbery june 1 or second does go in the database. Everything else about them is the same. Everything about the criminal justice system, their sentence, the the community they're going to be released back into, everything's the same except the person who got unlucky and was convicted just a couple days later is much more likely to get caught if they reoffend because they're in the database. So, what happens to behavior going forward? We can then follow those people over time. And what I've I've found in my research is that if someone is is added to the database for the equivalent of a felony charge, this is the policy frontier in the U.S. They are 40-2% less likely to come back and reoffend to be to have a new charge in the future. They're 40-2% less likely to reoffend than someone who wasn't in the database just by luck of the draw, and that's a huge impact. That's huge. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 16:34 and and you talk about the book about the reasons why. So then you talk about incentives at the beginning of this, and you're going okay. Well, what's the you know that aspect? And talk about immediacy. Can you bring that aspect and kind of help our listeners understand that part of it? Because I think it's really fascinating. Jennifer Doleac 16:53 Yeah. So if you think about you know, again, for me, this all comes down to responding to incentives, right? And so Gary Becker is an economist who first started applying economic insights to to crime and criminal behavior, and he you know was the first person to to note that if you want someone to commit less crime, we either need to change we need either need to reduce the benefits that someone receives from from committing crime or increase the costs the expected cost, and there are two ways to increase the expected cost from committing crime. One is increase the probability of getting caught, and the other is to increase the sentence that you'd receive. Kurt Nelson 17:28 Right. Jennifer Doleac 17:29 And so it seems natural where you could pull either of those levers, and that should work. And so we've we've mostly focused on pulling that second lever. We'll just increase the sentence more and more and more. It's straightforward sentence enhancements, truth and sentencing laws. All these different policies we've tried over many decades in the U.S. We've gotten very good at this and making sentences longer, but it turns out that there's a kind of a third factor in here, which is that most people discount the future heavily. So, so what that means is that everyone is a little bit more focused on the present and their present happiness than on their happiness tomorrow or next week or in a year or 10 years, and this is natural. We all do this, right? And it's largely just because the the future is uncertain, right? We don't know. We have a present bias. We have a present bias. Yeah, but it turns out that the type of person who is on the margin of committing crime. The type of people we're trying to deter are especially present focused. They are especially likely to be focusing on the short term over the long term, and so this might be true for all of us, but especially this group. Changing the short term consequences of someone's actions is much more important for changing behavior than the longer term consequences. So, adding a year to an already long sentence, going from a one year sentence to a two year sentence to a five year sentence to a 10 year sentence, none of that matters if you're not thinking past this week or this month. But what does really move the needle is increasing the probability of getting caught, and that is especially useful information in the context we currently live in, where the probability of getting caught for committing most crimes is very low, and so we really have created this this system where it's essentially a lottery, where it's you have a very small chance of getting caught, but if you do get caught, we send we send you to prison for a really long time, and that that just is not effective at changing behavior, and the other piece of this is that most people who are committing crime, it's because they're they're you know really reckless and impulsive. That tends to be young people, right? It's like people who are young whose frontal lobes are not fully developed, and people become naturally become less reckless, less impulsive as they grow up and change. I'm sure we can all think of some friends that get that description, right? I can look at myself. There you go. There you go. And so there's this great like Miley Cyrus song that I quote in the book about you know it's like it's like she. She herself has grown up quite a bit and changed quite a bit over time, and and so we all do. And so that means that you know the other reason we lock people up is for an incapacitation effect. You're taking people who are an active public safety threat off the street, and you protect the community from them. There will always be an important role for jail and prison for that reason, but that that benefit decreases as the person grows up and becomes less of a threat, right? And so that means that's another reason these long sentences don't give us much of a bang for our buck. You know, keeping someone in prison when they're 40, 5060, years old-that's not actually doing anything for public safety anymore. And if it's also not having a deterrent effect, then it's just a waste of money from a public safety perspective. So if we can shift our all of our focus and energy toward solving more crimes faster, that will be a much more effective way to get less crime, put people onto a better path. You know, I think people think a lot about benefits to potential crime victims. It's also a benefit to the potential perpetrators-they are now on a better path. They are not spending their their lives in prison. They are getting-they're going to school. They're getting a job. They're doing something different, and that's better for everybody. Kurt Nelson 21:11 Well, I think one of the kind of subtle tensions in the book is this idea that people say they believe in redemption-that redemption is a good thing, but that that's that the systems that we have treat people almost as permanently dangerous. It's not that they they do age out of that component, and that maybe there isn't the redemption component of it. Do you have thoughts on that? And is that a did I did I capture that kind of subtlety in the book, and and why is there such a big gap between that belief in hopefully redemption, but the policies that aren't necessarily living up to that? Jennifer Doleac 21:55 Yeah, well, I mean, I think not everyone believes in redemption. Okay, all right, that's true. I think part of that's part of. I think that's part of the challenge here. I think you know, for the criminal justice policy space is one where a lot of strange bedfellows have worked on it for many years, and and part of that is this this issue that people come to this for different reasons. You know, you have you have the more you know what was at least for a while, termed the religious right that did believe in redemption and second chances, and that's part of the reason they were at the table and wanted to change incarceration policy and give people a second chance. You have, you know, the those on the left, the more social justicey types who care about the the racial injustice and disparities, and who winds up incarcerated, and then you have libertarians who look at this as a big failed government program, and they're like, "Get this! You know, this is like the government has gone too far, and we're not getting anything out of it. And so you have all of these people coming together saying, "We need less prison, more focus on rehabilitation. This will be better for everybody. I think. you know. Fast forward to the current moment where I think there's been some disillusionment, and the conversation has shifted. I still think there's a tremendous, there's a lot happening. It tends to be more at the state level and a little bit under the radar of most people. But but I think you know, in conversations I have with lawmakers, I do find it helpful to back up and talk about well, why do we incarcerate people? You know what? When we're talking about about prison to begin with, and I put that into four buckets. So one is deterrence, which we've already talked about. We think that you know this should the threat of a punishment should deter criminal behavior. One is incapacitation. You're keeping actively dangerous people off the street. A third is rehabilitation, right? Which maybe we do better in some places than others, but this is an intervention point. We can actively try to put someone on a better path than they were on when they came in. And the fourth is retribution. You just you've done something bad. You deserve to suffer for it. And I think a lot of our policy discourse around the criminal justice system writ large, but especially sentencing policy, is really driven by that fourth bucket. It's this belief in like what it's it's a debate over does this person deserve retribution or mercy, and and the reason I think it's helpful to name all of that is I, as an economist, have nothing to say about that last bucket about how much like retribution or mercy someone deserves. That's a question of moral values, your political views. You can talk to your pastor about that, right? But I have data and evidence are not going to be able to shed light on that. But presumably, regardless of how much where you fall on that issue, you would also prefer to get more public safety for less money. Kurt Nelson 24:44 Yeah, Jennifer Doleac 24:44 and in that case, you know the other three buckets are all empirical questions. How much deterrence, incapacitation, or rehabilitation do we get? I can help crunch the numbers on that and help us get less crime for less money, right? And and so so then we can just kind of like put that. Other issue aside, and talk just about dollars and cents, and like what is working if we want to reduce crime. Kurt Nelson 25:05 Yeah, throughout the book, you you do bring in a bunch of these natural experiments, right? That that I think is one of the really interesting pieces, and you do a really great job of explaining them and kind of setting them up, and I I find them fascinating. One that I really found intriguing was the one on deferred adjudication. Right, so for our listeners, could you talk a little bit about what a deferred adjudication is, and then what that natural experiment found, if you remember that? Jennifer Doleac 25:36 Yeah, so deferred adjudications are they they go by different names in different places, and it's a different prosecution. Every state calls it something different, which is very confusing. But basically, the idea is that if you you know you're convicted of this crime, basically you will go you you would place it on a probationary period, and if you successfully complete that probationary period, then then they'll drop the charges, and they'll they'll take the the record. They'll you know you won't have a criminal record basically. So it's it's really the second chance to avoid the first the first conviction. We have kind of similar similar setup. So in the in the book, I talk about a natural experiment where they looked at the effects of deferred adjudications in Harris County, Texas, where Houston is, and there were a couple different policy shifts there. And this was for nonviolent felony defendants. There's also a parallel natural experiment looking at the effect of just dismissing a case outright for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, and we had different natural experiments in both cases, but yeah, this natural experiment piece is is for the fun part for someone like me. Like, how do we find these in the real world? This is like the the scavenger hunt almost. Yes. So, so in the Harris County example, there were a couple, and and one was a ballot initiative where they were trying to raise money to to build a new jail, and everyone thought that would pass because it's Texas, right? Obviously, you're gonna like the voters want more more prisons, more jails, right? And it didn't pass. It just barely lost, and and so suddenly everyone realized, like, oh shoot, we have this major overcrowding issue in our local jail. We thought we were gonna get a new jail, and we're not going to, and so we need to figure out how to solve this another way. And so suddenly, overnight, you see this huge increase in deferred adjudications. Like basically, like all of a sudden, like the judges are just like, let them out. Like we're not going to incarcerate them because we have this this overcrowding issue. And so, and so, you know, those defendants got really lucky. It was sort of again, this is the coin flip. If you happen to have your case heard the day before this ballot initiative, the the election, you're going to jail as usual. And if you happen to be be convicted or have your case heard the day after, they're trying to get everybody on a different path, and so you get this deferred adjudication. And so, in that case, people got really lucky and got the different adjudication. And as a result, what we found was that they were about 50% less likely to come back with new charges in the future. So, it's another one of these. Like again, it's it's in this chapter on erring tour leniency, where the punchline really does seem to be the entire effect was driven by first time defendants, so it could apply to anyone who was had a case with a nonviolent felony charge like larceny or burglary, but the benefits only accrued to the first timers, and so it really is a story about they got a second chance to avoid that criminal record, the first felony record. If you already have a felony conviction on your record, then avoiding the second one turns out doesn't really matter. It's already harder for you to get a job, already harder for you to find a place to live. But helping someone avoid that first conviction on their record is really useful, especially in a context where you know this is probably a rock bottom moment for a lot of people. This is your first time in court with a felony charge. That is a real wake up call for a lot of people, and and I think the way I interpret this evidence and the other evidence in the space is that's enough of a consequence for most people, right? That they they they've been arrested. They had to go to trial. All of these things. Jennifer Doleac 29:28 They surely were worried about the consequence, and then they got lucky and avoided this first conviction. And that was enough then for them to say, like, "Oh my gosh, I have to do start changing my life. Stop hanging out with those friends that are always getting me the trouble. Go get go get serious about work and school or whatever. Change course, and it turns out if we get out of people's way, a lot of people will do that on their own. Kurt Nelson 29:48 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting aspect of this. That was the the element of all right. You don't have that strike against you, and now you. Can live a life that doesn't have that. There's a little bit, probably a little bit about identity as well in there, and a variety of of different factors. As you said, it's much easier to find a job. There's various different pieces of that. I actually, let's go to the job part. I was going to go to prison and talk about prisons being a place for change. We'll hopefully come back to that. But the job part, and I think you you bring up a really good component of after somebody is so somebody does go to prison and they come out, then there's a whole bunch of factors that can play into whether or not they get back into prison, and or if they kind of go, and jobs are one of those. And and and I wanted to ask specifically about that kind of in a general, but then also the the box band the box, yeah. So talk a little bit about the the the bigger broader component, and then let's get into ban the box, which I think is surprising for for many people. Hey, Grooves! Quick break from the conversation to talk about something we don't bring up enough on the show. Tim Houlihan 31:16 Yeah, that's right. When we're not behind the mic, we're working with organizations to apply behavioral science in ways that actually move the needle for leaders, teams, and whole cultures. Kurt Nelson 31:27 So whether it's designing smarter incentives, boosting engagement, setting goals that actually stick, or helping teams navigate change, we bring real science to real workplace challenges. Tim Houlihan 31:39 And we don't just talk theory. Our approach blends research-backed insights with hands-on strategies that drive results. Now we've seen small behavioral shifts lead to big wins in Fortune 500 companies and scrappy startups, and even in mission-driven nonprofits. Kurt Nelson 31:56 Yeah, and we bring the same curiosity, creativity, and care to our client work that we bring to every episode of the show. Tim Houlihan 32:03 Really, I I think people might want more than what we bring to the show. Kurt Nelson 32:07 Yeah, you you probably have a point there. You're probably right. Tim Houlihan 32:13 Okay, so we'll bring more care and creativity to our work with you and your teams than what we do on the show. Kurt Nelson 32:20 Yes, more care. So, so if you're ready to build stronger motivation, better team dynamics, and maybe even make your workplace a little more groovey, Tim Houlihan 32:29 yeah, reach out to us. Grab us on LinkedIn or Facebook, or just drop us a line. We'd love to help you and your team find your groove. Jennifer Doleac 32:40 Yeah, totally. Yes, so I think for most people, it's it's intuitive that getting a job when you get out of prison, if you're trying to build a a stable life and avoid crime in the future, it's hard to imagine being able to do that without a steady job. Right now, there's this whole separate conversation we could have about whether a job alone is is going to do that, and the evidence there is surprisingly mixed. But it feels like the sort of thing that's probably even if it's not sufficient, it certainly seems necessary. So maybe you can call it necessary if not sufficient. And so, so how do we help people with criminal records get jobs? We know we have lots of evidence at this point, including from sort of these these field experiments where you use you have resumes for fictitious applicants and you randomly send them to different employers and you randomize whether they have a criminal record or not. We know employers are very reluctant to hire people with criminal records. They will discriminate against the criminal record if they see it on an application. And the standard question is something like, check this box if you've ever had a felony conviction, and and like if yes, you know, explain. And anecdotally, you hear from people that like, oh, if you see that box checked, you just throw the application out. And this seems incredibly unfair to people who have you know done their time, right? Worked hard to change course. They are ready. They want to make a change in their life. They are trying to do all the right things, and then they cannot get their foot in the door for an interview with employers because they just throw the application out as soon as they see they have a criminal record. And there's been a lot of conversation about this, and a lot of policy energy has gone into like, what do we do about this? And I think the natural instinct in this case, and turns out lots of other contexts, is that you know we hear that someone is using information that we wish they didn't use, they wish they didn't care about. We wish employers did not care that someone had a criminal record, and so let's remove that information. Let's take. Let's tell them they can't ask anymore. And so what ban the box does is they it it delays when you're as an employer you're allowed to ask about whether an applicant has a criminal record until very late in the process. You can check the background, do a background check at the very end after a conditional offer has been made, but you go through the process not knowing. And the idea is this should help people with records get their foot in the door, build some rapport, maybe have a chance to say, you know, I did have. That you do see a gap in my resume. Let me explain. You know, tell you how I've changed all these things, so that by the time you do the background check, you don't care anymore. That's the hope. The problem when someone like me hears about a policy like this is that I think, in terms of incentives, right? It's like, okay, well, you haven't changed any of the underlying incentives. Something there's something about a criminal record that employers are worried about, and and that is based on whatever incentives they're they're trying to run a business, they're trying to maximize their profit for whatever reason they think a criminal record is a bad signal about whether you'd be a good employee, and now we're telling them they can't ask about whether you have a record anymore, but they still care about it. So now, if they can't ask, I worry that they're going to try to guess. They're going to use the remaining information they do have to try to guess who has a record, and then avoid interviewing those people. And in the United States, having a criminal record, especially a recent conviction that an employer might be worried about, is highly correlated with the you know race, age, education. So, what I worry about is young black men with limited education are not going to get interviews anymore. And so, you know, that's an empirical question. Lots of people thought this would work. I thought it wouldn't work. Jennifer Doleac 36:15 Let's go look at the data. So, I have a study looking at just the rollout of ban the box policies across the U.S. as a natural experiment, so kind of the staggered rollout was the experiment we used. There's a different experiment that was a field experiment where they sent out these resumes and randomizing whether you had a record or not, along with race before and after ban the box went into effect, and both of the studies found that after ban the box went into effect, you saw a huge increase in racial disparities. So, so employment for young black men dropped. Young black men were less likely to get callbacks from employers in the experiment. And so, what is happening here is that young black men who don't have a record are no longer able to signal that upfront, and employers just assume they have a common record, and that makes it harder for them to get jobs. And so, and then subsequent research found that it also didn't help people. We sort of assumed, well, surely some of the people with records got their foot in the door and got a job, so it probably helped some people. And the question is, just what's the trade-off? Subsequent research has found that that's not happening either. So people who do have a record might get their even if they do get lucky and they get an interview, they're eventually rejected when you do the background check. Right. And so there's just there's something about this record that employers are worried about. And my current view is a much more productive approach will be figure out what it is they're worried about, and directly address those concerns. Change the incentives that they're responding to, and then you know help them help us. Kurt Nelson 37:49 I think one of the interesting things in the in throughout the book and in the research that you you highlight is the unintended consequences that they're Jennifer Doleac 37:57 yeah Kurt Nelson 37:57 that these are some great attempts, and and on the surface they actually look good and but then you dig into the research and you go oh maybe they're not as good as we thought they were they they appeared to be at the beginning one of those was in some of the additional support or kind of other things that you have. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because again, was really fascinating. It's like, of course, extra support is going to be valuable, but that wasn't necessarily what you found. Jennifer Doleac 38:34 Right. Right. I just want to say upfront, like, yeah. I mean, I think the culture change that I and others are really trying to push for in this space is is it would be much more helpful if we addressed all of these problems or approached all these problems with much more humility, just about how hard it is to solve these problems. Right, these are really complex problems. They were easy to solve. We would have solved them already, right? And the fact that there are such differing opinions often about what will work is a signal to us about about how how challenging they are and kind of the unpredictability. And so, what I'm trying to preach in a lot of the work that I do now is we we should be trying lots of stuff. Like we if we don't like the current equilibrium we we're in, we have to be trying new things. But we have to do it in a way that enables us to learn quickly and fail fast if it's not going to work, so that we can pivot and try something else. Like be more in that iterative, science-minded approach rather than the typical "I have the solution" kind of kind of manner that that policymakers like to bring. So yeah, so the example of wraparound services, as they're called in the space, is you know I think a lot of this is so common in the nonprofit space here, with especially for reentry, people coming out of prison, but honestly, anything where we're trying to help more at risk youth or people who who have a criminal record, I think a lot of nonprofits start offering. One service or one, you know, providing one one way of helping people. Let's help you get a valid ID so that you can, you know, drive or whatever. And then you actually start working with the population, and you realize, oh my gosh, you have a lot of challenges you're trying to deal with. You maybe have a substance use problem, so you need treatment. You you now have a driver's license, but you don't have a car, so we need to like get you you know transportation. You have kids, you need childcare. You have you can't find a job. Okay, we're helping try to find jobs. All of these things, and a lot of this is honestly just poverty is what we're trying to solve, right? There's just a lot of problems that perhaps are the reason someone got caught up in the system to begin with, but it's hard. I think for a lot of people who work in this space, it's very much a well-intentioned reaction to recognizing like any one addressing any one of these challenges feels like just a drop in the bucket, and they're like, "Gosh, if I really want to help this person, I need to solve all their problems for them. So, like, let's keep adding on bells and whistles to these programs, and so you get these what they're called they're called wraparound services, which often involve a case manager too. So they're helping you connect you to all of these different things, and this sounds great. Like this sounds the sort of thing. Like I would think this would work, right? I would think too. Like it seems like the big risk is it's just expensive, right? So it's like, okay, well, how much you know? How much does it cost? What's the benefit? Let's weigh them. So there have been some big randomized trials now, and it turns out people who are randomized to get the programs versus not do get a lot more services. So it's not that the people in the control group just go somewhere else, right? This they do get a lot more services, but at best there is zero impact on their likelihood of being reincarcerated. At worst, it actually seems to have a detrimental effect, and so in some cases people are more likely to be incarcerated if they get randomized into the treatment group and get all this extra help, which is really discouraging, right? It's like, wait, if this doesn't work, what are we supposed to do? And so, I think you know there are three potential reasons this could be happening. Jennifer Doleac 42:06 One is that you know we're doing all we're doing 10 things, but individually, none of those 10 things are effective, right? And that would really be the worst case scenario. If like none of these things work, then doing them all isn't going to work. But we actually have other evidence that just doing one of the 10 things does work. So just giving people cognitive behavioral therapy or mental health care or something like that-that is effective. But when you add CBT and all of these other things together, suddenly you don't get an effect anymore. Okay, so that's not it. The next possibility is just when you try to do everything at once, you don't do any of them well, right? It just becomes kind of a watered down version, so that's possible. So maybe it's kind of an implement good idea, but poorly, but just hard to implement well. Possible. The third, which I think I've come, my current hunch is that this this might be what's going on, is that there's something here about the the impact on someone's sense of agency that if you if you are you know especially if you're someone who's you know you're you're in this really vulnerable situation society clearly thinks you've you've screwed up and you know and and you know doesn't have much faith in you and then you have this program that's saying like oh my gosh you need so much help let us help you let us give you all these services that maybe that really affects your own view of how much help you need and what you can accomplish on your own. And if we were to just give you the one thing that would give you the the freedom and opportunity to rack up some wins on your own and build your own confidence in your own sense of agency and ability to to build your own your your life, and so maybe that's what's going on. But regardless of the reason, these programs are not working. And so, the way I would put it, like, look, it's it's always possible that one one of these programs out there might be having an impact. But I think we should be viewing it with skepticism and and just view the burden of proof, I think, is now on the the providers to show that they're really having an impact on the the folks they're serving. Kurt Nelson 44:08 Yeah, you bring up a really interesting facet of that identity and how that happens and what that means. And so, again, as you said, if this was easy, we would have solved it a long time ago. And there's a multitude of facets that always come into play in various different things. With that in mind, if you could redesign the criminal justice, you know, system from scratch, is there a principle that you would anchor everything around, or is that just like how would you think about that. Jennifer Doleac 44:42 Yeah, I think the most straightforward one that can get us a long way is this focus on increasing the likelihood of short-term consequences rather than a longer-term impact. And so, it's most straightforward as we talked before with like solve more crimes faster, right? Kurt Nelson 45:00 Right. Jennifer Doleac 45:00 Just solve more crimes faster. Increase the probability that you get caught, and that will reduce. That'll deter a lot of crime. But it also shows up in other places. So, for instance, in sentencing policy, traditionally it's possible for someone who is incarcerated to be eligible for parole at some point, based on and and what the parole board is looking for is evidence of good behavior. You know, you're not getting into trouble in the prison. You're staying out of fights. You're engaging in lots of rehabilitative programming. So, and then if you're doing all the right things, then they could decide, okay, you've actually you've you're no longer high risk. You're a low risk the community, and so we're going to let you out. You're now going to serve the rest of your term, you know, on in the community. And a lot of people did not like that. A lot of people, you know, kind of the left and right really hated the role of the roll boards. The truth and Kurt Nelson 45:54 sentencing is that kind of where that you're going. This is where this is Jennifer Doleac 45:57 going, right? And so, truth and sentencing policies came about, and and so truth in sentencing is this idea that like if we say that you're sentenced to 10 years in prison, you should serve 10 years in prison, right? It shouldn't be four or six or eight; it should be 10. And that's appealing intuitively to people. The problem is that it turns out that possibility of parole provided a really important incentive and moved the light at the end of the tunnel up closer, so that people could see it and feel it, and feel like, oh, if I change my behavior today, I could get out sooner, and I see, I realize the benefits faster. Yeah. Then because we know this is a population that's not good at looking very far ahead, right? And so, if we move the consequences for good behavior up, then we'll get more good behavior, and so, so we have evidence now that that that is a real effect, and so providing the eligibility for parole, putting that back into the system, is a way to get everyone to engage in more programming, and we actually see a reduction in recidivism later. Kurt Nelson 46:56 Yeah, I mean, you make the case that you know prison can be a place for change, but often isn't. Yeah, and so I mean, this is one of those missing ingredient, or potentially could be one of those pieces that makes it not there. What are some of the other facets that that if prison could be a place for change, why why isn't it that way all the time? Jennifer Doleac 47:19 Yeah, I think part of it. I think part of the the answer, short answer to that question is is a philosophical issue, right? I think again, a lot of people view the role of prison as retributive. It's not supposed to be a cushy place. You should be suffering when you're in there, and so we don't want to make them. You know, I think people often look to Scandinavia and the Norway Kurt Nelson 47:43 prisons that you the Norway prisons that Jennifer Doleac 47:45 basically feel like college dorm rooms, right? Like you've got a TV, you've got a nice little you know bed and desk, and and I think a lot of people in the U.S. would say absolutely not. Like you know, no, you should it should be worse than that. But it also just-I mean, to me, as as an empiricist, right? It's like ultimately, like I care about what the consequences of our policies are. I want to know what the impact on public safety is, and to me, prison, as many other points in the criminal justice process, that's an intervention point. We have people who whose lives are obviously not going great, right? Like they're not on a great path. They wound up in prison, and so let's use this opportunity to try to put them on a better path when they get out. And I think there there are a lot of people out there actively working on this, but but I think progress has been slow. Also, so even if we can kind of set aside, like let's say we can convince people, and there are enough people who want to be able to use prison in this way. We've also been slow at learning because all the programming and everything that we use in prison tends to be used as a carrot for or an incentive for good behavior, like the eligibility for parole piece. That makes it really difficult to study what the impact of any of those programs are, because you've got like you can look at people who take a GED class, and it's like great. Everyone who took a GED class did better when they got out than people who didn't take a GED class. It's like well, but wait, people volunt like the motivated people took a GED class, and they only got in if they didn't have any fights on their record. And then so we're comparing motivated, well-behaved people to unmotivated, poorly behaved people. Maybe we're not surprised, right? It's collection issue. So we have to find these natural experiments, and so the researchers are starting to find them, right? Like people are really starting to dig into this, and so we have some really nice evidence, for instance, right now that cognitive behavioral therapy programs are really effective in prison as well as out of prison. And one of the real challenges with these programs is, is like, how do you scale them? But it turns out that these programs are the program that's been tested and that we have good evidence on is in Quebec, Canada, and so and but it's it's rolled out in all the. In Quebec, there's a manual that the corrections officers use. You don't need a clinical therapist or someone like that providing it, and and it's really effective at reducing recidivism. And so it's like great. Let's do more of that. What's next? What's next that we can learn about so that we can keep learning and make sure that the the resources we're using are actually giving us some return on investment. Kurt Nelson 50:24 Yeah. So you're going to go a different question here because so you're now working with Arnold Ventures, right? And and at the very end of the book, you talk about this. What you're just saying is thoughts on why these evidence-based solutions are not getting implemented across the the system faster, you know, just implemented at all, right? And so you bring up six reasons why you think about this, and I don't want to get into all of them, but you had to just kind of outline just just some of those reasons because I think it's really fascinating for me. I think one of the things that I always kind of think about with this is, all right, what does the media, what do politicians, who do they, what do they end up focusing on, and you can have all right. So if we have leniency and we give somebody you know early parole, and then you find that one person who goes back and does a heinous crime. Jennifer Doleac 51:25 Yeah, Kurt Nelson 51:25 what do we get? It doesn't the the 9999 that didn't do that don't get talked about. It's that one person that does. So, you know, what are your thoughts on some of the the reasons why these aren't being implemented? Jennifer Doleac 51:41 Yeah, so that. that very human challenge. So in that particular example, you know, thinking about what are the incentives that the judges or the parole officers are responding to, and how can we help change those incentives, right? So, so that's something you know my team is very much thinking about. How can we help? You know, risk assessments are one way that you can potentially provide have a computer say yes this person is low risk and maybe that gives a judge a little bit of a political cover, but but more broadly I think yeah I think the issues you know I was an I was an accountant professor for many years before I joined AV about three years ago and so I think when I first came into this job I thought that the fights I'd be having around trying to get more evidence based policy would be that with with policymakers and practitioners who just like didn't really believe the science or didn't care about it. You know, they're just like, sorry, like my gut says that's wrong, and I don't care what your data say. And that's just that's that's not the conversation that I and my colleagues have with most people who are on the ground. They really do want to know what the evidence is, and you start telling them about these natural experiments. They get it right, and they they see the value. They genuinely just don't know any researchers, and and the researchers, meanwhile, like they don't know any policymakers or practitioners. This is just a relationship and network problem, and and so they just and then the other piece is like most of most criminal justice policies made at the state level. Kurt Nelson 53:06 Yeah, Jennifer Doleac 53:06 state lawmakers are part time. They don't have a staff. They like they're doing their best, but they have to be an expert on all these things. Yeah. And how are they supposed? How do they know? Like how? And so they're just like doing their best and trying to like reach out to the people they know, and so if we can help them broaden their network and introduce them to people who can who can be helpful and give them a better sense of what the evidence is, they are in a much better position to be able to make make the policy change that's effective. And so it's just made me like I am so I'm such an optimist in this space for this reason. It's like oh, there's real change happening, and people are really want to do it, but yeah. So I think there's there's a relationship issue that people just don't know each other, and so like let's get them in the same room so they can meet each other, build some trust, stay in touch. I think more broadly, I think the other big challenge in this space and a big reason I wrote the book was to try to debunk this a bit. Was this idea is this idea that for meaningful change is going to require big structural reform, right? I think most books in this space are what I call "burn it all down" books. They're just like, look at how bad this system is. This is just such a mess. You know, the criminal justice system is just racist. It's just totally ineffective. Everything is terrible, and you you leave at the end of the book, and you're like, "Man, that's so depressing! Like, what are we? Where do we go from here? Right, and it's like, I guess the the only thing you want to do is burn it all down. We're not going to burn it all down. I think like that's you know we're not going to burn it all down. So, so I, I mean, you know, I think I'm just very much a I'm very much a pragmatist, and it's just like, what do we do? Like, what's the next step? How do we? And and anyone who has an idea about, you know, sort of a, um, I you know, I have a lot of of colleagues and friends who would call themselves abolitionists, right? They want, you know, they you have the defund the police movement. Police prison abolition is a is a you know real belief system, and it's I think interesting to think about what this utopia could be where we don't need prisons anymore. But in the world we're living in, like even Norway has police and prisons, right? And so so I just I think I think about it from like how do we get from where we are to a place where people's lives are meaningfully better, and and there are. It turns out there are a million things we could do right now that are politically feasible, that are not tied to either the red team or the blue team. Right, that we could everyone could agree on. We could move the needle right now, make a lot of people's lives much better, and let's just let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, right? Like we can make a lot of really good change if we take this more incrementalist approach to to policymaking. So that's a big reason. I think another thing I'll just I'll add is just this this sense of like what does good research look like in this space? I think there are a lot of people who who like the idea of a scientific approach, but they think that means randomized trials or nothing. Jennifer Doleac 56:12 And part of what I'm trying to do in showcasing these natural experiments is showing no no there are all these ways we can get traction on these important causal questions of like distinguishing causation from correlation from causation that we can use these these cool natural experiments instead in in places where we a randomized trial is not possible and so just getting people's gears turning about like like my favorite thing is when people hear about this they either read the book or listen to my podcast and and think like and they start hunting for natural experiments themselves, and they'll write me emails like, "I found this cool thing. I wonder if you could use it. You know, it's like that's so fun, and it can be a very fun game once you get started, like hunting, natural experiment hunting. Kurt Nelson 56:54 Well, my last question was going to be after writing this book: Are you more optimistic or more frustrated about change? But I think you just answered that very. You're still optimistic about this. You you have hope, right? Yeah, totally. Jennifer Doleac 57:08 And I think you know, I I signed this book contract when I was still a professor, and so I expected to write this book as an academic. And then I decided to leave academia and and take this job at Arnold Ventures, and so I wound up writing most of the book after while I was more much more directly engaged in the policy conversation. I think it's I think it I hope it made the book richer. Like it's certainly better informed about the policy side, but it also I mean as I was just describing like this process of actually talking to people on the ground and working directly with our our policy and practitioner partners has made me such an optimist. Like truly, like really feels like the only constraint on the work is how much sleep my team and I need, right? Which is like a much better problem to have than nobody cares, right? And like sleep is impossible. So much better. Yeah, yeah. I'm I'm very much an optimist here. Kurt Nelson 57:59 All right, now Tim is usually the guy who asks these music questions, but we're going to switch to music because we're running at the time here. Give it a shot. So, so all right. So you mentioned Miley Cyrus already, right? And you you quoted or a song of hers used to be young in the book, right? Yeah. And what what's the quote? You you say I used to be wild, but I used to be young. Say I used to Jennifer Doleac 58:20 be young. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 58:21 why why did you bring that and put that into the book? What was what's the the piece on that? Yeah, Jennifer Doleac 58:28 yeah. There was this whole discussion with my editor. It was used. It was originally a longer quote, and my editor was like legal issues. Like we're gonna have to like what's the shortest version we can put in here that you won't get us sued. But yeah, the idea is like I I remember at some point tweeting about like back when it was Twitter right tweeting about how like that song could be an anthem for sentencing reform because it really is this fundamental idea that like people grow up right like she you know she had a reputation when she was younger for being like kind of wild and crazy and awesome and now she is not anymore and she's like I just I was young then I'm not anymore, and that is just so true of so many people, including many people who, you know, do really bad things when they're younger and wind up in prison, perhaps for good reason. But that doesn't mean that they're, you know, if you were a public safety threat when you were 20, doesn't mean you will be when you're 40. And it's just it's giving people the opportunity and space to change is good for all of Kurt Nelson 59:25 us. Okay, Jennifer, when you wrote the book, did you listen to music while you were writing it, or are you a person who has to have complete silence? Jennifer Doleac 59:35 Yeah, no, I definitely don't want complete silence. I'm like a I'm a coffee shop writer. Okay, I need the I need the buzz, and I need the like background music. But yeah, I think I, I, but I can't be hearing like actual words that could get stuck in my head, and so I need. I generally my favorite genre is country music. I listen a lot of country, but um, it's uh, but and when I'm writing or working like this, it's more more like whatever. Focus flow, yeah. The playlists are on Spotify or whatever. Yeah, yeah. More like just electronic that Kurt Nelson 1:00:10 that background rhythmic beat. Yeah, yeah. Okay, fantastic, Jennifer Doliak. Thank you so much for being a guest on Behavioral Grooves. Jennifer Doleac 1:00:21 Kurt, thank you so much for having me. Kurt Nelson 1:00:31 Welcome to our grooving session, where Tim and I share ideas from what we learned from my discussion with Jennifer, have a free-flowing conversation, and groove on whatever else comes into our jailed brains. Tim Houlihan 1:00:44 Oh yeah. Well, hopefully we're getting out of jail, though, right? But your implication is that our brains are all jailed up. Kurt Nelson 1:00:52 Yeah, we have. You know, it's it's the lights out one that I did the other day that you didn't like either. So, well, is this? Are you being Tim Houlihan 1:01:00 opti? Are you being pessimistic? Is that is that I'm being Kurt Nelson 1:01:05 realistic, Tim, about your brain and my brain, and the lack of light and freedom and availability to grow and expand. Okay. Well, before if we take, but if we take the The conversation, our brains can get a second chance. Tim Houlihan 1:01:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like second chances. Get out of that jail. Kurt Nelson 1:01:30 We can turn the light on. We can. Our brains can blossom. Tim Houlihan 1:01:35 Well, before we get to our second chances, let's let's express some gratitude to people who have given us a second chance, and those are some Substack paid Substack subscribers. And I just want to say a big thanks to Terry and to Gabriella. Thank you for subscribing recently because we really appreciate seeing that that weekly that weekly donation come in. It's really, it's very kind of you, and we really appreciate it. Kurt Nelson 1:02:03 Thank you. It is. It truly means a lot to us, and we are so appreciative. It, it helps us not only in keeping the lights on for for us from paying those bills, but it just is such a nice testament to like, hey, I guess we're we're we're doing some things okay, and that's always nice to know. Tim Houlihan 1:02:25 It really is. It really is. Okay, Kurt, where do you want to start? This was your conversation with Jennifer. Where do you want to start this? Kurt Nelson 1:02:31 This idea that harsher penalties are going to deter bad behavior, right? Or that's what it is, right? Or drive better behavior, right? I mean, that's that's really what you're trying to do, and that is just wrong, right? It's just the the data does not support that when it comes to things, you know from prison and recidivism and all of that, and I loved, you know, what what what was interesting to me is like the DNA conversation that I had with her. I was surprised. I was caught off guard by. I mean, I read it in the book. I should have been caught. I was caught off guard when I was reading it. Right? Is this idea that you know the which seems a very intrusive taking my DNA sample, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you talk about why and the rationale behind that, it makes sense, and it goes back to this harsher penalty thing. It's the idea that okay, you have my DNA on file now. The immediacy of me doing some criminal act that can get me caught, where has now just increased that likelihood of actually having a consequence-not how harsh the consequence is, but a consequence of being caught and going to jail. Tim Houlihan 1:04:09 So it's the odds of being caught just went up, not the not the weight of the penalty. That it's Kurt Nelson 1:04:16 it's the immediacy of what's happening. Again, we've talked about temporal discounting of you know long term rewards that that the same thing happens on long term consequences right yeah which is why we you know can you know value eating that ice cream Sunday you know Tim Houlihan 1:04:35 because the impact the long Kurt Nelson 1:04:37 term impact is like way down there and we can discount that and and that it's like, wow, that makes sense, right? Yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:04:48 So it's kind of going from I might I I'm I'm going to play the odds of I won't get caught, and the penalty is way way down to to to this immediacy of there's a good chance that I could get caught on this. So it's there's a it increases that as you said this is the temporal discounting part that I I love about this work that Jennifer's doing that I get into my head like oh it could happen immediately I like this could this could be a consequence to me and it could be very direct and very straightforward, and I think that that's that's a really great way of of thinking about it. Well, Kurt Nelson 1:05:27 think about think about this: if I'm going to if I committed a crime and I'm gonna go and I'm or I'm I'm committing a crime and I'm thinking about consequences. Okay, well, I could go to jail for 10 years, or I could go to jail for 15 years. Tim Houlihan 1:05:43 Yeah, yeah. Kurt Nelson 1:05:45 Okay. At the point of me doing the crime, does the extra five years matter? I mean, that's like that's me when I'm 70, right? I I don't care. It's like it's so far out there in the future, it's the future me that I could, you know. Basically, it's fuchure me. Wait, did you just say Tim Houlihan 1:06:08 that in five years you are going to be 70? Kurt Nelson 1:06:10 No, in 15 years I am going. Oh my god! Tim Houlihan 1:06:14 What about okay? One of there was another thing that you you and Jennifer talked about the ban the box conversation, Kurt Nelson 1:06:22 yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:06:23 yeah. So, so review how how did that play out as you were you were having that conversation? Why why did you feel like that was so important? Kurt Nelson 1:06:31 Well, again, it's one of those counterintuitive pieces. It's like, of course, people we should ban the box and the box being that like an employment form, like have you committed a felony in the past X number of years? Yes or no, and those are on like job applications. And you go, oh yeah, of course you should take that off because you're going to bias people from you know if somebody has taken checked off their a felon. What was found, though, what Jennifer found with the data, I think, is really interesting. Is that when you took that off, then people didn't know, and so now our natural stereotypes and biases come into account. and you know everybody of you know minority or supposed you know stereotypical that people that might have stereotypes about get relegated into. Well, I can't. I don't know if you were a felon or not. I'm going to just make an assumption that maybe you are, and so it doesn't help in people who actually have committed crimes if they're of a of a you know demographic background that has that negative stereotype approach to it doesn't actually help. Tim Houlihan 1:08:00 I think that that that is one of those wonderful things. That again, the way that we discover this stuff is through science. It's through trying, testing different things. It's through actually putting this stuff out in the real world and seeing how people actually respond to it. This is, of course, the the wonder of of Robert Chaldini and that work, and and I just and I would like to just say that I got closer to this field, this whole idea of of recidivism and recovery, and sort of you know going through the entire system, being accused and put it and tried and put in jail when a colleague of mine in St. Louis got herself into a terrible situation where she she committed fraud and and you know she admitted to it she went to jail she served the time she is now, by the way, on her way to a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. So she's she's not an average person in in any way, but she's certainly succumbed to very average situations when it came to getting her in, and she certainly suffered very average responses when she got out because she she was in fact, you know, someone who had been in the system, and that worked against her for a lot of job opportunities. And I do feel like, in general, societally, we need to figure out how to do better at being willing to give people a hand up, to give people a try. My father was somebody who ran AA group in in a state county penitentiary, and took a lot of guys out. It gave them jobs after they got out of of the pen. And good news is, a lot you know a lot of. Those worked. Some of them didn't work, but each person's different. Kurt Nelson 1:10:05 But that happens if you hire non people who of course you have some of them work really well and some don't. And yeah, to to your point, I think there is a sense of humanity that you know we we tend to overgeneralize. Yeah, we tend to put people in buckets that we have defined based on a story or two, often the most egregious story or two that we hear about these things, and again, I like Jennifer's perspective of saying, "What is our what is our real goal? Is our goal to punish and to to do that? Then that's that's one thing. But if our goal is to ensure that our world is safer, that less crime happens, that the the people have an opportunity to work themselves and to be a positive person in society. Then we need to look at some of the policies that we have in place and say, are they working, or are they not working? And what does work, and use those, even if they sound soft, even if they sound like they're not. You know, it doesn't fit a nice political stump speech that you can get everybody riled up about-they work, and if they work, let's use them. Tim Houlihan 1:11:47 Evidence, evidence-based. That's that's the story. So, Grooves, if you are not on our Substack right now, I just want to encourage people to go out and sign up. You can sign up for free, and then as you fall in love with it, you can amp up your free love into a $5 a month love, into a $10 a month love, into a $20 a month love, into a you can just keep going, and you don't even need second chances on that. You can just keep on going. So, but but check out our subsect because it's great way of getting a lot of interesting information, great articles every week, and of course access to all the podcasts as well. Kurt Nelson 1:12:26 So, Tim, do you think most people like click off of the podcast or the YouTube video right here? You think they like go? This is this is you guys are just trying to sell me on on all this kind of crap that yes, I do. That is what's going on in my mind. Behavioral Grooves community on Facebook. You know, watch our YouTube channel. So, but if you haven't, if you're not one of those who has already signed up, thank you. We appreciate it. And and two, yeah, sign up for a Substack. Make sure you check out our Behavioral Grooves community page on Facebook, and we are on YouTube. And go out there and and like those. That's where more people are finding us on YouTube. New subscribers are finding us on YouTube than any other channel, and I think that's just because of the algorithms that YouTube has. And if you can help those out, we would really appreciate it. So, Tim Houlihan 1:13:20 yeah, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line, really, always. And we hope that you use some of the fantastic ideas that came out of Jennifer and Kurt's conversation, and you put them to use this week as you go out and find your groove. Transcribed by https://otter.ai