Should reformers care about "evidence"?

Better research probably won’t end mass incarceration.

Hi folks. I just published an article for Inquest that digs into “evidence-based” criminal justice reform. Please take some time to read the piece here. 

I’m not writing from the outside of the issue, so to speak–I’m a social scientist who focuses on criminalization. With this piece, I wanted to address the question of whether we need a stack of randomized controlled trials in order to advocate for a given policy change. I fear that this is an increasingly paradigmatic attitude among funders, researchers, and advocates. 

Much like the last few articles I’ve published, this started as a Substack post draft, but I realized it would probably be better if it had an editor. (It is a LOT better now.) You could see it as a sort of follow-up from the end of my piece on effective altruism, where I touched on the relationship between certain social science methodologies and “philanthro-capitalism.” 

I did my best to make this piece accessible to folks outside the academy, but ultimately it was always going to have to veer into wonk territory. As I became more attuned to the way that social scientists see the world, I felt some of my prior approaches to criminal justice advocacy changing. I used to believe that people just didn’t really understand what the science said about safety. Now I believe that the set of claims science can make about safety are pretty limited, and the limits are particularly significant for the types of social science which are taken seriously outside of the ivory tower. Plus, it’s not like mass incarceration is perpetuated because of rational beliefs about safety… Our world-historically unique punishment regime was built on naked racism and fearmongering. In short, I argue that we’re going to have to fight dirty, whereas the professional preference of social scientists is to present “clean” evidence. 

Part of what made this piece so hard to write is that I kind of want to have my cake and eat it, too. I’m not arguing that social science is useless for advocacy, and I’m not arguing that all social scientists are attention-hungry charlatans. I’m just worried about where I see a certain train of thought heading in the future, and I wrote this piece to try and chart a conciliatory path. This puts me in a funny personal-professional position, where I’ve started to believe that my work - the stuff that pays my rent - is really just done in service of my own professional advancement. Sociology is a cool job because we learn by telling each other very rigorous and time intensive stories about how the world works. I’m less clear on the political benefits of its policy influencer tendencies. (I also have an academic paper under review which digs into the tension between explaining how the world works and controlling how it should work.) 

I’ve been reading Inquest pretty regularly since it got started, and they’ve recently published an amazing series of articles from plenty of smart people who I admire. It’s an honor to have something up alongside them, even if my piece is a bit less practically minded than many of theirs. I hope it can still be useful or thought-provoking nonetheless!