Evidencia

The other day I was reading a Smith Institute report on Juvenile Justice in England and Wales. The forward said something that I thought was interesting:

It is almost 10 years since the Attorney General of the US, Janet Reno, submitted an independent, scholarly report to the US Congress entitled Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising (1997). When I read that report shortly after it was published, I immediately sensed a sea change in the way democracies would talk about crime prevention. No longer would we focus just on ideology. Evidence would soon take a much larger role in the debate.

This struck me because so much of what we do, especially in the world of criminal justice, is based on abstract ideologies, theories, or even raw emotion. We are angry and outraged when someone commits a crime, we paint them as someone outside of society and often throw them in prison where they are supposed to learn a lesson. And certainly there are crimes that merit this kind of punishment. But the great mistake in the American justice system is failing to realize that nearly everyone who is put in jail will some day be released. Ignoring the needs of those who break the law (drug rehabilitation, education, etc.) has been proven to lead to an increasing number of repeat offenders.

We can continue to build more and more prisons, or we can get smart about the way we do things, focus on the evidence at hand, continue to collect more evidence in the future, and do what's best for society as a whole.

More to come soon . . .