Could We Ever…Use Science to Fight Crime?

[Ricardo] We’re recording? Okay. Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the [mumbles] Okay.

[Danyelle] Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the UT Dallas CometCast Network.

[Ricardo] Could We Ever shines a light on our experts and asks them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[Voice 1] So given that, yeah I do expect everyone on my team to give me a hundred percent of their effort a hundred percent of the time!

[Voice 2] Right, got it.

[Voice 1] And that means triple checking that the work is done right, the report is thorough and the lab delivers its results on time. If that seems beyond your capabilities or your field of interest maybe another team would be a better fit.

[Voice 2] The lab’s had a mix-up on end and sending them over now.

[Voice 1] Well there you go.

[Ricardo] That clip was from a new Netflix series called “Unbelievable,” follows two different police investigations — one set of detectives botches their work, and the other does it right. This clip shows a lead detective on a case setting the bar for good work. Today we’re talking about crime.

[Danyelle] Our guest for this episode is Dr. Alex Piquero. Dr. Piquero is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology and the associate dean of graduate programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. Later on in this episode he’s gonna answer the question, could we ever use science to fight crime?

[Ricardo] How did you get into criminology?

[Dr. Piquero] Great question.

[Ricardo] Isn’t it?

[Dr. Piquero] It is. So I was a radio, television and film major my first semester of undergraduate at the University of Maryland at College Park and had my own little disc jockey show, which was fun, and one of my cousins was a DJ in the middle part of America, not making a lot of money. Not saying money is the only motivation but, you know, it’s, it’s a consideration, not a motivation. And then I thought that may not be the best future for me. But I was loved music and I thought this is great. So my second semester my freshman year I took an intro to criminal justice class simply because it fit the day and time that was available in my schedule. Complete happenstance. I didn’t know anything about criminal justice. Couldn’t even tell you, you know, anything about it at the time. Took a class. The instructor was unbelievable. And fell in love with it, with the topic and switched my major immediately, and then she brought me in to do some research that she was doing in the Baltimore Police Department. We collected data on police officer attitudes about various kinds of things. We ultimately published that paper when I was leaving as an undergrad and starting grad school. And so my adviser said, you know, you should go to grad school. What’s grad school? Neither of my parents finished college. They are both immigrants from Havana, Cuba, and so I was born in the United States and so I went home and I said, my mentor wants me to go to grad school. My mom and dad say, well, who’s gonna pay for school? I said well these things called assistantships. And like what’s an assistantship? So I went to grad school and got my master’s in two years and my PhD in two years at the University of Maryland College Park and then started my academic career in 1996 at Temple University. So I’ve been able in the course of my academic career to do research on lots of different topics and to see the world and give presentations all over the world just based on my research and my success. I’ve been very fortunate, and not a day goes by they don’t realize that.

[Danyelle] What’s the area of criminology you find most interesting that you’ve studied thus far in your career?

[Dr. Piquero] It changes and so it really is on the topic. So then the three things that are most interesting to me right now are my research studies on immigration and crime, my research on NFL crime rates, and my research on implementing policy in the real world. And so what I’ve liked about all of those is they cut across various disciplines. There are things that people have very strong opinions about but I try to bring the best available science to talk about those issues. As a scientist – whether you’re in criminology, psychology, economics or whatever discipline you’re in – you do the best you can to call balls and strikes. And that’s our job. We’re supposed to be independent arbiters of the data and analyze the data and then bring that out there. Our job is not to necessarily change policy, though sometimes that’s good when it does. I think our job as scientists is to do the best we can with the data we have and then present that in a way that people can understand and then they can take away some information for them to think about. So I think what we want to be doing is we want to be involved in the discussions and the decision-making to have the science there. I don’t think 9 our job is say, oh this is what we have to do. I think our job is, if you have a range of options here are the strengths of this option, here are the weaknesses of this option. And then let the policymakers in the real world do what they think is right. All we want is them to use objective data to make the decisions they make.

[Danyelle] What are some of the ways that you make your research accessible to lawmakers and people who are also enforcing the policy once the law has been made when they don’t have the same research background that you and your colleagues have?

[Dr. Piquero] That is a fantastic question and I do this many different ways. I’ve done a lot of congressional testimony, a lot of testifying to different governments around the world about translating research into public policy. A good example of this is the previous Attorney General Eric Holder established a commission on children exposed to violence and so I had to go to Detroit to give testimony to this high-level commission and I was given three and a half minutes. So that’s forced me to translate my work through these articles and books into a way where you and I can have a conversation and you understand what I’m talking about.

[Danyelle] How can law enforcement and decision makers use research like the research that you do to inform crime policy and implementation?

[Dr. Piquero] There are two things here. The first one is, law enforcement is just one part of the criminal justice system. So you have the courts and the corrections and they all work together. Not necessarily with one another, but they have to work together. Because the decisions at one affect the decisions at the others. Police chiefs, police officers – they work in the real world. I was on a National Academy of Science panel some years ago when my colleague next to me was Chief Ramsey, who was the police chief in Washington DC. And he sat there one day, his Blackberry’s going off every four seconds. He’s like, oh there’s the robberies, there’s a murder. This is – that’s his life. And we’re sitting there talking about the scientific research that the Department of Justice has produced. And he is sitting there looking at his Blackberry. He says, “Alex, I love all of these experiments and studies you all do. It’s gonna take five years for me to get the answer. I need to know the answer right now.” And that really put a lot of perspective into me. They value the science, but they have to make decisions right now and the science doesn’t always equate in time when the decision needs to be made. So you have to do whatever you can do with the data and information you have in your hand. What a lot of really good research has been doing since the late 1980s and with the advent of computers and technology, was cities have been, or cities have been able now to map where crime incidents occur. So typically before officers go on the street, they get a briefing in during roll call. And during that roll call they get the prior eight and 16, 24 hours of where the crimes occurred in the particular city. And so then they allocate their officers to wherever those crime incidents occur. This idea is called hot spots policing. S you target particular areas of the city that are known for hot beds of crime. So that is an absolute perfect example of how criminological research has changed the way police officers decide allocation of resources. So that’s a really good example that. Another example of where criminology tried to solve the problem early on, but didn’t get the headwinds in the political world, is now being fixed. Let me go back to why that’s the case. In the mid-1980s in the United States we started to see a really big uptick in crime in the U.S. And it kind of peaked in around the early 1990s and that was associated primarily with the crack markets. So where I grew up in Washington, D.C., I was a kid, there was one homicide a day. So DC is tiny and having one homicide day is kind of astronomical. But what was happening was a lot of teens were jockeying for turf and it’s easier to eliminate your competition than to work with your competition. So there were a lot of homicides. And so the U.S. government was worried about this because people were worried about this. And so they decided to create lots of policies. And one of the policies they created was what ended up being called mass incarceration. The U.S. incarcerated more people for longer pages of time than just about any country in the world. Now, it’s not to say that there’s some people who shouldn’t be in prison for a significant period of time. The question is, should they be imprisoned for a long period of time, and what kinds of people are we putting in for long periods of time. Right? So do we want to put in people who are using drugs for 40 years ? Do we want to put in people who are convicted of armed robbery for 40 years? So that’s the question we have to ask. What our research has showed is that the majority of offenders when they do offend – we call that a criminal career length – they don’t offend for 40 years. So what’s happened is, is the U.S. was incarcerating a lot of people for a long period of time and then we had this kind of a big budget problem in every state in the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So a good example of this is the state of Texas was actually one of the leading states in the U.S. that actually changed the way they were making decisions about punishing people. They started to take the money that they were putting in for incarceration and building prisons and locking people for a long period time, and they started to reinvest that money into prevention and rehabilitation. And everybody was really worried. Oh my gosh, the crime is gonna go soaring through the roof cause you had to let all these people out. You know, you’d be soft on crime and that’s– no one wants to be soft on anything. Ad so what happened was, oh wait, the crime rate didn’t go up in Texas. It actually continued to go down. So Jerry Madden, who’s a very famous politician in the state of Texas, was instrumental in leading this “right on crime” perspective. So this is a case where we knew the outcome of what was gonna be with long-term incarcerations. We knew that because that’s what our research showed, but it took a while for the legislators and the policymakers to have the- enough guts to make a decision that wasn’t very popular in the, in the real world. And so sometimes you can affect policy quickly. Sometimes you can affect it 10 years down the road. Sometimes you may never do that. So the decision-making at the county and at the state, at the federal level is affected by things beyond our control in any capacity. And it’s decision-making. Right? Every bill that gets passed, some people are gonna like parts of the bill, some people gonna hate parts of the bill. But that’s the world we live in, in a democracy. And so sometimes the research, you know, is going to support one angle or not support one angle but I think in criminal justice policy there have been some things that we’ve done that have been to research that has been successful there are others that are not. And I’ll give you a good example of a program that that many jurisdictions continue to do today but that has no effect on crime. And that is D.A.R.E. Drug Abuse Resistance Education. The statistical evidence on D.A.R.E. programs shows it has no effect on reducing crime or drug use and in some cases actually makes the problem worse. Kids actually do more drugs and crime as a result of going through the program. But we still — the evidence on this is crystal-clear, but we still continue to do that.

[Danyelle] Hey friends, we just wanted to give you some quick background here. D.A.R.E. was introduced into classrooms in 1983 and as Alex said, it seemed on track to be an effective program at decreasing drug use amongst young people. But in the early 90s, data showed it wasn’t. As a result, D.A.R.E. lost federal funding in 1998, And now, back to the show.

[Ricardo] Why did it fail? Why wasn’t there a bigger success than then it was on paper?

[Dr. Piquero] I think the scientific evidence which point to two things. The first one is – remember you’re talking at twelve, thirteen, eleven year old people. So we were all that age and we did some things we were that age. If I tell you, hey you don’t want to listen to that song. You don’t want to try that over there. Why not? Why can’t I do that? So there’s, this when you tell people not to do something, there’s this natural inclination to want to know, why not?And then maybe I want to try it. So when you say to people, hey these things are bad there’s a logical question that goes in their heads. Why is it bad? If it’s so bad then why do a lot of people do it? And so you have that issue. The second issue is, drug use – that’s a huge term because it’s marijuana, it’s cocaine, alcohol. There’s a large swath of things in there. We know that drug use is fairly normative, at least in terms of experiencing, for a kid. The majority of kids will try some substance, whether it’s alcohol, whether it’s some kind of drug, what’s, cigarette smoking. Whatever it is. So you are, you are trying to target people for behaviors that are somewhat normative. I’m not saying, they’re appropriate. I’m not saying that they’re right. I’m saying that a lot of adolescents they do these things and they experiment with these things. So you’re fighting against – its like you’re flying from the east coast to the west coast and you have headwinds, and it’s gonna slow your flight down. Adolescents have constant pressure. And their parents may tell them something The teachers may tell them something. The police may tell them something. But if Joey or Jennifer tell me, hey let’s go do this. Well it’s Joey and Jennifer and when you’re 13- and 14-year-old kids, the people who matter are your peers. And so that’s what the scientific evidence says. It has nothing to do with the fact that officers aren’t good and doing a really great job and promoting the right message. The question is, is it the right message or is it a realistic message? So you’re not gonna change every policy that you think the science should change but there are some wins and, and some misses.

[Danyelle] Why do you think there’s that gap between what we know and what people are actually willing to do?

[Dr. Piquero] Emotions and perceptions are a really hard thing to get people to change.

[Danyelle] Can we talk about that? Can we talk about why people have such strong feelings about these?

[Dr. Piquero] Sure, so Let’s just take the D.A.R. E. I have nothing against the D.A.R.E. program or the people who are involved. So you have officers who go to grade school and tell 0 kids, you know, it’s bad to use drugs, drugs are bad, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole nother curriculum. But how does that not sound like a good idea? Right? Sounds great! So people think that that sounds really good just like they did, you know, with boot camp programs. So instead of, you know, people going to prison for a long period of time, they would put them in these boot camps. So military-style, you do a lot of drills, your day is scripted, we’re gonna get tough on offenders, you’re tough on crime. Has no effect on crime. Has actually worse effect on crime. But people love the ideal. Gonna be tough on people, tough on people, hard on people. And so some people, some things you’re just never going to change on, on people’s opinions and there’s, there’s nothing you do about that. And so sometimes people come to the table already believing something. You know we’re seeing that discussion right now in many parts of America, with respect to various issues, whether it’s education funding, whether it’s immigration policy, you name it. And so people have strong views on that and I think what every scientist and every person in society should expect of the people who make the decisions, if you’re gonna make a decision, may make it based on something. Not out of thin air. I mean whatever the policy ends up being. You know, and if there’s no science there to guide the policy, then get the science done to guide the policy. And I, and I make this analogy ever since I was, when I testified to Congress sometimes I, I use this analogy a lot. When you go to the dentist. Right so, I’m going to the dentist next week, actually. Go to the dentist. All right, you see the dentist went to you know, whatever university, blah, blah, blah. Great. You went to Penn. Baylor. Oh, wonderful. Super great school. And so when you open your mouth for the dentist to perform a surgery on your gums, do you want that dentist to have read the latest scientific evidence, to use the best tools possible to give you the appropriate medication and dose and to, most importantly, not hurt you? The answer to that would be ys, yes, yes, and yes. Why wouldn’t we want to impose the same standards on criminal justice decision making in the United States. Especially because criminal justice expenditures are one third of most state budgets. It’s education, health care and criminal justice. That’s a lot of money. So if you can save money of incarcerating people down the road because you can implement evidence-based programs – things that we know work. You’re going to have a cost now but you’re gonna have the savings much later. And everybody wins the fewer people we have committing crime. My research with Mark Cohen at Vanderbilt shows that if you can save a kid from becoming a high-risk offender throughout adulthood you save upwards of three million dollars. That’s a lot of money per person. So if I can take four thousand kids and not have them have long term, high rate careers of offending I’m gonna save a significant amount of money over the long term. And I pay a little bit more at the beginning but I’ll save a lot more later. And then you can use those monies and you can put those monies in different pots like, you know, education, health care, things that we all succeed and need.

[Danyelle] Do you have any examples of any areas or programs or instances where you were surprised at the outcome? Where maybe the outcome was better than you expected. I know D.A.R.E. is kind of surprising because we all logically would think it would work but are there any where it was the opposite, where you were like, oh there’s no way that will work, and then the science shocked you?

[Dr. Piquero] Yeah. Early on I wasn’t so sure about drug courts and mental health courts. So these courts are specialized courts that deal with people having specific problems. And these courts were not just a regular court proceeding. So you’re, you’re a drug offender, you were caught using, you had, you were caught you know with certain amount of substances on you and they can put you through the criminal justice system and lock you up for a period of time. Or maybe you actually have a problem and you have an addiction that you need some correction. So these courts started to be created in the 90s and continued through today, that target specific behavioral problems and specific types of offenders who might have those problems. And so there’s been a lot of work on drug courts and if you, if you put the money into getting these people treatment, you know there are, there’s relapse, but they eventually do better. And the same thing is true with mental health courts, which are, we’re starting now seeing in the last 10 or 15 years. You know, if you look at our jail population, about sixty percent have a mental health problem and/or a drug problem. So you know jails have basically become our mental health hospitals. Because we don’t have as many mental health hospitals. So we need to get those people some services. Because if they’re not treated now they’re gonna be a problem for themselves and for other people well down the road. And those initiatives have done very, very well. In fact Harris County in Houston, I just saw a presentation by them a few weeks ago that showed a very low recidivism rate for people who are getting the mental health services they’re getting. In fact the DA here in Dallas, John Creuzot, is thinking about implementing this kind of strategy and I’ve talked with him and started to work with him a little bit about how we would do something like this and how we would evaluate something like this. He is, you can’t have people think that were being soft on people. The key is we’re helping people, you know, people have addictions and, and not all those addictions are always by choice. And this isn’t giving a free pass to people. This is saying, we have to take care of these people because otherwise they’re gonna exercise a toll on themselves and people around them. So early on I didn’t know how those things were gonna turn out. Because you have to give people the right kinds of services. So it’s like when you go to a doctor. And you say, doctor, you know,others thyroid problem. All right, so doctor says ok, take this medicine and here’s the dosage. Right? So that dosage may work for you but it may not work for me. So you have to adjust the dosage. So the idea behind drug courts and mental health courts is, you have to figure out exactly what’s wrong with the person, what kinds of needs they have and then to give them the appropriate treatment they need.

[Danyelle] Are we over fixing issues with policy? By “we” I mean policymakers. Are they feeling like, oh, you know the drug problem is an issue so we’re gonna just really crackdown and then we do more harm than good? Is that something that you’re seeing?

[Dr. Piquero] Everybody thinks there’s a quick fix to everything. Right? So you know let’s take the city of Dallas right now, is we’re– a good example of the homicide spike that we’re seeing and the increase that people are very concerned about. So immediately everybody wants more police. According– that’s the answer. More police, more please. Guess what? Police have almost no effect on homicides. The reason– they have effect on other kinds of crime. The reason why they don’t have effect on homicides is, homicide is a very situational events. It’s typically a drug deal gone bad, a gang fight or an ag assault, aggravated assault that didn’t end up being solved with a knife or fist, ended up being solved with a gun. Police aren’t in those situations where those things are happening. So their effect on the homicide problem, having more police officers on the street is not, is not necessarily going to solve the homicide problem. It might have other effects on other kinds of crimes and disrupting transactions and the like. But there are some kinds of crimes that police can do very little about. You know in today’s Dallas Morning News there was a great op-ed minister in the city of Dallas about, hey folks, let’s stop thinking about the causes of crime as being more police and more money for officers, but let’s get to their actual real causes as to why the city of Dallas has this problem. And so not everybody likes these answers right – poverty, poor performing schools, food deserts. You know here’s a list of you know, playing “Family Feud,” there’s a list of top five answers on the board. Right? And so you can decide attacking those problems or you can decide to attack other kinds of problems. And so I think this is where people immediately think they have the answer to everything. Oh it’s this! Well no, it’s not that. Um, and that’s, you know, part of our job is to educate people. Not to necessarily to change your mind, but to educate.

[Danyelle] Do you think in the case of adding more police officers to the city of Dallas specifically, people think it’s gonna have one outcome. You’re saying it won’t necessarily affect that outcome. Is there anywhere that it could go wrong? Could adding more police officers have an adverse effect on our crime rates?

[Dr. Piquero] They’ll arrest more people! And so your crime rate will increase. so it’s that’s why you got to take you And so that’s why you have to think about that very carefully. The city of Dallas is around 600-700 police officers down. So that’s, that’s a non-trivial number. They need to get back up to that, a higher number and, and pay them as much as they can possibly pay them with the constraints that the city has. But I do think that adding more cops will do some things but it’ll have other kinds of adverse effects.

[Danyelle] So then why do you think people have such strong feelings about when people are perceived to be being “soft on crime?”

[Dr. Piquero] The majority of people aren’t offenders and so for them, why people offend is a little bit of a foreign concept and we know that in criminology severe sanctions backfire. What we want to do is we want to educate people early on and try to instill some sense of believing in a just, fair legal system and to believe that the laws are just and to have a moral code that says, you know what, doing that is not right. It’s a lot like, you know, cheating in in school. You know, cheating is wrong. Hey, I don’t care why you have to do it. I don’t care if your two points away from passing that. You know it’s wrong to do it. So you have to inculcate those kinds of messages when kids are young.

[Ricardo] So I asked Alex, what does criminology have to say about a big topic these days: decriminalization of certain low-level crimes.

[Dr. Piquero] DA Creuzot came in and said, you know, look, we have to change the way the system’s operating. We can’t be locking up all these people in jail because they had mental health problems. We can’t be locking up people because they’re stealing food. Right? And the messaging probably didn’t come out as ideal as he wanted it to be. But what he’s trying to show is that there are some people who need to be locked up but not everybody needs to be locked up and we have to figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing and if we lock up less people and give them the services and treatment they need then we save money for the city and we get these people to help they need. That’s a humane thing to do and I think that’s what he’s trying to do. It’s, you know, run off, ran afoul of a lot of people who thought oh well he’s just giving people a free pass. I don’t think he’s trying to do that. You know, I’ve known the DA for a long period of time and he is about trying to get the city to be better and trying to keep people as safe as possible but also making sure the decisions we’re making about incarcerating people are for the right reasons. And you know some of these policies, other jurisdictions around the country have been doing for a while. So this is not anything new. It’s something new here and sometimes people don’t like change and they have an interpretation of, oh this is what’s going to happen. Well, it hasn’t happened yet.

[Danyelle] Do you think that criminology can help to educate lay people? Not just the people who are making the policies but the people who have these really strong feelings about new policies coming into effect?

[Dr. Piquero] Yeah, you know, as a good example of that, several of the op-eds I’ve written that are based on my research or just in general thoughts about things. Sometimes I get hate mail; I think that’s fine, you know. I tug at the strings and that’s what happens. But sometimes you get people to say you know what I didn’t know that, I didn’t realize that. And so that is like, okay, good, so I I got across to one or two people. They now are thinking about something they didn’t think about before. Is it gonna change their minds, change policy? I don’t know, not really sure I really care. But I got them to think about some piece of science they had not thought about before. So a good example of that is when we published our NFL crime research. A lot of people said I had no idea that the NFL players were less criminal than their general population because all we saw on TV was all of this stuff. And so people formed their perception and a lot about what happens in the real world respect to what they say on TV and I think oftentimes when people think about crime issues — the police use of force shootings, the immigration stuff, issue, whatever it is — they’re making a decision based on not all of the available data. I don’t think that’s a good practice. And so it came out in The Huffington Post, it came out on ESPN, it came out everywhere, CNN, all. And so that led to a lot of calls. And as well the NFL and I had several conversations about my research. Actually had an hour-and-a-half phone call with several of their high-level brass about our research and what we did and we’ve done several subsequent studies after that about NFL players and different kinds of misbehaviors and the like. But that was one little study where you had this perception that existed absent data and we kind of knocked it down. So that was kind of fun. Yeah, I love sports so this is kind of a married of my, my love of sports and my, my criminology career. But it was really neat to to bring that and that’s a– everybody had an opinion on this and a lot of people love football. So this is kind of one of those really cool pieces of research where it’s so accessible to people and, and we didn’t do anything fancy. We just plotted the data so you can actually just see the data and so anybody could pick it up. In fact the Huffington Post and [some others?] just plotted up, put our graphs up there. But it was a really good way to engage with people and subsequently, it’s, you know, it’s continues to be part of, shows up in newspapers pretty regularly when someone does something wrong.

[Danyelle] What are some other areas that would be fun pop culture timely research experiments that you could do?

[Dr. Piquero] I’ll tell you one that we’re almost done right now.

[Danyelle] Okay, little sneak peek.

[Dr. Piquero] This is cool. So I’m sure a lot of listeners out there have been to theme parks. So whether it’s Universal or Six Flags or Disney or whatever. So we — myself, my wife, a former PhD student of mine, and a current UT Dallas PhD student I worked closely with — we analyzed crime data around a theme park in a southern state and what we found was — and we, we did this little geographical analysis to kind of say, okay, well, if you’re close to the park what’s the crime rate like kind of move away farther from the park, farther from the park. What happens as you move away father? Where is your crime risk occur if, if it varies at all? What we found was the crime risk was right around the park. Right where people park. And so the crime risk is property crime. Right? Your car gets burglarized but also violent crime — you get held up. So what we’re — this is an interesting little finding but no one had ever shown that crime right around tourists theme parks was higher than away from theme parks. You could tell a story would actually would actually probably be lower because you’d have a lot of people around to see what happens. You probably have security guards and cameras. You got to tell a story where it wouldn’t be lower and we found that actually was higher and we attribute that to a lot of people with a lot of jewelry, a lot of credit cards, a lot of phones and they’re out on vacation and when people are on vacation, right? What happens in Vegas, dot dot dot. People, people don’t– people let their guard down when they go on vacation. I mean that, we know that. That’s why people go on vacation. Unless they’re hiking in Glacier Parks or whatever. So you know I think that that, uh, that’s a really neat little finding that we, that we came up. We didn’t know how would turn out. And that’s where the cool set of research study especially in criminology is. You find something that no one has ever asked and then you amass the data, you say, oh, this is really interesting but it really doesn’t matter how it turns out because we don’t know the answer to it and so it’s, that’s the, that’s the joy and the really neat part of doing research.

[Danyelle] Hey, friends. Just so y’all know, since we recorded this Alex has published the theme-park study and you can find a link to the study in our show notes. Ok, back to the podcast.

[Ricardo] Okay, yeah, how’s the research, like, affected crime policy?

[Dr. Piquero] So about three years ago the Juvenile Law Center, which is a non-profit legal aid division that deals with juvenile offenders in Philadelphia, had received a grant from the Arnold Foundation, now called Honor Ventures and which is based in Texas and in New York, and they asked, they were tasked with analyzing what we know about fines given to juvenile offenders. Can they pay them?I they can pay them how much they cost? I they can’t pay them what happens to them or their families? Because if a juvenile can’t pay a fine often times they are either locked up or their parents are locked up and out goes all of the resources coming into the family for every kind of rent, you know, electricity, food. So we said okay, well, let’s — our part of the project, which I did with one of my former PhD students — we said okay, well, let’s go find data on how many kids have been fined and what their recidivism rate looks like. Well, oh, nope. No data. So we had contacts in Allegheny County, which is the city of Pittsburgh, and we asked them if they would be willing to share their fine data. And they were. So we were able to get a large sample of juvenile offenders in Allegheny County who had been sentenced to the process and given fines and then we were able to track their recidivism rates over a couple years. So in other words, do kids who get fined, do they have different recidivism rates in kids who don’t and then do higher fines have a higher likelihood of recidivism? And then does that vary across race? So our results were the following: juvenile fines increased recidivism. Higher fines are associated with a higher likelihood of recidivism. African-Americans were given higher fines and had a higher likelihood of recidivism.

[Danyelle] And can you define what recidivism is for anybody…?

[Dr. Piquero] Re-arrest. A re-arrest. So they had to come to the police and be arrested for an offense. No one had ever published a study like this before cause there was never such a dataset. So we published our study and our study was also part of the Juvenile Law Center’s overall report because they were doing a qualitative case study analysis of what every state was doing with respect to juvenile fines. And so our study was cited on the front page of The New York Times – above the fold, for the people out there who know what that means. And so when it hit the front page of The New York Times, that’s kind of a big deal. And so we had a lot of lawyers around the country started to cite our research. Our research was cited in amici brief that were filed for defense, uh, defense, by defense attorneys for juvenile offenders who were in the process of being fined. Some jurisdictions now subsequently to that have outlaw fined. So no longer will kids be fine. And so I can say that our research has definitely been used to be part of the decision-making because it’s cited in a lot of the legislative policies. It’s cited in a lot of the legal briefs that were put forth and the state of Nevada just is one of the most recent examples of doing this. And so that was neat to see not necessarily that we had an effect on changing policy but you know, our research was used to inform policy that was bad and was hurting kids and hurting kids of color and you know, we’re trying to become a, as fair of a system, a process as possible. And so that was a really good example. I don’t know if I’d ever hit one like that ever again. I mean, that was, everything just happened to fit, you know. All the stars lined up perfectly in that and then The New York Times picked it up and then you know once that happens then, you know, you’re on the train and you just kind of, you know, riding around the corner and with the reporter we worked with it was really good. He did a really good background and, you know, he situated this great story on one kid and so it’s really great when you can make an example of one kid and then build the science around that and then you know it just, it just has traction and so we were very fortunate that we had a reporter who was interested, who was knowledgeable, and who was objective and got different pieces of the puzzle from different constituents when he wrote the article.

[Danyelle] And was the policy they had with fining juvenile offenders one of those, kind of like the example you gave for D.A.R.E.where they just thought this is the right thing to do, to hold these kids accountable?

[Dr. Piquero] Yeah so if, I mean, you’re 14 years old you don’t have a job and I find you $100, where you gonna come up with $1,000? And then if you get locked up and now I reverse the fine of your parents and your parents don’t have $1,000 in the bank account then they get locked up. Where’s the good there?

[Danyelle] Well. what was the, what do you think was the…

[Dr. Piquero] The thought behind it?

[Danyelle] the rationale? Yeah.

[Dr. Piquero] Fines have always been part of the criminal justice system. So if fines are levied for lots of different reasons. So for example, let’s say you’re getting drug treatment; we will charge you for getting a drug treatment. Let’s say you have to have an ankle monitor; we charge you for using the ankle monitor. All of those, they’re different and there’s different kinds of those things. So there’s different kinds of fines and a lot of them vary by jurisdiction but those are some of the examples. So you were translating the costs of administering justice to the person and if the person doesn’t have any money then they get locked up. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. And so that’s why the recidivism rates, I mean, they, then they come back out. They have no money — the cycle just keeps reverting itself over and over and over again.

[Danyelle] Is it too soon to know if in the places where they have abolished juvenile fines, that recidivism has decreased significantly?

[Dr. Piquero] Stay tuned.

[Danyelle] Okay.

[Ricardo] Part two coming soon.

[Danyelle] Part two coming soon.

[Dr. Piquero] It’s a year away at least.

[Danyelle] Okay. I didn’t know how.. had been

[Dr. Piquero] These are brand new.

[Danyelle] Okay.

[Dr. Piquero] A lot of the legislators, to their credit, are now trying to build in an evaluation component to some of their policy changes. So in other words– A perfect example this is state of Washington. The state of Washington has something called the Washington Institute for Public Policy and before any significant policy change is done in the state of Washington — whether it’s in education, health care, criminal justice — it actually goes through a sort of cost-benefit analysis. And this independent agency then provides a report to the legislature and says okay, if you’re gonna do this, this is gonna be the cost. This is gonna be the benefits with respect to monies, recidivism, whatever the outcome of interest is. Insert your favorite topic. And at least that’s put into the hands of legislators. And then when they implement our change of policy then they continue to evaluate that policy going forward. That seems like a really good idea

[Danyelle] Yeah! Why hasn’t that happened in the past?!!

[Dr. Piquero] Why don’t we all do that? Some jurisdictions are more open to data than other jurisdictions. I can say that.

[Ricardo] So Alex, could we ever use science to fight crime?

[Dr. Piquero] Absolutely. We do it now. I mean, we do, we do the hot spots analysis where we allocate officers to certain parts of the city when we know crime is up. We use a lot of technology and airports with respect to the TSA, the securities and stuff like that, use detection systems of all kinds of sorts. So science is good when it’s not used nefariously. And so that’s always the problem in a democratic society about is how much of an imposition on your freedom — however you define — you’re willing to allow and not allow. So you know a perfect example this is is 9/11. So I flew on 9/10 and my whole flight from Toronto to Gainesville at that time but the cockpit door was wide open. Just wide open. Yeah there were times we can go to the gate and then 9/11 happened. Terrible event. And we changed all aspects of flying in this country. Now we have TSA and now we have the pre-check line and the non-check line, you guys take off this, and it’s a hassle. But people still fly. So people are willing to give up a little bit of their freedom for the idea of a little bit more security. So the idea of using science is gotta be harnessed in a very similar way. How do we use the science? Who controls the science? What do we do when that information is in our possession? And how, what kinds of decisions we make. So yeah I do see a future for science in all parts of criminal justice. We just got to make sure that it’s used correctly, not shared illegally, and continue to evaluate whether or not that science is improving whatever it is we’re trying to decide on at that time.

[Ricardo] Awesome. Thank you for being on the CometCast.

[Dr. Piquero] Pleasure to be here. Thank you all very much.

[Ricardo] The UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle] A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minish for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.