Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 152 | Charis Kubrin on Criminology, Incarceration, and Hip-Hop

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

It's all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people who break the rules. In our modern legal system, mostly that involves incarceration, especially for so-called "street crimes." Here in the US, we've taken that strategy to extremes, leading the world in the number of incarcerated people per capita. How do we decide who goes to prison, and how should we decide? I talk with criminologist Charis Kubrin on how the justice system distinguishes guilt from innocence. We discuss one interesting issue at length: the use of rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. What role should artistic creations play in deciding someone's culpability of a crime? Support Mindscape on Patreon. Charis Kubrin received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She is currently a professor of Criminology and Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is co-author of the textbook Introduction to Criminal Justice: a Sociological Perspective. Among her awards are the Ruth Shonie Cavan Award and the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the W.E.B. DuBois Award and the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology. Web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Twitter

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Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, The Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. On the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. On the podcast, we've occasionally talked about moral philosophy, right? What is right, what is wrong? How do we decide these things? In fact, I'm kind of more interested and knowledgeable about meta-ethics than I am about ethics. So meta-ethics being how do we decide what is right and wrong versus ethics, which is what is right and what is wrong. But no matter what your choices are, about how to decide what is right and what is wrong, as a society, there will be people.

who don't listen to you, right, who violate the rules, who break the laws, who act in ways that you've decided were wrong. What do you do about those people? And generally speaking, whether it's a dictatorship or a democracy or whatever, generally speaking, the end result is we throw them in jail. Sometimes there's a death penalty or financial things, but throwing people in either jail or prison, incarcerating them, in other words, is the most common way to punish people for serious crimes in the modern world. So that raises questions. Who should be incarcerated?

What should be the process by which we decide who is incarcerated? And it's very interesting that here in the United States, where I live, we are completely an outlier worldwide. The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest per capita incarceration rate. In some sense, this is a recent phenomenon. We've increased the number of people who are incarcerated by four times since 1980. So something has happened. We're putting a lot more people in prison.

Why is that? And is it the right thing to do? So today I'm talking to Charis Kubrin, who is a criminologist who studies this whole phenomenon of incarceration, both who gets incarcerated and should they get incarcerated. One specific thing we talk about, not just the general theory of incarceration, though there is that. But one of her expertise is, let's put it this way. would you be happy if you were on trial and the prosecutor brought up your youthful poetry as evidence that you were in a bad state of mind? I mean, maybe you had written some poetry that was violent or misogynistic or something like that. Okay? Well, how about if instead of poetry it was rap lyrics?

Turns out that if you're a young person and you've written violent rap lyrics, those lyrics that you wrote as a youth are more likely to be held against you in a criminal trial than other things that maybe would be more relevant. So Charis has actually done a lot of work, both academically and also in briefs before appellate courts and so forth on why that is not a good idea. You should not take people's rap lyrics as confessions to crimes. It's in art form, it's poetry. There could be people who are very violent offenders and also rap artists, but that's not a necessary relationship. I don't know. Is this true? Is this a good idea? So that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about this whole set of ideas involving who should be put into prison and jail and how we actually do it and why the United States is so different than

other places, whether it even works, right? Is it true that throwing people in jail or in prison decreases crime? It's not obvious. But social science, very, very complicated. Wherever people are involved, the questions become much harder. So let's go. Charis Kubrin, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. So you're dealing with one of these topics I occasionally have on the podcast where many people who are listening, including, well, myself, who am talking, will not be an expert in the area and yet have strong opinions, right? When we're talking about incarceration, crime, race, things like that. So why don't we just start with some background knowledge because people do have these opinions, but your database, you actually have the numbers and you can help us get straight?

I mean, is the general feeling that here in the United States, we have an international audience, but we here in the United States have a feeling amongst ourselves that we incarcerate a lot of people. How accurate is that feeling? Yeah, it's accurate. It was particularly accurate in the early 2000s up to about 2011. And this is when our field of criminology saw the introduction of new terms. I mean, this is how you know something is a big deal when new terms like mass incarceration. Yeah. Come onto the scene. And so we've, the United States is definitely the place where we incarcerated at the highest rate compared to anywhere. Students are still surprised to hear that. We got better around 2011 with rates going down a little bit, but we still far outstrip, you know, pretty much anywhere else in the world in terms of our incarceration rates, unfortunately. So not only do we outstrip, you know, France and Canada and Japan, but, you know, some of the biggest,

repressive dictatorships in the world. We're much better putting people in jail. We don't typically compare ourselves to, yes. And again, just to set the landscape so we know what's going on, is that mostly a federal issue? Is it a state issue? You know, why is it that we're so good at putting people in prison? It's mostly a state issue. So, I mean, we still have an issue at the federal level, but the bulk of people incarcerated in the United States are in state-level institutions. I could give a whole lecture on the buildup of mass incarceration, it's disproportionate effect on certain populations, and I could go on and on.

But in short term, we've just punished too many people for far too long. And so we've grown pretty severe in what we choose to punish in terms of casting the net out quite widely. And then we've enacted policies like mandatory sentencing, truth and sentencing, that really punish individuals for quite a long time relative to the crimes that they've committed. Right. So that makes sense. Both of those factors make perfect sense. Let me just dig in a little bit more to both of them. When you say that we incarcerate a lot of people, is that the kinds of crimes or just even very minor crimes we throw people in prison for?

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. So I think we've identified crimes for which in other places, perhaps the result is not to incarcerate an individual rehabilitation or other form of supervision. I'll take California, my state, for example. We just started criminalizing very low-level drug offenses in particular that helped build up the population in our prisons. And in the last several years, have had to enact several reforms, which have moved many of these crimes to lower offenses for which prison was now not the outcome, if you will. And I guess, you know, one could still make the argument. Maybe people do that we're doing it right and everyone else is doing it wrong.

Is there a feeling out there in the community about that? No. Yeah, I mean, I've been on radio shows and others where I've been arguing opposite of someone else who thinks the system is working great. We're doing a great job. And I guess I would say, you know, it's good to be number one in a lot of things in the United States, but having the most individuals incarcerated per capita is not something to be proud of. It, to me, it suggests a system that is over-incarcerating.

And I think there's finally realization of that on both the left and the right. And this is why we've had reforms all over the United States, in particular, California, my state, has really done a lot to turn the ship around. And that was prompted in 2011 by the Supreme Court stepping in and saying the conditions in California state prisons are so horrible. The overcrowding is so problematic that you need to find a way to very quickly reduce your prison population. And this is not a notoriously left-leaning Supreme Court saying. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's bad.

It's bad to begin with. It's really bad when, you know, the Supreme Court steps in and says, this has to be fixed. And California did. Well, you mentioned drug offenses in particular, and I think that's the thing that you hear more often than anywhere else. The United States is just crazy about throwing people in jail or in prison for drug offenses, including relatively minor ones. Is that a big cause of our leading the world? That's part of it, but there's so many other. I mean, just low-level kinds of crimes, thefts and other things, numbers of priors being a major determinant of incarcerating,

people for long periods of time. Excessive sentences once individuals are convicted. We have problems with basically probation and parole, well, parole in particular. When an individual is incarcerated and then let out early on parole and then does something that constitutes a violation of that parole, they go right back to prison in California. At least they did prior to these reforms. And so we kept filling the prisons back up with people that were violating parole on their very first time, for example. So not a lot of chances given a lot, you know, harsh penalties for relatively minor crimes. You know, so this at the end of the day creates the buildup. We just had, as we're recording this, didn't we just have like a week or two ago a Supreme Court decision saying it was

okay to throw juvenile offenders in prison without possibility of parole forever? I'm not, I've been really slammed last week. Okay. Try. Yeah, there probably, I'm not, I haven't been keeping up with that. So I'm not, what happened. Yeah, there was, I remember, I mean, Sonia Sotomayor, I think, wrote a blistering dissent, as one does.

But there's a 6-3 decision, and I'm not going to get the details right. But basically, it made it much easier to throw juveniles in for life without any possibility of parole, which a lot of people were saying, like, how do you ever judge? especially when certain members of the Supreme Court are known for their own youthful indiscretions. Well, absolutely. That's why we have an entire juvenile justice system because we recognize that youth are quite different in their development than adults. And so they shouldn't be held accountable in the same ways as adults. There should be more rehabilitation.

And this is probably going to take us a field. We'll get back to focus a little bit. But I can see whereas in the United States, if you're a politician campaigning, you want to get elected, than saying, let's let more people out of prison is not the winning campaign slogan. But that sounds very simplistic. And why is that not the case in other countries? What is it about us that makes us so different? I mean, there's just so much our history.

The role of politics in our criminal justice system has become, in my opinion, out of control. You're absolutely right. The left and the right can never say, we need, you know, we need to rethink our policies and practices. It's always about getting tough on crime. You know, why we're different is a really difficult question that I'm not quite sure I have the answer to or I know enough about what's happening in other countries to make those comparisons. But, you know, I do think at least for 40, 50, 60 decades, crime and getting tough on crime,

the politicization of crime has been very salient in our country. And I mean, I remember in 1994 when the crime bill was passed, I remember when Bill Clinton was running. I mean, it was like a race between the left and the right as to who was going to be tougher on crime. And so, yeah, you're not going to get elected. You don't get votes. That's pretty much the norm from local politics to all the way up to the president.

Well, in another way that the United States, out, of course, is in its gun laws and its gun ownership patterns. Absolutely. Is that a close tie into the sentencing and the criminal population? Or is it just two things that are going in parallel? Yeah, I think that helps explain the United States rates of violence relative to other countries. So, yes, absolutely, guns, gun ownership is a huge part of that story. In terms of how it played into the question that you asked prior, I'm not exactly sure.

But certainly when criminologists talk about why is violence so high, why are homicide rates so high in the U.S., guns are a key part of that conversation 100%. Okay, so, I mean, we have a lot of violent crime here in the United States, but it's not nearly enough to account for all the incarceration, right? So much of it is nonviolent crime. So we're just incarcerating people right and left. We like throwing people in prison. Yeah, we tend to assume that the link between crime and incarceration is perfect, right? that it's correlated, you know. Yeah.

And there is obviously some correlation, but it's not nearly a perfect correlation, as one might think. There's so many other factors that go into the incarceration rates. And some of that I talked about before, but crime is only one part of it. And, you know, the other assumption that happens is we assume that incarcerating people at a high rate will reduce crime on the other end, sort of reverse causality.

And that's also been shown not to necessarily be the case to the extent that we would think it would be. There's some debate, but economists say maybe 20% of the crime decline, for example. So crime really rose in the 80s, leveled off in sort of the early 90s and started going down. And this has been the great American crime decline, the crime drop, until about the mid-2000s. And criminologists have rushed to figure out what it is that caused crime to go down. And, you know, those that support this harsh punishment will argue, well, we've just incarcerated more people and that's brought the crime down.

But only about 20% of that decline has been attributed to punishment, basically. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot to talk about in terms of why people are committing crimes, how much they're committing. The last question I have on sort of the background incarceration question is, what about the role of private prisons versus state-run ones? This is something I know nothing about, but it's definitely one of the phrases I hear being bandied about. This is the most under-discussed topic that is on the horizon. That is a huge obstacle for this country. When Obama was president, he was beginning to phase out private prisons. In fact, at the federal level, he was closing them all down.

Trump came in. And I don't know if you noticed, but when Trump was elected president, stocks in private prisons. skyrocketed. Did not notice. And what's interesting is there's no appetite for private prisons with respect to our general prison population because of interest to minimize mass incarceration. So it's shifting. And it's shifting to immigrant populations.

So for example, what we're seeing with Trump's immigration policies was a buildup of privatization around immigrant detention. And right, if you're going to identify Roundup. and deport large swaths of people as President Trump wanted to do. You need places to hold individuals, right? These sorts of things. So a lot of immigration detention is privatized. So that's been resurrected, unfortunately.

I have huge, I mean, you would, it'd be rare to find a criminologist that thinks this is a good move. And I could spend days talking about the problems associated with private prisons. I mean, at its fundamental core, having institutions profit off of having, you know, it's a business. And that's a fundamental concern among many critics of private prisons. Well, it's very analogous, I guess, to the healthcare situation, right? We're having lots of money you can make by not giving people health care is a problematic incentive structure, even if you believe in capitalism. Exactly.

Exactly. So yeah, this is growing. In all my courses, I have a segment on private prisons. And when I show the growth of private prisons and the number of companies involved and employees, I mean, it's a whole, it's a whole beast. Some exciting news for fans of our sponsors here on Mindscape, the Great Courses Plus is now Wondrium. Wondrium is everything we know and love about the great courses plus and much more. Wondrium provides fantastic video and audio learning experiences, tons of great content to enrich our lives with mind-blowing moments. You can still stream all of your favorites from the great courses, including videos created in partnership with National Geographic, Smithsonian, History, the Culinary Institute of America, and more. My favorite part of working with the great courses was that when I worked with them, they clearly cared about getting the content right, which means that if you're watching something on Wondrium, whether it's about the history of ancient Egypt or how to cook a souffle, you know that you're incapable hands. I can't wait for you to experience Wondrium, so prepare to have your mind blown.

Sign up now through my special URL to get this great offer, a 14-day free trial with unlimited access. Just go to Wondrium.com slash mindscape. That's W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M-com slash Minescape. So how big is it? Like what if I'm if I get arrested at the state level for selling drugs, what is the chances I'm going to end up in a private prison? Depends on the state. Depends on who they're contracting with. Depends on how full their beds are. I mean, there's there there are many states that because they've incarcerated so many folks in their public institutions now have had to reach out to private institutions and are paying to house individuals in their facilities. Is it more costly to the state to have a private prison? You know, so this is really, these questions are good. They're very difficult to answer because each state is quite different. Right.

Okay. So just to give you a concrete example, it's about $65,000 a year per individual to house in a public facility in California. Okay. That's a number that more politicians should be mentioning when they're talking about how many people should be in prison. Especially when you look at budgets around education. in California versus, right? One of the big stories of California is how many prisons were built, you know, in the last several decades relative to new campuses, say, for example, in the UC system, how much money

is funneled to prison development versus education. And then even with that, they're still using private facilities in California. Now, that's come down a bit over the years, but that was a very scary trajectory. that was happening. And from our immigrant detention, privatization is still the primary way that that happens. Right. And he did put the finger on the Trump administration for the immigrant issue in particular, but it's important to emphasize that otherwise it's been a bipartisan push, right? 100%. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we taught when President Obama was, you know, when he was president, when he was president, they were referring to him as the deporter in

chief. They were, you know, it was a detention nation. There's a lot that both sides have done to to kind of create restrictive, harsh, exclusionary policy aimed at immigrants. Right. And I did want to, you wrote another couple of papers that I thought were just worth getting on the table here, even though they're not in the direct line of what we're talking about. But you mentioned the drug offenses and how that's a lot of the prison population. And then we can discuss, well, what should people be thrown in prison for? And so you did some studies on the relationship between legalizing marijuana and suicide. And so letting Pot be legal decreases the suicide rate in some sense.

Is that right? Yeah. I mean, what we used a really fancy methodological approach to determine sort of what would have happened to suicide in California had, you know, basically had things continued as such. What did did legalizing marijuana have an impact? And yeah, basically what we found was that it lowered suicide rates. And, you know, the main question is why? What are the mechanisms behind that? What accounts for that? And that is unexplored using the methodology that we did. But we raise a series of possibilities looking at whether people are substituting marijuana instead of alcohol, alcohol causing, you know, a lot of mental health and other kinds of problems. So yeah. there's there's a there's uh generally i like to look at the impacts of various policies on a number of outcomes i i keep my personal opinions about the policies out um in terms of legalization or these reforms but just there's so many claims around the impacts of these policies and the harms

that they're going to cause and create yet very little research done on their impact so my focus has always been well what what what is the impact of legalization on such and such outcome. And what I really liked about this study is actually there's an interesting philosophy question here because it's easy to sort of just track the number of suicides or number of incarcerations or whatever and like draw a line at where something is legalized. But you went beyond that. You constructed an alternative world in which it had not been legalized, right? Like you tried to model what it would have been like because there's other things going on in the world, right? So there's some counterfactual exploration here, which is actually philosophically very interesting.

Yeah, my number one pet peeve with sort of the news reporting on these sorts of policies is what they will typically do is a policy gets enacted, whatever that policy is. People will follow what goes on with crime. It'll go up. It'll go down. It'll stay the same. And then they immediately attribute any change in crime to the policy. Forgetting that crime or any outcome, suicide for that matter, is a, is. is affected by so many different factors.

I mean, if you take crime, for example, we can look at the role of guns, drugs, gangs, economic conditions, joblessness, poverty, demographic shifts in the population, other policies, policing. So crime is going to do what it's going to do because of a myriad of factors. If you wanna isolate out the impact of one particular policy, you have to do something a little more sophisticated

and look at what crime trends do following that policy. And that's why we do this synthetic control design method. Do you, since I don't know how different fields tie together, I mean, there's been a burgeoning discourse in the idea of causality in the social sciences, Judea, Pearl, and things like that. Do you, does that stuff impact what you do? Yes, love it. And my former grad student, who's now a professor at the University of Arizona, Brad Bartos,

he did his entire dissertation on causality. Oh, wonderful. And looking at the way in which this approach, the synthetic control design method, addresses some of the biggest challenges to determining causality when you have a situation where you can't conduct a pure experiment. My field is very difficult. I'd love to experimentally assign a policy to some states and not others, right? That's never going to happen.

And so we do these quasi experiments, sort of the next best thing. which has all the benefits of an experimental approach, minus the random assignment, if you will, to treatment or control. And yeah, so that is front and center. There's philosophical components of it that I love and get into, and then there's also just like this makes for a good way to test policy. Right. All right. Well, thank you for indulging my philosophical question there.

Oh, I can talk about that all day. But there's another philosophical question I have, actually. So moving into the sort of more nitty-gritty of how people get, incarcerated, convicted, etc. But let me still lay some groundwork here. I mean, do you, this is too much to ask, but do you have a feeling for what the right answer is or should be to the question of why should you incarcerate people at all, right? There's punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, there's all the different motivations,

and we're not very clear necessarily about why we do it. What is the right answer? I do not know. And I don't think it's one answer. I think it's historically contingent. It's contextualized. There's a lot of variation, whether we're talking at the local level, the state, federal. It's complex. And, you know, we're really good. Criminologists are really good at telling everyone what they're doing wrong. It's a lot more difficult to come up with solutions to those problems. I can tell you right now, we're still incarcerating too many people. And I can, you know, I can identify places where we're two hundred people. harsh or the policies are not working. So like I fully supported all of the reforms that California has enacted and the research shows they're not causing crime to go up. You know, we need to start, look, that was some of the lower hanging fruit, right? It's easy for me to say, well, petty theft, you should not go to state prison at the cost of $65,000 a year and serve out a long sentence for

petty theft. There are other ways to address that. The question really comes, well, what about violent individuals who have engaged in violent crime. And I'm very sympathetic to victims and others. I myself have been a victim of various crimes, including violent crime. And so I'm not one to just say, abolish the prisons, you know, that we don't need, we don't need to incarcerate anybody because I do think there are individuals out there that are dangerous and that need to be behind bars because they're producing lots of harm to society. So, you know, I'm not that extreme on that. I certainly think there's still room for reform. So that's kind of where I situate myself, identifying very carefully where it is that we can make changes,

recognizing that there's still room for improvement, but also not ready to kind of throw the system out. Yeah, no, that's very good. And I love the fact that you're willing to say when you don't know what the answer is to a question. So not all podcast guests are quite so honest with themselves. So thank you for that. But so I guess one of the answers is that, you know, different people involved in the criminal justice system might have different individual feelings, philosophies about why we're doing this. But, you know, often they line up. And at least we would like to prevent crime, right? And so we can say, well, if a certain incarceration policy doesn't prevent crimes, then why are we doing it? That's part of it for sure. I mean, its impact on crime is key, but there's other considerations

like, you know, maintaining the values that underlie our system of democracy, just a just system, a fair system that even if a policy might lower crime if it's not fair or just, you know, we can question whether that's a useful policy. You know, questions around retribution or rehabilitation, what are the values that underlie our system? And I think they're so varied. And, and, you know, if a policy doesn't limit crime, but doesn't increase it either and is more humane, what do we feel about that policy? Sure. Yeah. So it's a heavy topic. Yeah, it is. But, you know, you're in it. You're the one who has to think about it. I don't. I think about the universe. It's very non-valued. It's just the laws of physics.

But, you know, I did, when I was in high school, I was on the debate team. And we had, you know, the debate topic that year was a criminal justice topic. So that was my last exposure. I won't say how many years ago. But I remember, it was about the exclusionary rule in the Fourth Amendment, right? Yes. No, actually, sorry, it wasn't. Our case was about the exclusionary rule in the Fourth Amendment.

The topic was just about criminal justice reform more broadly. And I forget, it's like the United States should enact. large-scale criminal justice reform. But I remember the motto that it would be better that a thousand guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted. We're clearly nowhere near that, right? I mean, just in capital cases, once DNA came in, we realized, holy crap, we've been finding a lot of people guilty who were not.

I mean, what is your feeling about the reliability of the criminal justice system in actually incarcerating people who were guilty, at least, nominally of the crime? they're being accused of. Right. This is the tension in our system. And it goes back, I mean, criminologists have been, and theorists have been writing about this for decades. On the one hand, we can value crime control. And the processing of cases through the system as quickly

and expediently as possible, you know, dealing with the large caseloads that we have. I mean, this is part of our problem is that, you know, the vast majority of people never go to trial. They plead guilty. Why? Because our system is overloaded. So they're not even exercising those rights that we so fundamentally hold and value. On the other end of the, if you think of that as one model, efficiency, crime control, handling the large caseload. On the other end is sort of the due process model,

which says, you know, and the first one I liken to more like an assembly line. It's assembly line justice, right? We're getting most people through. On the other hand, errors are happening. but we're willing to tolerate those errors in the larger goal of processing and efficiency. Then there's the other end, the due process end, which I liken more to an obstacle course, right? The goal really is to root out people of the system early on so that we're not producing error. The problem is that in that ideal role, everyone's going to trial, every stage of the system is slowing down to make sure errors are not happening. it's not functional in our society. And there's a resource limitation, right?

Exactly. And so, you know, those are the ideals in some way, the sort of theoretical ideals. And our system is somewhere in the middle and we can debate all of that. So how many errors are we willing to withstand to make sure, for example, that people are processed through the system and justice is done? Right? If you're a victim and the individual that the offender that victimized you is their case is thrown out because they weren't arrested or they weren't charged within 48 hours of being arrested, which is the rule. And that case is thrown out, right, is justice being done? So there has to be some processing that happens.

The question is how much error are we tolerating? Now, when it comes to the death penalty, the answer should be zero. Right? And this is the big, this debate we've seen the most play out with respect to the death penalty because of errors and the consequences of those errors. It's interesting because it actually reminds me of Richard Feynman being on the Challenger Disaster Committee. He went and interviewed a bunch of engineers at NASA and higher ups at NASA. And when he talked to the higher ups at NASA, he said, you know, what in your mind was the acceptable failure rate for the launches of a space shuttle? And they said zero percent. And he said, but that is literally physically impossible.

You could never have zero. They were clearly just saying that because they couldn't possibly quote a number politically. Exactly. And presumably the same thing is true in criminal justice. The only way to get zero percent failure rate, even in capital cases, is just not to have the death penalty, right? Right. Absolutely. I mean, yeah.

So, and these are, these are, it's funny because when you ask the question, what is that person? Nobody's going to say a percentage like that. And that's why these are nice theoretical models that we can debate about. But at the end of the day, yeah, these numbers are not something that anyone has an appetite to discuss. Yeah. So no one is going to say we'll accept 0.1% of our verdicts being false. But what they will say is we can't afford to spend all this money doing every trial at all of its glory, right? Yep.

And so we have a problem then with things like, again, I'm not an expert here, help me, with things like the public defender's system. You know, a lot of these, I would say clients, suspects, what are they called? Yeah, clients is actually the right term. Yeah, okay. You know, they are given a public defender who's overworked, makes a lot of mistakes. I mean, how much is that one of the problems in getting that failure rate down as low as we can? I think, yeah, it's hard to pinpoint what accounts for these errors because there's so many different factors involved, but certainly an overburden system. And that is part of the overburden system. Now, I mean, the thing about public defenders is even though they have large caseloads, they also have very good working relationships with other members of the court, including the judge and the prosecutor. So they're often able to make very good plea deals. Okay. And they're part of the courtroom work group. So there's, you know, there's advantages and disadvantages, but certainly, you know, one of the other old sayings is if you look to see who's on death row, you're never going to find someone with a lot of money on death row, right? So yeah, having money, being able to afford a whole pile of attorneys that are going to push to, to advocate on your behalf is a huge, huge plus. I mean, this and and there's other ways, like with respect.

to bail, right? Right now, there's a lot of debate about whether cash bail should be part of the system or not. It disadvantages those that don't have access to cash. And we know that there's a large correlation between being put behind bars, you know, pretrial detention and your outcome. So money is and resources are definitely a key part of this. Is there a simple explanation beyond just, well, good lawyers are good as to why we have this impression that you can, if you're sufficiently wealthy, buy your way out of almost any conviction? Oh, it goes to so many different things. So you can do studies early on to identify who the ideal juror is for a case. So if you have resources, you can do interviews, focus groups, the attorneys can, identify who ideal jurors are.

they are able to, you know, at every stage of the way, they're able to use those resources to help the client in their case, get certain kinds of experts present in the courtroom, high-cost expert witnesses that will come in and help the case, right? Just at different stages like that. But it's interesting. So it's not just straight out corruption. It's just that there's so many moving parts that if you have enormous resources,

you can game all of them to maximize your chances of getting free. Exactly. Okay. Hiring people is something that is fraught with peril as well as promise. It sure helps when you can narrow down the list to only really great choices first, so you're not choosing between good and bad, but good and great. That's what you get with Indeed. Indeed is the job site that makes hiring as easy as one, two, three.

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That's true. The ones who've made it already, they can probably afford the best lawyers. Snoop and others might disagree with that. Right. JZ can afford. can afford whatever lawyers he needs. But, uh, yes. So you've done this fascinating work where, um, prosecutors would, you know, for on whatever

evidence they might have bring up to trial a defendant, uh, who they find has written their own rap lyrics. So we're not, we're not talking about rap lyrics that are sort of in the air and on the radio, but these are lyrics written by the defendant. And well, you tell us. What happens here? Yeah. Basically rappers, aspiring rappers are having their.

lyrics used against them in criminal cases. And prosecutors are making the claim either that the lyrics are so threatening that the individual is communicating a terrorist threat. So the lyrics themselves are the crime. Or they're arguing that the lyrics represent sort of identity or motive with respect to some other alleged crime. Because the assumption is that rap music is nothing more than autobiographical confessions. You know, it's not art. It's, it's rappers, confessing to crimes. Bragging. Yeah, bragging. Exactly.

And so they will, so what, how do they actually bring that in to the court? So they basically, you know, along in their case, they will treat that as evidence. And often it's the only evidence they have about the individual that's being charged with XYZ crime. And so the lyrics come in, the videos come in. As evidence, the judge allows that evidence in. And the next. thing you know, this extremely stereotypical biased evidence for reasons I can get into is part of a

trial where the jurors are told that these are confessions to crimes. Right. So why is it biased? Go into that. Well, so, you know, I, just to back up and give some context to this, I, I, when I was a brand new assistant professor, I've always listened to hip hop. I had this idea of treating rap lyrics as data, sort of thinking about different ways that we could, well, yeah, basically thinking outside of the box in terms of data. And I thought, well, rappers have a lot to say. And they have a lot to say of interest around crime and violence and problematic policing and all sorts of things.

And I did content analyses of rap music lyrics in very systematic ways, which I'm happy to talk about, analyzing over 400 songs in a 10-year-old. period and published a series of papers where I use the rap lyrics as data, exploring a variety of themes around violence and crime and so on and so forth. Then in 2011 got contacted by an attorney who came across these content analysis papers of mine because he had a client, an aspiring rapper whose lyrics were being used against him, you know, arguing that they were communicating a terrorist threat. And they, and this attorney wanted me to do a content analysis of these lyrics to talk about whether these, in fact, were actual threats or just the stuff of rap.

So I did, I testified in that case. Fast forward several years. I've testified in many cases. I've consulted on dozens of cases. A conclusion from those experiences was, wow, these lyrics, you know, are literally, I could see it on the faces of the jurors. I liken it to, if you've never seen a horror movie, and then you get dragged to see Texas chainsaw massacre, and you're just taken aback. So most of the jurors in these cases don't know anything about rap music. They certainly don't know much about gangster rap, which is the subgenre here. There's lots of violence.

There's lots of threatening language. Now, as a listener of rap, this is pretty much par for the course. So I noticed immediately that the effect of these lyrics, was sort of biasing. In other words, the jurors were unable to evaluate the content of the lyrics apart from stereotypes and assumptions that they had about not only the rap lyrics themselves, but rappers who make them. So I conducted a series, sorry, I know this is long,

but I conducted a series of experiments to try and determine if this, my hunch, was in fact the case. And the experiments that I ran, and these were, true experiments where we were able to randomly assign people to conditions of being exposed to rap lyrics versus violent lyrics that were other music genres, right? If that impacted people's evaluation and we found out that it did. Interesting. And just to be super duper clear, what we're saying here is that someone can get arrested,

a crime has been committed. Right. More or less, all we know about this person is, you know, maybe they owned a gun or maybe they had the opportunity and they wrote these lyrics. and no other evidence, and they get convicted on the basis of that. Right. And so my attitude is I don't know whether the person's guilty or not. I have no idea.

But using rap lyrics as a shortcut to bypass a proper trial, if you will, is problematic. If there is physical evidence, you know, the gun, you know, if there's eyewitness testimony, if there's other kinds of evidence, that should be the evidence that leads to the conviction, not someone's lyrics that they penned on a paper five years ago that maybe talk about killings and shootings, but have nothing to do with the case at hand. So often what you get are the facts of a case. And then the prosecutor trying to line up the lyrics with the facts of the case. The lyrics are quite generic. They're very common. You can find them in most rap songs. They have no bearing on the actual fact of the case. And if I recall from what the paper,

you've written, it is something special about the fact that these are hip hop lyrics rather than country music or heavy metal. That's exactly the point. So what we did in our experiment was we found some violent lyrics. They're actually lyrics from a folk song, Fat Man's Blunder, by Kingston Trio. And just a couple of stanzas from them. And what we did was we randomly assigned people to be told that these were rap lyrics or country music lyrics or heavy metal lyrics in another set of experiments that we did. And then we asked people to read the lyrics and we asked them to evaluate the lyrics on a number of dimensions. How threatening are they? How dangerous are they? Should they be censored? Not played on the radio. Do you think the artist actually did what they're

saying in the lyrics? And depending on which set of lyrics you were assigned, the rap, heavy metal, right, the evaluations changed significantly, right? So those that were told they were rap lyrics evaluated them much, much more negatively, and most importantly saw them as more literal and autobiographical compared to those respondents in our study who thought that they were heavy metal or country music lyrics. The Kingston trio, those notorious gangster rappers. There you go. And if I remember correctly, it was actually not carous.

related with what the people being studied thought the race of the artist was. It was the music genre was more important than race. Yeah. And I don't know. So the thing, so let me just back up and say, so once we did this study and we found that there was this impact. And by the way, we also found that it wasn't just the lyrics that were negatively evaluated. It was the artist himself.

So when we assigned artist status to each set of lyrics, this is a rapper, right? Then we ask people to evaluate the character of the artist. You think this artist is smart, intelligent, a nice person engaged in criminal activity, a gang member, those who thought the lyrics were written by a rapper, right? Much more negative character. Then we wanted to understand what's going on here. Is this rap? Is this race?

Is it some combination of the two? And, you know, we tried to isolate out race by having conditions where the rapper was white versus the rapper was non-white, right? This sort of thing, black. And it turned out that it was a very muddy kind of set of findings. We didn't find that you could isolate out race in a way that was significant, per your comment. However, when we didn't, this is very difficult to explain, but let me just put it this way. When we didn't identify the race but asked the individual in the rap condition to suggest the race,

Right. They most frequently suggested that this person was a person of color, African American. So we think race is definitely a part of this equation. It's just very difficult to separate out all of these things. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that would be the lesson that I would draw. It's not that there's no racism there, racism doesn't matter, but that there's a whole bunch of factors that are in a stew that are mixed up. And that's why your job is much harder than mine as a physicist. This is why I cannot imagine studying human beings.

It's the perfect definition of intersectionality. Exactly. That's right. You know, that these folks are black. They are young men mainly from inner city communities that are aspiring rappers. So it's all of it together. So they're practically guilty before they even step in. Yeah.

Tell us about the content analyses you mentioned. So when I was a graduate student, we were reading works by famous sociologists, William Julius Wilson and others, on sort of the large-scale macro changes happening in society and its impact on communities, basically African-American communities in terms of crime and violence. And everything from deindustrialization to the war on crime, the war on all of it, war on drugs. And I was listening to hip hop at the time. This was in the 90s, the mid-90s. And I remember thinking, wow, these rappers are rapping about exactly what I'm reading about in William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged. Of course, they're not calling it deindustrialization, but they're describing these changes. And that's when I got this idea of using rappers lyrics as data to kind of illuminate some of these theoretical concepts that I was seeing.

My dissertation advisor told me, don't do that. You'll never get a job. That cannot be your dissertation. It's too fringe. Nobody knows about hip hop. This was the mid-90s. And so I put it on the back burner. Well, when I got to be an assistant professor at George Washington University,

I said, enough, I'm doing this. And so I decided to do a content analysis, identifying the various themes in these key sociological works, but doing it in a much more systematic way than I thought had been happening in the field. there was a lot of sort of ideological work around hip-hop. Sure. So I basically got every single album, rap album, that went platinum, over an eight-year period, all of the songs off of those albums, okay, and then I got all of the lyrics from all of those songs, thousands of them.

Then I randomly selected a third of them, which was about 600 songs. And then I started content analyzing them one by one. Because they were randomly selected, I felt that I had. the universe there. Yeah. And after about song 430, I was, I reached what is called saturation in terms of the themes, line by line by line, content analyzing. Then I had an independent coder, a graduate student, code a subset of those, so we could

check for intercoder reliability on all these different themes. And then I started writing papers. This was like a five-year project that produced many, many papers, but it was very, very long and arduous. If you're moving all your precious possessions, here's something no one tells you. It's not just packing boxes. It's figuring out what supplies you need, how to lift without hurting yourself, how to protect what matters most, how to fit everything into a truck, and how to get it there safely and on time. That's where United Van Lines comes in. With nearly a century of experience, United knows exactly what movers like you need, guidance, protection, and professionals who've

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I started, I had both a deductive and inductive approach. The deductive approach took a couple of theoretical frameworks, like I mentioned in William Julius Wilson's work, Elijah Anderson's Code of the Streets and others, looking for themes around violence, misogyny, problematic policing. But however, as I was content analyzing the lyrics, themes kind of bubbled up that I hadn't anticipated using these theoretical frameworks. And so I also incorporated those. And one, just to give you a concrete example, and I don't know how familiar you are with hip hop in the 90s, rap music of the 90s. But a lot, a lot, I'm looking, I'm waiting for.

A little bit. A little bit. I'm not going to claim like, I'm older than that. I'm more, you know, Eric B. Rakeem kind of era. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My head, Kev likes to think that he knows rap of the 90s, but, you know, it's quite limited. But so, you know, I'm listening to these songs in my sample.

You know, I would, a song would come up in my random selection. I'd listen to it a bunch of times, get a feel for it. And I would listen to it with the lyrics on the screen. coding line by line. Do that a couple of times to make sure. One thing I noticed was, wow, rappers of the 90s obsessed about death and dying and the afterlife. Interesting.

And, you know, rappers like Snoop and DMX and, you know, Drey and all others, they were Tupac, Biggie, they were all talking about, I might die. Death is just a, I mean, one of the papers that I wrote on nihilism is called. I see death around the corner, which is a Tupac title. They were just obsessed with death and dying, and I got interested in that. And that wasn't really a part of any of the paradigms that I, the

theoretical works I was dealing with. And so I kind of, that bubbled up from the data, and I ended up coding around that and wrote an entire paper on a sort of nihilism and rap music. And is the point that, you know, there was something that was being perceived by these artists that was not being perceived by the academics?

Exactly. And one of it was, was, you know, a lot of people say, well, rappers and folks in these communities, they act irrationally. And, you know, what, how do we understand violence? Like, what is the purpose? Why are you carrying around guns? What is, why is there so much violence? Like, and a lot of what I was hearing from the rappers was this notion that, like, tomorrow is not promised. Yeah. And death could be right around the corner. And at any moment, um, your life can be taken away from you. And that was the case for Tupac and Biggie, two of the people that spoke about, right? They were right to have these fears. And, you know, the source of those fears goes from everything from their histories to

the conditions in their neighborhood, to the role of guns in the community, to these macro-structural changes to problematic policing. And, you know, in that context, acting crazy and not caring about the future, not planning for the future, kind of whiling out, made sense. And so I talk, you know, it's quite rational behavior. If tomorrow isn't promised, it doesn't make sense to buckle down and look to the future for your gratification. So it was like those kinds of themes that were fascinating to me. And it's also, this is just a complete cliche, but worth getting on the table, that hip hop has always been criticized by older school popular musicians by the fact that they're not playing their instruments. There's no melodies, things like that.

But on the verbal side of things, it's just so extremely more sophisticated and accomplished than any typical pop lyricism that we've had ever, right? And that is exactly why I loved hip-hop and continued to love hip-hop, and that's why it's flourished and has been as successful as it has been. And this is my problem with what I call rap on trial, the phenomenon we were talking about before, which is that rap is denied the status of art. It's denied the status of poetry.

It's, and it is relegated to basically autobiographical confessions. And that is extremely problematic to me. And it racist, quite frankly. Pretty darn racist. I want to talk, I think that there's very interesting things to be said about how art can be thought of as evidence in a criminal trial. So let me just ask the most. procedural question. What are the evidentiary rules for a judge to just let someone's high school poetry into a trial? Right. So obviously, the evidence has to be proposed by the prosecutor.

In these cases, defense attorneys are arguing vociferously to exclude it. Sure. But they need help in terms of making that case. Now, in theory, you are not allowed to use what is called character evidence in these cases. In other words, evidence that speaks to someone's character. And that's how prosecutors are attempting to use this. And so what happens is that

prosecutors, what they want the jurors to hear is if someone could write these lyrics, they could do the crime. Right. That's what I think is their hoping is happening. That's not allowed. So basically, but they're finding ways around that by arguing

that the lyrics speak to the motive identity or intent of the individual with respect to the alleged crime. I see. So part of the maneuver is to deny that this could be art, right, to say that it must be a straightforward autobiographical confession, which if you sang it with country music behind it, you would not think. Well, and that's exactly the point. Name me one other form of artistic expression where this is happening in the courts. You can't. There is no other form of artistic expression, in other words, defendant-authored lyrics that are being introduced into the court except when it comes to rap music. Now, heavy metal cases have been in the courts. That's for a separate

issue, the issue of incitement. But we're talking about defendant-authored lyrics, making an appearance in court that is only for rat music. And you've said, I think you've already said this, but I'll just hear it again. It works. This bringing in these violent lyrics really does sway the juries. Absolutely. Convictions are happening. Now, some cases are getting overturned at the appellate level, but most or not. And I think, you know, the goal is to not get the lyrics in to begin with. And defense attorneys come to me all the time asking, you know, I'm filing a pretrial motion to exclude this evidence on these grounds. I know it's, I know it's biased and stereotypical. How do I show that? And I'm like, well, here's some experimental research I've done that. that actually documents that. And I'm currently working with a law professor at UC Irvine, Jack Lerner, and his students at a clinic that he runs. We are producing a manual for defense attorneys

that will help them navigate these cases because many of them don't know much about rap music to begin with. So they get the videos. They have some of the same stereotypes and assumptions, even as they want to help their client. And then, you know, given my experience testifying in these cases, I'm able to provide some context and useful information about how these cases basically go down, if you will. So what if we're, I'm just trying my best year now to do the devil's advocate thing.

So if I'm on the jury for one of these trials, and maybe it's specifically about rap or whatever, but my big picture question is, how much context should I let inform my priors about who this person is, who the defendant is, where they come from. I mean, in an ideal world, you want to say, well, there's the evidence of this case. But as a good Bayesian, I want to take my prior and multiply it by the evidence, the likelihood of the evidence, right? So is there a theory of that or do the jurors get instructions about how to be good basians? Right. So this is a really important part of these cases.

So if the lyrics do get allowed in, the pretrial motion fails, as it often does. Okay. What is absolutely essential, given my research, I think, is that the jurors be educated on the broader context of hip hop and rap. These are the genre conventions, right? If you're an aspiring gangster rapper, these are the kinds of themes that are going to permeate your music. Why do these themes permeate the music? Because that's what makes commercial success. That's what gives you respect as a rapper. So having that context, having that background, and understanding allows jurors to properly evaluate the evidence in the context of the other evidence and the trial. Not having that background information is extremely problematic in my case. And that's where experts come in to provide that context. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. And to have an alternative explanation other than this is simply confession. A violent person. They're going to do it.

And I mean, since I'm very much out of the loop on these. things, how prevalent is gangster rap as a subgenre of hip hop now as compared to what it used to be? Like, I had a feeling that in the early 90s or whatever, it was, it was very high up there, and maybe it's less prevalent now. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if you would even call it gangstrap. There's so many subgenres of rap music, right? And I guess what we could talk about is, you know, what percentage of aspiring rappers, you know, have themes of violence and threat and misogyny in their lyrics.

And I still think it's pretty high. Now, it may not be the stuff you hear on the radio or, you know, you're familiar with among common rappers. But it is definitely, definitely out there at the amateur level, at the aspiring level. Good. And I mean, I just, it's, it's huge. And it's not just among blacks. It's among white rappers and Asian rappers and Latino rappers. It is definitely still the currency by which you both make money as a rapper and gain respect as a rapper.

So I think if you were, yeah, I mean, people are not rapping about the good, you know, the, there's just not like a lot of Will Smith kind of rappers out there. But also when you're aspiring anything, you're in your teenage yonxty period, right? And, you know, the world is terrible and you're going to explain it to people. Exactly. Or you're also going to report what's going out in your community. Right. I mean, a lot of cases involve rappers that are frustrated with the conditions in their communities, with the problematic police relations. and they are calling the police out in it in threatening ways. Right?

When does that become a problem? When is it an actual threat? Yeah, no, I mean, that's a legitimate question, I think. It's hard, like we've been saying, your job is very hard. And let me make it even harder by extending from hip-hop lyrics to just art more generally. Like, what is the general theory of if I have someone who has created something, lyrics, poetry, novels, videos, right? Because everyone has an iPhone now. They can make their own videos. How much should that inform a juror's deliberation about the likelihood that they could have committed the crime in front of them?

Right. And this is the stuff that's decided in the courts in these appellate cases, right? Figuring out if something constitutes an actual threat or if it is just, I mean, you know, that there's that question. And then there's also, you know, why has Quentin Tarantino never been? charged for the violence in his movies. You know, why did, like, the common example that we use all the time is Johnny Cash, I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Like, nobody would, or the Dixie Chicks, Kill Earl, the former Dixie Chicks. You know, nobody would assume that what's going on in that song, they're actually doing.

And so what is it about rap? Now, there are some nuances there that should be addressed, like, rap claims authenticity. So, you know, right? There's a component of rap that, like, I'm not just rapping about it. I'm doing it. Yeah. And yeah, but, and so that brings a wrinkle in.

But the point is, is there's complexity there. It doesn't necessarily mean that the rappers are doing that because if every rapper did what they said they were doing in their raps, it'd be World War III up in this country. Well, look, every politician claims that they were born in a blue collar family and, you know, drank beer and everything. The fact that you think that authenticity is very important does not imply you're authentic. Exactly. And also there's a difference between who you are as a person and the character you play. I mean, this is why rappers have stage names. It's like Hulk Hogan, right? You know, there's Terry Bolaea and then there's Hulk Hogan. And when he's in Hulk Hogan mode, he's going to say all kinds of crazy things. You know, I'm going to rip your head off and I'm going to do this, that, and the other.

And it's part of the character. Are there lessons here for things that are not quite aroused? or even aspired to be, but nevertheless might be brought in as evidence of what this person is like, like, you know, personal diaries, social media posts, things like that. I mean, what are the rules as an outsider, once again, for bringing that stuff in to impugn the character of the defendant? Yeah. The rules are very difficult.

And I mean, it's very, I mean, as just a criminologist, I am not up on sort of the legal, the legal doctrine around what is acceptable, what is a true threat, right? I know artistic expression has certain protections and for good reason, right? If I want to critique the police in a song, because we worry about a chilling effect that that might have on speech, particularly artistic speech, artistic expression. But what all the intricacies of whether in a particular instance, lyrics from a song or just someone's thoughts represent a threat is like, I mean, I'd have to go back to all those Supreme Court cases where they're ruling on this and understand the complexities there. It's difficult. There's a lot going on.

I mean, let's start circling back a little bit. Despite all this, crime is going down, right? I mean, you know, we've talked a little bit about incarceration, how high it is some of the inequities in the system. But yet, crime, like maybe since 1990 or something like that has been going. down. What are what are, what are, is our understanding of why that has been happening? Well, um, so first of all, there's as a criminologist, we talk about crime trends kind of at different levels. There's the societal level and we can look at the societal factors like economic conditions and that sort of thing. We can look more at variation across cities. So I would argue that crime is not going down in

some cities, but it is in others. And then even within cities where crime is going down, you have sort of the unequal distribution of that benefit. Like in some neighborhoods, crime is going up. So it's a very complex question. Crime is going down, I'd say, I'd say on the broad scale, mainly because socioeconomic can, I mean, let's take the crime drop because that's a very defined period. So the crime drop, so remember I mentioned the crime drop early on in the interview, which is that crime rates were sort of consistent. going down starting about the early 90s through the mid 2000s. Okay.

Okay. Because, you know, when you say crimes going down, I want to get like fixated. Well, what yours are you talking about? Yeah, because it's actually gone up and yeah. So let's pick a defined period that everyone would agree that crime sort of went down universally, which is the crime drop. And we have looked at a number of factors responsible for the crime drop, including the sort of drying up of the crack.

the crack cocaine markets of the 80s, the economic boom of the 90s. My own work has looked a lot at the role of demographic shifts in our society, including a rise in immigration to cities in the United States. So contrary to a lot of popular belief, immigration to an area causes crime to go down rather than up. You wouldn't know that after our last administration, but that's in fact the case.

So these large-scale macro forces are what we can, tend to look at to understand crime booms and busts. And there's the freakonomics explanation of Roe versus Wade. No, it doesn't work. Yeah. I thought that was kind of discounted, but I wasn't sure. Sorry. Yeah, no, that's, that is, that is, uh, we've moved on from that.

That's pretty much been debunked. So I certainly makes perfect sense to me that the economy doing better in the 90s, uh, would, would help crime go down. And in some sense, it makes perfect sense to me that the dissolution of the crack cocaine epidemic would help. Is it mostly because people who were addicted to crack committed crimes or people got arrested because they were on crack? No, so basically the recession of the crack markets involved people. It really, the role of firearms is central here.

Okay. So when crack was very popular in the 80s and out and about and individuals were getting involved in selling crack, people were arming themselves with guns because you can't turn to the police when you have a prop when you've gotten your drugs brought off with you, right? So basically people started arming themselves. This also meant that folks in these communities who had nothing to do with the crack cocaine market, but who navigated in these communities also felt the need to arm themselves in protection. And we saw an upsurge in young people carrying firearms. Okay. Well, recall your statement earlier about young people development and firearms, right? And so we saw a surge in violence in the 80s due to,

these due to this, which when the market's closed up and dried up, a lot of that gun violence and ended up going down. So there's no rule that says that when an effect happens, there's only one cause of it. There can be multiple causes. That 100%. That is exactly why it is so difficult to, I mean, with looking at something like controlling crime or predicting crime, it's very challenging. And that's why statistics are our friend because we can talk about probabilities without being, you know, needing to be like certain, right? We can say within a certain range of probability, right? More of this equals less of

that. But my students will go, well, what about? And I go, well, that's still what's statistics? Yeah, that's part of it. But one case is still works within our statistical framework. Well, and you did mention immigration is something in particular. I think that's worth being clear about because it is a messy situation and politically highly charged, but there's data out there. And the short version is that I think it's true to say that immigration does not increase crime. But what's the longer version? So if there is one area that I have done research in where the findings are consistent and clear,

it is this area. And that is both that immigrants have lower offending rates. then their native-born peers and that immigration to an area either has no impact on crime or causes it to go down. That's it. And this has been reported in studies from the early 1900s through my meta-analysis and beyond. I did a meta-analysis with Graham Owsey at William and Mary.

We basically got every single study published between 1994 and 2014, of which there were over 50 studies. And we did a meta-analysis. sort of a formal evaluation of that literature, looking at sort of what the average effect of, you know, of the immigration on crime, sort of the average effect of immigration on crime across this body of research was. And it was null. It was basically a null relationship. When there was a significant relationship, it was more likely to be negative than positive, meaning immigration going up, crime going down. And what we also found, was predicting the variability in in in that the coefficients if you will we found that studies that were more robust that had more control variables that had longitudinal designs that means dealt with causality better showed a more a stronger negative effect than positive effect so i mean every the needle points in the direction every single time of course both immigrants and uh people who are

already here are heterogeneous groups right there's all sorts of different people coming in there. But is it nevertheless possible to go one step beyond what you just said and explain why? I mean, if there's a slight decrease in crime, is it because immigrants are just a little bit more careful about not offending the powers to be because they don't want to be kicked out? Or is it just because they're selected to be hardworking and trying to form a better life? Or what can we say? You hit two of the big ones. So the first is the selection, the selection issue, right? Obviously, folks coming over to the United States, not a random cross-section of the population, highly selected, hardworking, willing to delay gratification, right? None of the characteristics associated with criminality.

There's also the sort of the fear of maybe deportation or coming into contact with authorities. So a deterrence perspective there. There's other factors, though, that I think are interesting. We found in some research that immigrants, on average, tend to have lower rates. of single parent households, divorce, and other kinds of family disruption. And family disruption at the macro level is correlated with crime. So, you know, again, that's not to say that immigrants aren't, you know, there aren't households where divorce is happening and that sort of thing.

But on average, they have lower rates. Statistics. They're also, they also have lower rates of unemployment compared to native born blacks and whites, particularly, I mean, even if that's low wage unemployment. it still helps offset poverty and poverty being a correlate of some crimes. So, you know, there's a number of competing explanations, some at the individual level, some at the more macro level. And right now I've got a grant from the National Institute of Justice that's beginning to try

to parse out why, you know, which mechanisms may be responsible for this. I guess maybe one thing worth saying, although correct me if it's emphasizing the wrong thing, but a lot of the crimes we've been talking about these violent crimes or drug crimes, we're excluding or not paying attention to white-collar crimes very much, right? And that would be a very different discourse. It's not what we think of when we think of these kinds of crimes. 100%. The whole field, unfortunately, criminology, is obsessed with what we call street crimes rather

than sweet crimes, S-U-I-T-E. And that's hugely, hugely problematic. Yeah, that would be a whole other podcast maybe. but okay. People who are in the in the suites are still committing some crimes. That's, that's probably true. In fact, I don't know. Is it more likely if you have an income of over $300,000 a year that you're committing a crime every year than if you have one of under $50,000 a year? Let's put it this way, that the damage done is much greater. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I bet the probability is higher because you're at least, you know, like not paying all your taxes or something like that, right?

Exactly. Right. So, I mean, yeah, the question is, I mean, for a long time, that was many of these behaviors weren't even considered criminal. They're considered like creative accounting or something like that. But 100%, yes, there is plenty of white-collar crime going around. All right. So I'd like to end the podcast on an optimistic note, if possible. But I will let you decide whether we should be optimistic or not. Crime did go down a little bit during the crime drop. I mean, are you optimistic about how we're doing? Do you think the criminal justice system is becoming a little bit more good or efficient or sensible or just in dealing with these? And if not, what's the one thing we can do to make things better? Oh, that's a good question. So, you know, what's interesting is COVID. You know,

we didn't talk at all about sort of COVID in crime, the pandemic, I should say, in crime, because one of the really interesting silver linings, if you can say something like that, to the pandemic, was when everything shut down, crime plummeted. I really, really, really, Really, it was unbelievable to see the drops in crime. I mean, part of that is nobody's going anywhere. Right? So, you know, stores are shut down. So crime absolutely plummeted.

The scary thing about that, though, was that we saw it move online. And shift online in a way that is like a harbinger of the future for me, which is sort of how are we going to deal with the complexities of combating crime in the virtual space? which has really, really taken off. Yeah. And so I think as, you know, we move forward and think about, you know, crime going down, is it really going down? Is it being displaced elsewhere?

Right. And now, by the way, it's in some places it's back up. Violent crime in some cities is quite problematic. Obviously, mass shootings are a huge, huge problem. So I think when we talk about kind of run-of-the-mill crime, things seem good. But there's a lot of things. So that's optimistic. But I am going to end pessimistically because I worry about the mass shootings that are just every day.

Police violence, a lot of the, you know, what's happening in, you know, to young men of color and young women of color whose lives are being taken by misconduct by the police and other police use of force. there's the online crime that has shifted as we get more advanced and people are using technology more in their daily lives. So those are my, and then the privatization thing to circle back to that. Those are like four areas that I think we need to be keeping our eye out on. When you mention online crime, what should we have in mind as the kind of crime that is prevalent online that you're worried about? Oh, everything from, I mean, you know, recall when when people were scurrying around to, find masks, right? The sort of the, all of that where they have these fake products, these problematic products,

or people were getting their checks and then they were getting false emails to log in to get your check from the government to, you know, bigger picture kinds of tax evasion stuff. Well, yeah. So I'm blanking on who it was that was. Remember they sold the stocks at the last minute. Oh, which one? The senators? Yeah.

I mean, Kelly Lothler was one of them, right? I forget. But remember, they unloaded all of that. I mean, that, just that kind of, it's, it ranges from like the individual who's selling illegal goods online or who's stealing people's checks or are, you know, doing hate crime online, all of that from the individual to these bigger kinds of fraud, if you were. So this is your optimistic message, that we're entering an era of widespread fraud on the internet. That's on the horizon and we need to figure out. I mean, us criminologists, we're so busy with our street crime. Well, maybe the optimistic message is that when you mentioned the mass shootings and police brutality and things like that, maybe we're more cognizant of that now.

Maybe there will be a momentum to try to clean that up a little bit. I don't know. Oh, yes, I agree. I think that's, there's recognition of these issues as problems. and there's an awareness. And so we just need to figure out how we're going to stay one step ahead on all of this. And reform where reform needs to happen. Those are all very wise words.

I think that's a very good ending place. Chiris Kuban, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. I enjoyed it. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement.

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