Building Towards Certainty Rather Than Severity With Greg Newburn

For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point.

Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Justice at the Niskanen Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy .

In this episode, we talk about why the criminal justice system may have been built around the wrong theory of deterrence, why certainty matters more than severity, and what it would look like to design a system focused less on increasing punishment and more on increasing the likelihood that crimes are actually solved.

Greg Newburn is director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center. His previous positions include state policy director and Florida director for FAMM and chair of the Florida-based 'Yes on 11' political committee. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

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I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable. Increased penalties, increased sentences, and hope it all works out. My guest today says that framework misses the point. Greg Newburn is the director of criminal justice at the Scannon Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy. In this episode, we talked about why the criminal justice system may have been built around the wrong theory of deterrence, why certainty matters more than severity, and what it would look like to design a system focused less on increasing punishment and more on increasing the likelihood that crimes are actually solved. We get into clearance rates, mandatory minimums, state capacity, and the political challenge of building policies that are both effective and sustainable over time. This episode is a conversation that explores what changes when the goal is preventing crime, not just punishing it. Let's dive in. My guest today is Greg Newbern. Greg, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. So, first question, same to every guest, but Greg, what what is your background? What brings you to us today? Oh, yeah. So I'm the uh director of criminal justice at the Niskanon Center, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. Niskanon just celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year. The criminal justice department has been around since uh about this time in 2021. So we're about five years old. And uh our work is essentially what we like to describe it as trying to minimize the cost of crime and punishment simultaneously. So we're looking to try to figure out evidence-based ways to improve criminal justice outcomes across the entire criminal justice system with an eye toward trying to minimize crime and violence and victimization while simultaneously minimizing the amount of punishment we have to impose to achieve those objectives. What is sort of your role in not just your role, but the Niskanon Center's role that you see it in sort of advancing these smarter criminal justice policies? You guys, I think, are much more Washington like developing the policies and working to actually implement them than other places that are more outwardly focused. How does that work? Yeah, I would describe it in two ways. So I came to Niscannon from families against mandatory minimums, which became FAM. Uh so it was FAM when I left. And I spent a little more than a decade working there on sentencing reform policy, mostly at the state level. And and the almost the entirety of the scope of our work was on sentencing and some prison reform stuff. But it was on that part of the criminal justice system. And during my time at FAM and being part of what I would call sort of professional criminal justice reform movement at the time, for again, a little more than a decade, it became frustrating to me that the reform community could very easily identify all of the problems with the criminal justice system, all of the excesses of the criminal justice system, sentencing that was too harsh or severe, and so on. But we had very little by way of an affirmative crime control agenda. So if we went to talk to a lawmaker and we said, hey, listen, you know, you don't need this sentence to protect public safety, they'd say, okay, well, what do what should we do for public safety? And there was very little that we could offer on that. And so part of the reason we wanted to start this program at Niskanon is to develop a crime control agenda that's rooted in good, solid evidence that is not just more of the same reflexive, intuitive, ratchet up sentences and hope it works model, which is how we've perceived the evolution of criminal justice policy over the last several decades. So the first component of that to me is the theoretical framework of how we approach the issue. As I said before, we don't see crime and punishment as two separate problems to be solved. We think they're two sides of the same coin, right? It's it's trivially easy to solve crime in isolation. It's trivially easy to solve over punishment in isolation. It's much, much more difficult to solve both of them simultaneously. But in my mind and in Niskanon's mind, it that's the problem that needs to be solved. And nobody was really working on it in a rigorous, systematic way, at least in the as we saw it in the criminal justice reform world. So we wanted to do that. We wanted to create a framework for how to think about criminal justice policy that takes both crime and punishment seriously. So I think that's one of the roles is offering a new and different philosophical and ideological framework for how to approach criminal justice issues, which is to say a rejection of the sort of left-right, well, punish them more, punishment left them less ideas, and more of a system-wide, what does the evidence say? How do we improve outcomes? So that's number one. And then number two, like you said, I think part of what we do is just develop the ideas that we think should work and then pitch them directly to lawmakers and staff and to practitioners to try to test as many things as possible, to try to develop a rec uh rigorous evidence base, to figure out what works, scale it as much as we can, and then keep doing that until we get the the outcomes that we want. I'm gonna ask a very big question, which is uh piece that you have on Niskanon's blog that you recently wrote calls for uh what I think you called a deterrence agenda. One, what is that? Two, how do you propose, how do you propose going about it? And three, kind of what is the strategy to implement it if you kind of separate those from what is it, how should states do it, and how does Niskanin and how do you approach getting them to actually do that? It's a big question because it's a big problem. Um, part of the theory in the piece that you just cited is that, or the implication uh of the theory behind that piece is that we've sort of built the wrong criminal justice state. So we we had this theory that if we if we threatened penalties that people would not commit crimes. And if we threatened them with really severe penalties, they would just stop committing crimes because they would be afraid of the penalties, of the, of the punishment. And because that was the theory, the subtext of that is like, well, we don't really need to do anything to stop crime. We don't need to build any institutions that are actively trying to deter crime because the threat alone is what's going to do it. And so if that's your theory, that if the threat alone is going to scare people from committing crimes, then again, you don't need to build a state to do that. I think that that model has been proven to have totally failed, right? You see 25 years of crime and punishment rising in tandem from the mid to late 60s through the early 1990s. This concept developed as like the response to murders going up, we've got to do something. Right. And and not just murders, right? Like any drug abuse and whatever the crime was, whatever the spike was, the response was just to sort of double down on this strategy of just, well, if there's a crime, then what's the response? There was no rigorous thinking about how to do this, except for the idea, which by the way was reasonable, I think at the time. I don't think it was unreasonable to think, well, if we increase the penalties, we should have less of the crime. That's that's not an unreasonable proposition. It just didn't work out that way. And so what we had was a system that was not ready to fulfill the threats that they made, right? Like we can make the threats, but we have no institutions really to make good on those threats. And so now you've got a lot of crime and you've got to do something with a lot of the people who are committing those crimes. So that's when you see the rapid prison buildup and the incarceration boom. And so we're we're left with this equilibrium of really high crime and really high punishment, which is roughly the opposite of where you want to be. And so when I say the deterrence agenda, essentially what I'm trying to say is that we've got to reset our entire way of thinking about how best to control crime. Rather than merely hoping that threats of long sentences will deter people, we actually need to build a state that is capable of actively doing that. And the elements of that uh are, well, and they're still sort of TBD because we haven't taken the time to really build a rigorous evidence base, but there are some things that we sort of know that should work, right? Like increasing the number of police officers is one way to deter crime effectively. And so that would be one place just to start there. And then there are other things, like Gend Doliac's got great research on how DNA databases can reduce crime. Which we've talked about on the pod. A lot of it is rooted in the idea that if you can increase the perceived certainty of apprehension, you can actually change behavior in ways that simply changing the severity of the punishment will not. So the deterrence agenda is essentially trying to figure out all the ways throughout the system where you can improve the perceived certainty of apprehension for criminal behavior and therefore get the double dividend that the folks who were using severity wanted, which is reduced crime and victimization and reduced punishment. And the theory behind this is, like Thomas Schelling's theory, that the most effective threat is one that never has to be carried out, right? If you can signal credible threats that you will be punished if you commit this crime, then that person will not commit the crime for fear of the punishment. And then now you've got less crime and you don't have to impose the punishment. Whereas if you're threatening someone and the threat is not credible, all you're doing is bluffing them. And then they are going to figure out that you're bluffing them and they're going to keep committing crimes. And then now we've got this big pool of people who are actively committing crimes, and we're going to figure out some tiny fraction of them to pull out of the pool and punish them, but we haven't done anything to shrink the pool or change the behavior or anything else, right? So that in a nutshell, the deterrence agenda is trying to figure out how to improve the certainty of apprehension, to change the incentives for criminal behavior, to get less of it, and then also to get less punishment. To your second question about what states should do. Again, I think because we were caught in this place where we had this check that we didn't think we were going to have to pay. And then now, when forced to pay the check, we're like, we don't know what to do. So we again we just build all these prisons and put people in them and hope that it works out. And we've left that system running now for four or five decades. And so there's a lot of inertia around that. Changing the calibration of and the distribution of your public safety spending, I think, is number one. And you've really got to focus less on the punishment side of things and more on the active deterrence. That could be something like building swift, certain, and fair sanctions programs for probation violations. Again, it's putting more police on the streets. Something that's near and dear to my heart, and I think probably yours is to improve investigative outcomes to signal that if you if you engage in this behavior, you really will get caught for it, which I think can pay dividends and deterrence in any number of ways. Again, DNA databases is another one. So there are things that you can invest in to say we can spend $100 million enforcing three strikes, or we can spend $100 million on all of these things that would improve the certainty of apprehension. Our opinion, and what we try to tell lawmakers, is to put that money into deterrence rather than punishment. To the third question about how to actually implement it, well, that can probably take another hour of a podcast. And we are working on that. Niskanon's got an entire state capacity project. I think there are very few people working on the state capacity and the implementation part of all of this, but we are. I think it's it's finally starting to filter out to the larger criminal justice reform universe that agency behavior and state capacity and implementation are first order problems, right? That that we have to focus on those just like we're focusing on what interventions might work and not work, because they they go hand in hand, right? Like dysfunctional agencies cannot implement even promising and evidence-based interventions with fidelity or with enough support to make them work. And so we've got to focus on both of those things. It's a very difficult problem, but the first part of it is just to start talking about it as a first-order problem and get people to work on it. And Adam Gelb, who was on a couple of weeks ago from Council on Criminal Justice, was saying that exact point that we think about these frequently on the federal end and then also at the local level, and that the states have such an important role to play. In theory, I would think that everybody wants murders locked up. People want murders solved, and improving the murder clearance rate, the violent crime clearance rate, should be a very popular bipartisan approach. Do you ever run into sort of the political end of, well, the prison complex isn't going to want fewer prisons. They don't want less money dedicated to them. They want more money to build more prisons and have more guards and things like that. Is that an overcomable problem, or is it just the random politics of states? So, in the handful of states where we've worked on violent crime clearance rates, that's Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Utah, and a handful of others probably, we have not run into any ideological opposition to the idea of improving clearance rates. The bills that we have helped draft and find sponsors for are universally bipartisan. They tend to sail through committees without a single no vote. There are probably some exceptions to that, but by and large, these are overwhelmingly bipartisan affairs. The polling that's been done on improving clearance rates is very consistent, that this is 80, 90% of people who are polled across all demographic areas want to catch more murderers. Right. I'm surprised it's not 100%. Give or take the number of murderers. You have to poll the murderers as well. Exactly. If you if you bracket out the murderers, then it's 100%. That's just overwhelmingly popular. And that's reflected both again in the polling and also in the in the enthusiasm that both Republicans and Democrats have shown for the specific reform mechanisms that have been introduced in their states. We we just had a bill out in Utah that was signed by the governor there, bipartisan bill to create a new grant program to focus on clearance rates. They're going to put money into that program. And Arnold Ventures, I believe, is going to support some of that as well. So we're building this movement toward certainty and clearance rates in a steadfast and successful manner over the last couple of years. And I'm excited to see where it goes. The pitfall is not that anybody's opposed to solving more crimes. It's just that it's a very difficult fiscal environment right now. So it's hard to find new money to do even very important things. But I do think that eventually people are going to come around to the idea that it's a penny wise and pound foolish not to invest some money up front in trying to deter some of these crimes. You're either going to pay for the deterrence or you're going to pay for the punishment. You might as well pay for the deterrence, which is cheaper, and you avoid the victimization, and you can reduce your murder rate and the number of people who are shot in your jurisdictions. People get that, and I think we're going to be even more successful in the short term, getting getting some states to get on board. I'm in Louisiana, so I have the opposite experience of sort of dumb on crime is sort of the approach because there's been this massive reversal of the state's criminal justice policies that were implemented almost a decade ago. What do you how do you approach people that are politicians, especially that are saying that the approach, the smart approach is, you know, reducing probation and parole, reducing good time, increasing incarceration, increasing sentences as a legislative political approach? So this goes back to what I was saying earlier about there not being an affirmative crime control agenda on offer for people who care about reducing crime. The reforms in Louisiana and the justice reinvestment stuff across the country, primarily, that's not about crime control. That's about improving system outcomes. It's about reducing your prison population safely and so on. But it's not primarily about crime control. You can say, well, you can do all these things and it won't affect your public safety, but that's a step removed from the thing that the lawmakers actually care about, which is crime control. Whatever amount of money they need to spend in order to reduce their crime rate, they don't care how many people are in prison or how much it costs if they believe it translates into lower crime. None of the other factors matter if they believe that crime cannot be controlled with this set of things in place. And so again, like that, that's the work that has to be done, is you have to give them an alternative to crime control. If you don't have anything that says this is affirmatively how you go about reducing your crime rate, then of course they're going to fall back on their intuitions and the thing that they have just sort of learned over the last few decades. If you're faced with a problem and you have one solution on one hand, imperfect as it may be, and then nothing on the other hand, well, let's at least try the one, imperfect as it may be. And so our goal and our mission in a lot of ways is to go to those lawmakers and say, we too have a, and this is important, a genuine commitment to crime reduction. Here's how you should do it, right? We don't try to lie to them and say this is, you know, a conservative idea, even though it was cooked up in some liberal think tank 20 years ago or anything like that. We're not in the business of taking progressive criminal justice ideas and then dressing them up as conservative ideological wins. We are in the business of trying to figure out what reduces crime. And it is our opinion that the best evidence and the best theory about how to reduce crime is not to ratchet up sentences and put people in prison for as long as you can. We think that just runs into a host of problems. But that is not primarily our goal. Our goal is not decarceration, which is, again, trivially easy if you don't care about crime. Our goal and our theory of the case is that if you can control crime, you can also control incarceration, right? So you start there and then you can get the other win. Whereas if you're going in the direction of how can we reduce incarceration, well, if you again, if you don't have a theory of crime, that can only go so far when someone cares about crime. And so I think that's exactly what you saw in Louisiana. You had a lot of this buy-in for uh for reform, all of it in good faith and and all of it probably on solid ground in terms of evidence and what it's and its impacts and so on. But when crime starts to spike and there's nothing else on offer, that's gonna go, right? I mean, there was never that that consensus. And that's what we saw. Well, what was frustrating here is you saw it implemented well in advance of the spike in 2020. And we didn't see a spike after sort of these justice reinvestment acts were passed. And then crime horrific, you know, bad everywhere. It's always worse in Louisiana. It got really bad. And then, yeah, there was there was this like knee-jerk reaction, but it it's frustrating because the knee-jerk reaction happened as crime was already going down in that 2024 timeframe. And so by the time we were responding to the spike, we were responding in such a way that wasn't actually responding to something that was actually happening. That's just me getting it. I think the politics always lags the actual on-the-ground crime realities. But it's it's just again, not to beat the dead horse here, but if you are a rational political actor and crime is spiking, or at least the political response to a prior crime spike is salient and your voters want you to do something about it, well, you're gonna go to your shelf of options and you're just gonna pull something off the shelf. It's too late at that point to figure out a new way, right? I mean, it's it's the moment it has arrived. And so you're going to reach for the thing that is available to you and what was available to them at the time, in part because the criminal justice reform community just completely dropped the ball for 10 plus years. It was, there was just nothing else available to them. Now, imagine a world in which you've done G JRI uh the way Louisiana did it, in a in a comprehensive, very impressive fashion. And in the meantime, for the that entire time and maybe even before, you had developed a robust theory of crime control that you have also been pitching to the same lawmakers. Now that we're doing this on this end of the system, let's also do this. If you've if you have that in place and you've got that buy-in and you can give them something to do, they can pull that off the shelf instead of repealing the thing, right? They can point to that. Instead of saying, oh, I'm gonna repeal JRI, I can say, I'm gonna invest in a thousand new detectives across my state, right? Or I'm gonna do, I don't know what Louisiana's DNA database situation is, but you can do DNA or rapid DNA or or whatever it is, right? I'm gonna do these things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put 5,000 more police on the street, right? I'm gonna spare no expense to do these things. That is something that you can pitch to voters and it has the added benefit of being true that you are actually doing something about crime. And and like you said, the clearance rate stuff is popular. If you give them something to pull off the shelf in those moments, those unforeseeable political moments, it's gonna be less likely that they're gonna reverse course on some smart thing they did a few years ago. What's frustrating about being in Louisiana, amongst other things, is the data is so bad. And again, we're coming back more to my element. The the data is so bad. I think right now the most up-to-date data on the state UCR program is the a PDF from the 2023 crime in the US report. So it's hard for policymakers when the the infrastructure and the reporting is so backwards that they're not able to even know. Well, should we be in crime control because we're spiking mode or reform because everything's working and we can maybe loosen the reins a little bit mode? So that's a real frustration. It's not everywhere. Texas is great, Pennsylvania's great. Um, a lot of the places you named have really strong data. Places that don't are at a real disadvantage. I feel like. And if you were trying to triage what to do here, that's probably number one, right? Like if you were in the pit version of crime control and you were trying to figure out which patient to handle first, improving your crime data infrastructure along the lines of the real-time crime index, by the way, right? Like figuring out what is happening in real time has got to be priority number one. And in part, that's the thing that allows you to do all of the other things down the line, right? To to be able to test whether what you're doing is working, to evaluate a particular intervention rapidly, which is critical and almost impossible in a lot of places now. So yeah, I mean, it's it really is it's frustrating to go to a place and say, what's happening with the murder rate? And you realize the best data that's out there is from 2021 or whenever they shifted data infrastructure. And people have made this point before, but and I'm sure you have made this point before. But the idea that we can know so much about so much, right? How many home runs did so-and-so hit yesterday? We know that, right? We know that immediately. You know, fantasy football data is updated in real time, fantasy baseball in real time. John Arnold talks about the number of pigs slaughtered in a day. Yeah, you're right, right, right. But we don't know how many people got shot in New Orleans yesterday. Although we might now, since you're you're doing it. We we have some ideas. Yeah. We we it it is improved. Uh Jacob Kaplan was giving a sent me a slide from his talk at Princeton. Uh Jacob Kaplan, who runs the crime data tool and has done a lot of work with the RTCI and he gave a talk talking about the golden age of crime data. So we're in this weird world where this is the best it's ever been, and in a lot of places it's still not very good. Right, right. To that end, what are sort of the metrics for success? Obviously, legislation and states coming on board. Is there something beyond just clearance rates to measure deterrence, to measure how well we're doing in reaching that agenda? Aaron Powell Well, in reaching the agenda, I think the more people who can just buy into the larger deterrence framework and certainty framework is the better. And in terms of legislation, you know, we ran a bill here in Florida where I live that would establish uh a pilot program for swift, certain, and fair sanctions for community supervision violations. We're looking into expanding electronic monitoring, home confinement, and that sort of thing, uh, to try to figure out ways that judges can use different levels of monitoring in order to deter crime. So as far as metrics go in terms of legislation, I think it's, you know, it's number of bills, the scope that those bills have, and the general buy-in left, right, and center for what we're trying to do. I think a lot of times folks like us who live this in this world full-time, I think we take for granted what we expect other people to know. And it is absolutely not unreasonable for a randomly chosen lawmaker to not know what Swift Certain Fair sanctions means, right? It is, it's not unreasonable. A lot of these legislatures are part-time, most of them are understaffed. These folks are very busy in their professional, in their personal lives. And so for us to just assume, like, oh, you you haven't read this or that. So it's our job to educate them about these things. And it is intuitive, it's plausible to think if I if I move this from a misdemeanor to a felony or from a third-degree felony to a first-degree felony, or I put a mandatory minimum on this, or whatever, it is plausible and intuitive to think that that's going to work. And so I don't hold it against these lawmakers for thinking that this is the right way to do it. And it's our job to educate them on why there's a better way. And what I've found is when you're sitting in those rooms and you actually are educating the lawmakers who, to a person, are acting in good faith and desperately trying to get a problem under control. And you can show them the connection between the theory and the evidence and the outcomes, to a person, they are open to it. And you can see their minds changing in real time. And once you learn this stuff, you can't unlearn it. Once you start to see the trade-off between severity and certainty, once you see the fact that a dollar spent on locking up a 90-year-old is a dollar that can't be spent on a cop, you can't unlearn those things. And it's it's impossible not to start looking at the margins and at trade-offs and trying to figure out how much public safety you're buying for your marginal dollar and so on. And again, once you start to think about the system in those terms, rather than, by the way, the dominant way that it is portrayed to lawmakers, which is through a culture war lens, right? It's not really on its own terms. It's not crime on its own terms or incarceration on its own terms. Those things are proxies for larger culture war fights, racism, poverty, you name it. But if you start to talk about it on its own terms in a little bit more technocratic and you can explain the evidence, they get it. You can see their minds change, and then now they want more of that, right? And then they're amenable to saying, oh, yeah, okay, I can see what you said there. What can we do? Well, have you looked at your clearance rates? Have you looked at the supervision violations or the responses to them? Have you looked at caseloads of your probation officers and so on? And then you're cooking with gas. You gave a great answer. I should have stopped you in the middle of it because you you brought up something that I wanted to ask, because I know you're a passionate advocate for this and have worked in this a lot. Can you describe for people that don't know like what are mandatory minimums and why are they so bad? Sure. I think it's a critical point. And I think we don't have another hour and a half to go on this, but I I think it's so important and it's such a knee-jerk reaction is you know, what is our response? Well, this crime happened. The sentence is four years. What if we made it six years? We could prevent that from happening in the future. And it's such a poisonous, I think, approach to things. So I was Yeah, yeah. I mean, so you're you're you're going back a few years. If there was a time uh where I could probably go on for an hour just on that. But I think uh a couple of reasons. Number one is the one you just described, right? It it reflects an approach to the problem that I think has long been discredited, which is again, if you just ratchet up the severity of the punishment, you're going to get a comparable deterrent effect. That's just a wrong-headed approach to this for any number of reasons, right? So a person who is going to commit a crime when the punishment is five years is not going to suddenly not commit the crime if the punishment is 10. The punishments are distant. They're far removed from the offense, they are intermittent and random in a lot of ways. This, again, what motivates people is not the potential punishment, but whether they're going to be caught. And you can double from 10 to 20, but if you don't change the perception that they're going to get caught, you're going to get similar levels of violations. Now, obviously there are exceptions to this. It's not a universal rule, but by and large, this is how deterrence operates. And it's something we've known for 200 plus years, right? But it just is not reflected in our criminal justice policy. So number one, it's just a reflection of poor thinking about deterrence and the relative mechanisms of severity and certainty to achieve that. And the second is more practical, right? I mean, it it just inevitably creates injustices when you have a mandatory minimum that is disconnected from the behavior of the person or the crime itself. I mean, and and at FAM we told these stories every day, whether it's for a drug crime that's based on weight, so you get a cliff effect, right? Like one person gets 10 years for having a handful of pills. A person who has one more pill gets 25 years. So, you know, 15 extra years for one additional pill is totally irrational and unjust, and so on. The practical effect of these things is to generate injustices in individual cases. The work of mandatory minimum reform is not about reducing the prison population or anything like that. These are outlier cases, but there are still injustices in those individual cases that have to be rectified. And it's an inevitable outcome of a sentencing scheme that includes mandatory minimums. And so that's why you see reform efforts that are across the ideological spectrum. People who care about the incapacitation benefit of prison are in favor of mandatory minimum reform. People who think that sentencing should be based only on moral desserts are in favor of mandatory minimum reform. So I think everybody has kind of come around to the idea that mandatory minimums are at best an inefficient and largely ineffective response to crime. But once again, it has been the dominant reaction to crime spikes for 40 or 50 years now, right? I mean, Rockefeller drug laws were 1973, Michigan 650 Lifer was 1978, uh, the feds got involved in the mid-1980s, and then the states started doing a lot in the 80s and 90s. And so it's just been the intuitive, reflexive thing that you do in response to a crime. And we're still seeing it today. I there were a couple of years ago when catalytic converters were being stolen with regularity, and that spiked. The response was, okay, well, let's just increase the penalty. The laziest, least creative way to attack a problem that you can conceive of. Especially like auto-based vehicle burglaries and auto thefts, where you're like, we have a 4% clearance rate. Exactly. Yes. Right. But we could give a billion-year sentence for each crime and it's still gonna have no effect because they know that there's a one in 25 chance of getting caught. Exactly right. Exactly right. So uh I've been asking all of my my guests this question. I'm very curious if you've given any thought to this. How is AI gonna change your job approach? Have you guys worked in that environment? Or do you have any thoughts on sort of how do how would you change the perceptions of AI adoption going forward? I know this is completely out of left field on this interview, but curious. Well, it is tough because every day you wake up and there's a sea change in the the functional capabilities of various AI systems. So as soon as you think you have a handle on something about AI, it changes so significantly that you've got to just sort of almost start over in how you're ordering your thinking about it. And so I I am still trying to figure out how it should work. I mean, I think there's a tremendous amount of possibility, and you can just immediately see it, right? I mean, imagine AI looking at videotape to look at when the blue car passes this intersection at 2 a.m. rather than a person having to spend his or her time doing the same thing. That's just an immediate personnel multiplier in an investigation or sifting through hundreds of pages of a file in seconds or minutes rather than hours, days, or weeks to figure out, you know, what are the patterns and what am I missing and so on. So you can see a lot of benefit potentially in clearance rates and investigative outcomes and in policing and so on, making policing smarter, trying to figure out where your hotspots are, who are the gangs that are beefing with one another at any given time. You can you can see how AI can be really useful in those. And at the same time, you can see how it would be really subject to abuse, right? And so I I think trying to figure out that balance of the productive uses and the potential for abuse, I don't think we're anywhere close to figuring out what that equilibrium looks like. And again, it changes every day. So even if we were close, we might not be close tomorrow or the next day. I think that there's also a possibility for, and I I haven't heard anybody else talk about this, but it's been my it's been a project of mine for a long time to try to figure this out. Like sentencing disparities based on similar crimes and so on. I feel like we could, with the right AI tool, every sentencing judge in the country could have access to every other sentence for that crime with a similar demographic, similar facts of the case, and so on. So we can figure out how do we eliminate uh disparities that are unnecessary or unjust. And also we can evaluate did the 10-year sentence, was it necessary? What were the five-year sentences just as good? Did you need 15 years and so on? We can we can compare it to recidivism data and and housing and unemployment and all these things and try to figure out for the first time ever, is there an optimal sentence for this crime committed in this way, in this place by this person if our outcomes, if our desired outcomes are X, Y, or Z. So again, I can I can really see a lot of uses for it, but I'm I'm happy to do that. That's a fascinating use case. Cool. Greg, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate it. What is next for you and Niskanin? Yeah, we've been fortunate that we've been able to grow the department. Uh, we we started with just uh two or three of us back in 2021, and then a couple of years ago, we brought on a state affairs manager, we brought on some more government affairs folks, we brought on researchers. So we've been able to expand our output, our original research. We're looking to further expand that. We want to get into more states, and we just want to keep making the case for certainty of apprehension to try to get the deterrence agenda in as many places as possible. So, in a lot of ways, we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing and hopefully doing more of it. Greg, I really appreciate your coming on. Fantastic conversation. And uh, where can people follow you? Follow Niskanon? Yeah, NiskanonCenter.org. I'm one of those folks who has abandoned social media with enthusiasm. So you won't find me on any the social media sites. I I guess LinkedIn we have to have, but other than that, you won't find me. But you will find Niskanon Center on Twitter and on Instagram and those folks. So go go find Niskanon. When I send you the email with the episode link and ask you to share on your socials, you can ignore that request. It'll go right on LinkedIn. It'll be the second thing I've ever posted, probably. Fantastic. Greg, thanks so much for joining. Thanks, Jim. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.