Zoom Meeting ID: 994 9962 1451
PW: CRIM558
Fielding RCTs in the U.S. Legal Profession: Randomizing Incarceration And Its Downstream Effects
The United States legal profession is uniquely resistant to scientific evidence and especially disdainful of randomized control trials (“RCTs”), adhering instead to the exclusive focus on an experience-based conception of truth that medicine abandoned in the late 1930s. The resulting knowledge void renders policy makers unable to take advantage of the current, and likely fleeting, social movement favoring decarceral reforms by adopting evidence-based policies and practices. This talk will discuss challenges in implementing RCTs in the U.S. criminal justice system. It will also present three criminal justice RCTs, one in the field, one in advanced planning, and one in an aspirational phase, through which researchers hope to begin to fill the void.