All episodes of The Michael Shermer Show

The Michael Shermer Show · 2026-05-29 · 67 min · 13,576 words

Can Science Fix Criminal Justice?

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player

We put people in prison for several reasons, right? At least four reasons. One is we think it'll deter crime. We already talked about that. It doesn't really work as well as we thought.

There's an incapacitation effect. If you take people who are an active public safety threat off the street, they can't commit crime in the community anymore. That is effective, while at least while they're still a public safety threat, not probably not when they're 80 or 90. And then there's rehabilitation. There's an opportunity at least to use this as an intervention point to put people on a better path, get them mental health care.

care, get them jobs training, you know, other things. We should be increasing the likelihood that anyone is caught if they do something bad. But we don't need to put like the punishment doesn't need to be draconian, right? But it doesn't need to be that, you know, you can't get a job in the future and you're in prison for three years. Like that's how does that help?

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