These reforms could transform criminal justice for people — and they cost almost nothing

The United States is in the middle of one of the most dramatic crime declines in its history — and almost no one seems to know it. (Unless, of course, you read this newsletter.)

FBI data shows violent crime fell 4.5 percent in 2024, with murder plunging nearly 15 percent. Data from the Council on Criminal Justice suggests homicides dropped another 21 percent in 2025 across major cities, potentially putting the country on track for the lowest murder rate ever recorded.

And yet, the US murder rate is still roughly two-and-a-half times Canada’s and five times higher than most of Western Europe. America still locks up more people per capita than almost any other nation on earth. Compared to other wealthy nations, we still have a serious crime problem — and a criminal justice system that too often fails both victims and offenders.

Jennifer Doleac wants to change that. Doleac is the executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures and a member of our inaugural Future Perfect 50 list. Her new book, The Science of Second Chances, makes a data-driven case that small, evidence-based interventions at key points in the criminal justice system can dramatically reduce recidivism — and that we’re leaving an astonishing number of those opportunities on the table.

I talked to Doleac recently about what the research shows. Here are five takeaways.

1) Instead of punishing criminals more, catch them faster

For decades, the default American response to crime has been to make prison and jail sentences longer. Doleac argues we’ve been focused on the wrong end of the problem. “My team at Arnold Ventures is spending a lot of time trying to shift the policy conversation from adding sentence enhancements and passing bills that increase sentence length, to solving more crimes faster,” she told me. “That’s something that not only works better, and it’s cheaper, it also has an opportunity for bipartisan support.”

The logic is rooted in behavioral economics. Most people who commit crime are heavily focused on the present; they’re not weighing the difference between a 10-year and a 15-year sentence. What does change their behavior is the probability of getting caught right now.

Doleac’s own research offers a striking illustration: when Denmark expanded its law enforcement DNA database to include anyone charged with a felony, future criminal convictions among those added fell over 40 percent in a study that focused on men ages 18-30. Not because these people were locked up, but because a simple saliva swab changed the calculus. They knew they’d be more likely to be identified if they reoffended.

“It’s really that reduction in recidivism that most excited me as a researcher,” Doleac said. “The opportunity to use the ability to increase the probability of getting caught as a way to change behavior and put people on a better path.”

2) Give first-timers a real second chance

This may be the most counterintuitive finding in the book: dropping charges against first-time misdemeanor defendants doesn’t lead to more crime. It leads to dramatically less.

Doleac and her co-authors studied what happened when nonviolent misdemeanor cases in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, were dismissed at arraignment — essentially because the defendant got lucky with a more lenient prosecutor. The result: a 53 percent reduction in the likelihood of future criminal complaints. A separate study in Harris County, Texas, found nearly identical effects for first-time felony defendants who avoided a felony conviction via deferred adjudication or dismissal. Their reoffending rates were cut roughly in half, and their employment rates rose by nearly 50 percent over a decade.

These are major effects, and Doleac told me she was initially skeptical. “If we reduce the consequences in some way, you’re probably going to see some people commit more crime. And so the question is just, what’s the cost-benefit, right?” she said. “And then it just turned out to be this massive drop in crime, costing less money, taking less time, and leaving everybody better off.”

Why does this work? The mechanism appears to be the criminal record itself. Once you’re arraigned, that charge is visible to employers and law enforcement — even if the case is eventually dropped. “It makes it harder to get a job or keep a job, harder to get housing,” Doleac explained. For first-timers, avoiding that first record keeps them on a path where they can still find work and stability.

Some of the most effective interventions in Doleac’s book are almost absurdly simple.

In New York City, researchers found that about 40 percent of people issued a summons for low-level offenses missed their court hearings — often not because they were fleeing justice, but because the instructions were confusing and people forgot or couldn’t get there. Redesigning the paperwork cut failures to appear by 6 percentage points (a 13 percent reduction), and text reminders raised appearance rates from 62 percent to 70 percent (8 points.) That matters because a missed hearing typically triggers an arrest warrant and new charges, pulling people deeper into the system over what might have started as an open-container violation.

In Johnson County, Kansas, outreach workers simply called people leaving jail who screened positive for mental illness and offered to make them a health care appointment. That was it — a phone call and an appointment. No follow-up, no hand-holding. That “warm handoff” reduced the likelihood of another jail booking (a proxy for rearrest) by 17 percent over the following year, at a cost of $15 per person. As the book puts it, these are examples of how small shifts in information and access — what economists would call changing incentives on the margin — can divert people away from the system at a fraction of the cost of incarceration.

4) Test everything — even the popular ideas

Doleac’s commitment to evidence cuts in every direction, and some of her findings have upset people on both the left and the right.

The most prominent example is her research on “Ban the Box” — the popular policy preventing employers from asking about criminal records on job applications early in the hiring process. The goal was to help people with records get hired. The unintended result was the opposite.

“Economists look at that and they’re like, wait, you didn’t actually change any of the underlying incentives involved,” Doleac told me. “Employers are not just going to treat everyone equally now — they’re going to try to guess about the information that they wish they could see. And in the United States, criminal records are highly correlated with race.”

Her study found that Ban the Box increased racial gaps in employment, reducing job prospects for young Black men. The effect was particularly felt by those who didn’t have a record, and who could no longer signal that fact to employers. Subsequent research found the policy wasn’t even helping the people it was designed for. But by the time the evidence came out, “there was a really established Ban the Box lobby, whose jobs depended on not being convinced by the evidence, and it became very difficult to shift that.”

The broader lesson isn’t that reform is hopeless — it’s that good intentions aren’t enough. Policies need to be tested rigorously, and policymakers need to be willing to pivot when the data says something isn’t working.

5) The reform window is open — for now

Falling crime rates create a paradox. On one hand, less fear means more political space to experiment with smarter approaches. On the other, there’s a risk of complacency.

“You could imagine everyone saying, ‘Okay, good, that’s over,‘” Doleac said. “But maybe part of the lesson here is when we all try really hard to reduce crime, we can do it. And crime is still, even if it’s not a problem in your neighborhood right now, it’s a problem in a lot of neighborhoods.”

The reason Doleac is optimistic has less to do with the data and more to do with what she’s seeing on the ground. “I now spend a lot of time talking to state lawmakers,” she told me. “And that is just a very different world from the cable news political conversation.”

These lawmakers are part-time, understaffed, and trying to solve real problems in real communities.

“When I took this job, I really thought a lot of the fights would be over whether we believe the evidence or not,” she said. “What I’ve learned is it’s a much more human problem — policymakers and researchers just do not know each other.”

That bipartisan potential — on issues like improving clearance rates, testing what works in reentry, and reducing unnecessary prosecution — may be the most underappreciated good news in criminal justice today. “We might not know why there are big swings in crime,” Doleac said. “But we can point people in the right direction. It’s not just random chance, and we don’t just have to cling to our theories. We can go out and test them.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!