A Meta Question For Criminal Justice Research

America spends massive amounts of money on criminal justice — especially on prisons.

It’s big business in a country that incarcerates over two million people and keeps millions more on probation or parole. Nationally, the annual cost to incarceate so many people approaches $70 billion, according to estimates by the Economics of Crime working group at the Bureau of Economic Research.

Of course, America does tend to do things in a big way. I was reminded of this tonight, when listening to Fresh Air. The guest was author Matthew Aid, who said that the number of intelligence analysts working for Uncle Sam has ballooned to 210,000 in the wake of 9/11.

This led me to wonder: If America can afford 210,000 intelligence analysts, what about criminal justice analysts? Is the amount of research that is done to help guide decisions in our sprawling justice system even remotely proportionate to the system’s expense?

The healthcare system has the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and other institutions devoted to research. Their funding is quite ample and their role in developing guidelines for hte delivery of care is significant.

What about criminal justice? It’s true that the National Institute of Justice, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Justice, supports research and issues grants for demonstration projects. There are also various research agencies at the state and sometimes even the local level.

But does our society really invest in enough research to develop an adequate level of knowledge about how the criminal justice system is performing?

Know 2, Don't Know 8?

In sixteeenth century Europe, when pretensions to absolute certainty made burning supposed heretics at the stake an all-too-common occurrence, Michel Montaigne remained a cool reserve.

How, he queried in his essays, could people be so certain of the truth of dogmatic, abstract propositions, when the human mind is so inherently limited? And, one must also note, the human heart is so potentially treacherous?

A decade into the 21st century, such healthy scepticism remains an important counterpoint to pell-mell orthodoxy. Why are so many people in America incarcerated, and what do we really get for the constant and still increasing drain on our collective coffers?

Let's admit that, to a very great extent, noone knows.

A number of the foremost criminologists have recently moved toward this more Montaigne-like view. Michael Tonry, puncturing holes in the easy explanations of why crime rates fell throughout the 1990s, speaks openly of "mystery." Alfred Blumenstein points out the very low amount of money spent on criminal justice research, compared to medical and even dental research. And Franklin Zimring commented a couple of years ago, regarding the state of criminal justice knowledge, that one could describe the score on that question as Know 2, Don't Know 8.

To recongnize the importance of this epistemological humilty, one could even go two millenia back from Montaigne to Socrates. Admitting what you do not know can be the beginning of wisdom.