CAUSE, EFFECT, AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL WORLD

"This paper surveys 50+ years of randomized control trials in criminal justice and shows that almost no interventions have lasting benefit -- and the ones that do don't replicate in other settings."

By MEGAN T. STEVENSON. From BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW.

"ABSTRACT 

This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another. This has a variety of implications. It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth. Understanding this shifts how we should think about social change and raises important questions about the process of knowledge generation."

"CONCLUSION

 Some might see the central claims of this Article as depressing. A world characterized by stabilizing forces that resist change could be seen as a trap, a vortex of inescapable and oppressive social forces. I have a slightly different perspective, one which harks back to an argument presented when discussing the scope of my claim. In an indirect way, this Article celebrates the strength and creativity of the human spirit. The fact that outside forces—interventions— are largely unsuccessful at engineering change in people’s lives does not necessarily mean that humans are powerless beings in the throes of social forces. Rather, it suggests that people have already fought to create the best lives they could for themselves given the circumstances. Any barriers to success that were readily moveable had already been moved—by people themselves and their communities. In econ-speak, people had maximized their utility subject to constraints. That being said, the constraints that remain appear to be deep, structural, and hard to shift. That doesn’t mean they are immovable, but just that they usually aren’t moveable with the type of intervention evaluable via RCT. As for how to move them—I don’t know. Moreover, I don’t think we can know, or at least not with the high levels of confidence promised by the engineer’s view. We will proceed, but must do so with the humility of uncertainty."