This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 21st, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

To understand the problems in our criminal justice system, we need better data.

States don't follow the same rules when collecting and reporting data and that data collection can vary widely between jurisdictions.

Stuart Buck is Vice President for research at Arnold Ventures, he argues that if the criminal justice system wants to treat people

with due process to which they are entitled, getting better data out of our criminal justice

system is critical.

How do you evaluate the current status of collecting criminal

justice data in a both a format and a rigorous way that makes it useful for people trying to study trends in criminal justice.

Right, so one of the examples comes from a book on misdemeanors by Alexandra Natopoff,

who's a scholar who studies these issues.

And she was trying to write about misdemeanors across America,

and one of the early chapters in her book goes into the extraordinary difficulty of just estimating how many misdemeanors

occur across the country each year. You might think this is a simple, you know,

just a simple counting exercise, like counting the number of, you know of states or counties in the country.

But it's not so.

It turns out that some states don't really report the number of misdemeanors that they

prosecuted in a given year of the

states that do report the number they do it in wildly inconsistent ways so you

will see one state that has let's say X number misdemeanors and the neighboring state for no apparent

reason has 3 X the number of misdemeanors and you know she's trying to

puzzle why would that be it turns out the second state is counting all

...