This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 15th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Many deep red states have taken some significant steps toward reducing penalties for low-level crime in an attempt

to save money.

But what's driving that effort today?

Derek Cohen, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, discusses some of the hopes for future criminal justice reform.

There has been a tremendous turnaround in polling on criminal justice issues and how the public thinks people who've been convicted of something ought to be treated.

So what has driven that?

Well, Caleb, you need to first look at how we got to the initial polling on criminal justice, especially when we look at the

polling of the early 80s and through the early 90s.

You generally see what we've known in academia as the punitive public.

In other words, you see that the public, given his druthers, would rather punish than not.

The only problem is this preference exists in a binary. It is simply

is crime bad, do we punish it? Yes or no. And now that's obviously an oversimplification

of the questions asked, but it didn't get much more in-depth than that.

So drilling down a lot of the social science researchers, as they found out in subsequent

iterations, is that when given more information, we've actually found that the public gets far less

punitive because instead of dealing with you know the hypothetical offender in one's

mind which is you know the the praised heart murderer versus, you know, the person who's graffiti

tagging a garage, you know, we're going to air towards the former than the latter.

So the more information that is given the more we see that that effect dissipate.

One example of this was a test that was run in Hamilton County, Ohio in Cincinnati.

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