Jennifer Dolyak, thank you for talking to your reason.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so I know probably everyone ask you this question, but I'm going to start with a low-hanging fruit.

And it's also what your book begins with. I find it fundamentally interesting that you are an economist who primarily talks about crime and criminal justice. So just starting off there, I would be

interested to hear you talk a little more about the relationship between those two things,

because I think a lot of people would think they're unrelated and how you got them. Yeah. So,

yeah, economists study all kinds of things that are not GDP and money and banks.

And so that tends to be surprising to everyone. But, you know, we study their education economists,

health economists, and they're a crime economist. And so I think there are three big reasons that economics is useful for thinking about crime.

One is we think a lot about how people respond to incentives.

So that's really the theoretical lens that economists bring to the table.

And it turns out there are misaligned incentives throughout the criminal justice system.

And so that that lens and that thinking about, you know, if we want to change behavior,

we should be changing the costs and benefits that people are responding to. That is just a

different lens than other than lawyers bring or sociologists bring to the conversation.

The second is that economists are more obsessed

than everyone else with distinguishing correlation from causation. And so if we want to know

if a policy or program actually works and, you know, if we want to measure exactly what the

impact of some intervention is on behavior. Economists tend to be the

best people to talk to about that. And then the third is that because we're so good at measuring

those impacts, we can be really helpful to policymakers and practitioners who want to think about

how to allocate their scarce resources to meet some goal. And so we love

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