This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 29th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Our criminal justice system is flawed and flawed so deeply the problems we associate

with police, prosecutors, public defenders, and

departments of corrections almost seemed to conspire to give so many criminal

defendants less than fair treatment.

Rachel Elise Barco, a professor of law at New York University,

is author of the new book, Prisoners of Politics,

breaking the cycle of mass incarceration.

We spoke last week. Politicians, you know, they talk about

criminal justice in many cases the same way they talk about immigration. When it comes to forming policy, individual crimes are given this

outsized influence when it comes to policymaking. It flies in the face for the most part with what we know about

deterrence and the power of harsh punishments to dole out deterrence. What do we know with certainty about the relationship

between the harshness of punishment and deterrence and what predicts deterrence better.

So what we know is that people's gut level intuition,

that it's always better to have tougher sentences

as a matter of deterrence or incapacitation,

is inaccurate, because that gut intuition misses the trade-offs.

So first of all for deterrence, we know that what matters much more based on the empirical

studies is whether or not someone thinks they're going to get caught.

So odds of detection and the certainty that there'll be any kind of consequence matters far

more for someone's decision-making, then what would the penalty be should they get caught? So we know that.

And then the other thing that we also know is the other argument in favor of longer sentences

...