Theory, practice and contradictions

From Does Pretrial Detention Reduce or Increase Crime? by Alex Tabarrok. Research across domains of knowledge, in this case economic theory and justice theory, is more interesting and more fruitful because it involves the recombination of ideas and evidence in new contexts. On the other hand, it is also more challenging, expensive to conduct and more subject to definitional and comprehension issues (one field not fully grasping the other).

Tabarrok summarizes the results from one study as:

In other words, the right to counsel makes it easier for criminals to escape justice and since the price of crime falls the quantity of crime increases. Makes sense!

And the other as:

In other words, when you lock people up before trial they lose their jobs and are more likely to get a record so pretrial detention severs attachments to civil life and increases attachments to criminal life with the end result being increased crime. Makes sense!

His overarching observation is:

What’s frustrating is that both of these papers are good–they have a plausible theory and sound research design–yet they reach opposite conclusions! To be sure, the time periods, places, people and exact experiment are different so both papers could be true. From the policy maker’s perspective, however, the fact that both papers could be true only adds to the difficulty of using academic evidence to make policy.

Marginal Revolution is a blog with highly intelligent and sophisticated readers and while the commenting can occasionally get raucous, it is usually, as in this case, highly discerning and informative.