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How Empathy Cuts Crime
Institutions aren’t just about products and services — there are real humans involved. Whether you’re buying and selling, creating and consuming, or teaching and learning, every social transaction has subjective feelings operating at both sides. Modern industry takes this seriously, which is why you’ll often find behavioral scientists and psychologists working at major organizations.
However, the same attention to human experience isn’t present in many of our most crucial public services. Earlier this year, one research project studied the human side of criminal behavior and the way our legal system responds to it. It turns out that nurturing one simple human variable — empathy — may help to reduce criminal reoffending.
Empathy in the penal system
Recidivism refers to repeated criminal behavior following prior offenses, and it’s one of the biggest challenges in legal systems around the world. When we punish people for wrongdoing, our ultimate hope is that the punishment will deter future criminal behavior. But this assumption often doesn’t work out so well. The US has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world with 76.6% of released prisoners finding themselves…
