⚖️ Empathic Law Enforcement Reduces Criminal Behavior

How a 30-minute online exercise boosts empathy and cuts crime

Oct 10, 2021

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 back in handcuffs within five years.

Many of our efforts to improve the legal system focus on objective processes and efficiencies. While those questions are important, any good answer to the recidivism problem requires a human-centered focus too. For example, what emotional variables affect the probability that someone will reoffend?

Earlier this year, Jason Okonofua and his colleagues at Berkeley published a study putting human perception front and center. They specifically looked at how parole and probation officers interact with their clients.

One common mistake we all make in social interactions is to collectively blame entire groups for the offenses of single individuals. If we have a negative experience with a mechanic, we might conclude “mechanics are so frustrating”. If we discuss a political topic with a hostile adversary, we might conclude “people who vote for that party are so evil”. For parole officers, any negative interactions with people on parole can lead them to conclude that “people on parole will always be criminals”.

Okonofua and his research team tested how changing these thought patterns among parole officers might improve outcomes for people on parole (some of the officers in the research sample were actually probation officers rather than parole officers, but I’ll simplify by using the generic term “parole officers”).

The researchers recruited 216 parole officers and split them into treatment and control groups. Officers in the control group completed exercises to improve their task management skills. Exercises for the treatment group had a very similar structure to the control group but a completely different focus—they were designed to boost empathy.

Here’s what the treatment exercises involved:

First, officers read an article that emphasized how “officers are pivotal in working to improve the lives of the client and the greater community by guiding and supporting successful reentry.”
- These ideas were supported by quotes from officer colleagues talking about their proudest moments. For example, “when I run across those guys [clients on the street] and they’re doing well I’m like, ‘awesome!’ …those are some of the more fulfilling parts of the job for me”.
Second, officers were asked to described their personal values and why they became officers in the first place. They also read material explaining why mutual trust and respect is essential in parole officer relationships, and they were discouraged from thinking about clients as “mere numbers”.
Third, they completed an exercise that stimulated feelings of hypocrisy related to collective blame. Specifically, they read about a parole officer committing a crime and then considered how that crime should reflect on other parole officers as a group—are other officers equally likely to commit the crime? After that, the officers repeated the exercise in the context of paroled people rather than officers. This gave them an opportunity to detect hypocrisy or inconsistency in how they judged officer misconduct versus client misconduct.
Finally, to solidify any learnings, officers wrote a letter to a new parole officer describing some of their personal thoughts related to principles within the education program. For example, “the work of a parole or probation officer can come to feel impersonal. It is critical for officers to remember the humanity in their work and the people they work with.”

After the treatment program, the researchers measured parole officer perceptions and client reoffending rates for the next 10 months, analyzing differences between the treatment and control groups.

Ten months after the program ended, parole officers in the treatment group were significantly less likely than officers in the control group to use collective blame in reasoning about paroled people. The hypocrisy exercise (number 3 above) clearly worked and produced a lasting impact that made officers less likely to tar all paroled people with the same brush.

But most remarkably, during the entire 10 months following the program, clients supervised by the treatment group officers were consistently less likely to violate parole terms or get arrested.

Recidivism rates are notoriously difficult to shift, and yet, an inexpensive 30-min empathy intervention for parole officers produced a 13% drop in recidivism among their clients.

Beware collective blame: All of us are affected by cognitive biases and poor reasoning. Our brains are amazing, but many of the shortcuts we use to understand the world don’t work so well in modern life. By developing a better awareness of errors in collective blame, we’re more likely to spot them when they happen and correct them in the future.
Empathy is impactful: Empathy is more than just a fluffy feeling (I’ve previously written about it in more detail here). Even in the toughest circumstances and harshest institutions, empathy has a noticeably positive impact. Cultivate it in your own life and use it to develop a more compassionate attitude toward other people. In fact, since we’re often our own harshest critics, direct more of it toward yourself too.
Battle your revenge instinct: Let’s face it—revenge feels great and instant karma is wonderful to watch. But it’s a primitive impulse that can be very misleading. Next time you feel it bubbling, consider whether you might be missing some wider context that explains another person’s motivations. Questions like “what makes people evil?” and “is revenge practical right now?” are a good way to shift from a reactive emotional mindset into a more conscious deliberative mindset.