 All right. Hello, Greg. How you doing today? Good. Nice to be here, Chris. Yeah, I'm super glad we get to talk. I've been really curious about this topic and I think about it at the time. But first, before we dive into it, the book that we're mainly going to be talking about is Rejecting Retributivism, right? So this book is a little bit older. You actually have a recent book, Just Desserts. But can you kind of explain what Rejecting Retributivism is kind of about what the idea is in a larger context for those who don't know? Sure. Yeah. So retributivism is one of the leading justifications for punishment in the criminal justice system. So I'm primarily concerned with legal punishment, institutional punishment, when the government punishes criminals or wrongdoers. And so retributivism basically maintains that absent any excusing conditions like, you know, insanity or some other sort of mitigating circumstances. Wrongdoers morally deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing. So the basic idea is wrongdoers deserve something bad to happen to them because they know and they done wrong. And that can include everything from pain, deprivation, loss of liberty, all the way up to say the death penalty. But the idea of retributivism is grounded in basically two sort of really important philosophical notions. The idea of just desserts that individuals justly deserve to sort of suffer for the wrongs they've done, where dessert here is not what we have after dinner. It's not deserts. It's the idea that it's punishment one deserves. Yeah. And this also kind of entails that the punishment is justified on purely backward looking grounds that is the punishment is somehow intrinsically morally good. It's good without reference to some other forward looking benefits like deterrence, or moral formation or to make society better. So the idea is that just wrongdoers deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing, regardless of whether it would have any of these forward looking benefits. And this has been both historically and presently one of the leading justifications for punishment and the criminal justice system. And so in the book, it's basically broken into two main halves with like one transitional chapter. The first half of the book lays out six distinct arguments against retributivism, why we should reject it. Two of them and a large focus of the book has to do with issues to do with free will and more responsibility. And then the second half of the book is my attempt to offer an alternative. Yeah, an alternative to not only retributive punishment, but to other non-retributive alternatives like deterrence and mixed theories of punishment. I argue that there are some moral complications with some of the other leading alternatives. And so I attempt to develop a non punitive and non-retributive approach called the public health warranty model. Yeah, yeah. And this is this is something like as I just kind of, you know, even think about the other side, it's something I'm really passionate about. So to lay it out. And so on Twitter, one day, I was like, hey, I'd love to talk about free will and the justice system. And I was like, you know what, Greg talks about this. I'm like, hey, we want to do it and we connected. But the reason being so I got sober in 2012. So I have nine years sober and I was a terrible human being, right? Like awful, just, you know, drugs, alcohol. I live here in Vegas. And, you know, I'm the son of an alcoholic mom, right? She got sober when I was 20. Mental illness runs through my family. You know, I've worked in rehab. I've worked with so many people who have, you know, all these all these factors outside of their control, right? And and aside, aside from that, like aside from the free will conversation, like you're talking about, like, you know, the punishment aspect, right, and the deterrence. And, you know, I have read so many books and I just love to read and learn and stuff, and I have yet to find any evidence that punishment works as a deterrent. And, you know, especially with like the prison industrial complex, how it keeps people in the prison system, like they don't really have any, you know, so that's one of the reasons why I'm just like, I want to talk about this. So so when when you're looking at this, I'm kind of curious just to get to know you, Greg, like what what made you interested in this topic, like, you know, like, I was interested because I was looking at the world and I've had all these experiences, like, was it something similar? Like, did you see some issues or? Well, yeah, I mean, I it's hard to always diagnose or analyze how one ends up sort of interested in the things they're interested in. But I was always interested in issues to do with agency, free will and more responsibility. And so I came to my views on free will first. So just for the listeners, I'm a free will skeptic. So I maintain that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. And because of this, we're never morally responsible in a very specific sense. What I call the basic desert sense, the sense that would make you truly deserving of praise and blame and punishment and reward. It's exactly the kind of more responsibility that's required for retributivism. So by rejecting this notion of free will, that offers one reason for rejecting retributivism, but I also started to get really interested in criminal justice, in part for a couple reasons. You know, I had I have five older brothers, two of them also struggle, struggled with drug addiction. I also saw how much of the, you know, criminal justice system is a byproduct of social features that it has less to do with individuals and more to do with circumstances. And so the more you begin to look at the role that lock plays in outcomes, it got me really interested in thinking about issues of justice and then in particular issues of criminal justice. And then you start looking at, you know, and this is all sort of stuff that's become part of the consciousness, but only more recently, this mass incarceration crisis we have in the United States. I mean, we make we have up only about United States makes up only about 4.5 percent of the world's population. That's relatively small part of the overall population. But we house 25 percent of the world's prisoners. That's the largest rate of incarceration known to civilization. No other society that we know of and, you know, in record has ever incarcerated that many people. And it's disproportionately affected black and brown communities. And you actually, like, you know, and maybe you could talk about this with your own experience at this point, you know, people are starting to be touched by the criminal justice system because one out of every 31 Americans. Just think about this. One out of every 31 Americans is somewhere in the criminal justice system, whether it's probation for all jail prison. That's a huge number of individuals being drawn into a system. And then you start asking, well, what's the purpose of this system? Is it the outcomes we really want? Is it making us safer? Is it the best way to deal with issues having to do with, you know, drug addiction and mental illness? And so those issues sort of got me into searching into the causes and the social factors, what I call the social determinants of criminal behavior. And the more you begin to analyze those social determinants of criminal behavior, the more you begin to realize that they're very similar to things like the social determinants of health, you know, like things like poverty, low socioeconomic status, abuse, domestic violence, housing, especially housing insecurity, mental illness, health care, education, environmental health, nutrition. We all know intuitively that those things have an effect on health outcomes, like people who live in poverty have higher rates of morbidity, higher rates of type 2 diabetes, higher rates of heart disease. But we also see once you look closely that they also have higher incarceration rates. And the same is true with low socioeconomic status, higher rates of abuse and domestic violence. So just think of this one statistic, 85 to 90 percent of women who are currently imprisoned in the United States have been themselves previously victims of abuse. Yeah. 85 to 90 percent. So that's either sexual assault, rape, child abuse. Some form of physical violence has been perpetrated on them. And the more you begin to look into the lives of those who find themselves within the criminal justice system, it's very hard to draw this line between criminal and a victim and perpetrator because almost all of the individuals who find themselves in the system with themselves victims at one point or another. And you begin to think then that if it's if it's, you know, is it is it the best way to go about, you know, blaming individuals and seeking, you know, retributive punishment on women who were abused because the abuse affects them in such a way that they ultimately begin to end up engaging in criminal behavior. And one of the reasons as a part is that either they usually co-addiction. So usually so you have a combination of violence within a relationship, you're compounded with, you know, a co-addictive, you know, partner. And so they might commit criminal acts, petty crimes to feed their their habit. It might be that they commit criminal acts in retaliation to their abuser or in many other cases, it's that. And we know this, the psychological effects of abuse. That women who are abused have a harder time holding full time jobs. It creates a psychological, you know, like post-traumatic stress effect on individuals, which has a big impact on their daily, you know, functioning. And so they have higher rates of unemployment. And if you're unemployed, you can't hold a job. You're going to end up resorting to petty crimes to get by. And so is the right approach to dealing with these kinds of cases, you know, punishment and retribution? Or is it to better to address what I would call the social determinants of crime and focus on prevention and social justice that is fixing the systemic causes of criminal behavior in the first place, rather than punishing individuals on the tail end? Yeah. Yeah. So last last year, I don't know what what sparked it. I think some of it was like, you know, you know, everything around like the Black Lives Matter protests and, you know, George Floyd and all that. But I was looking at, you know, systems and I got really interested in that. And I started diving into the idea of like meritocracy, right? And, you know, I started thinking about it more because I was this, you know, I was this person mainly because of my addiction recovery. I'm like, I worked hard. I put in the effort. I got sober, right? And then I was like, oh, there was a lot of things that really went my way. Like my mom was seven years sober when I got sober, right? She paid for me to go into sober living. And these are a lot of advantages that a lot of people don't have. And I actually recently spoke with Robert Frank about his book, Success and Luck, right? And that's when I, you know, his book and many others, I started learning about, you know, just things like John Rawls, like veil of ignorance, right? And and just there's so many things outside of our control. And like kind of like what you're talking about, like we have so much data, right? We have so much data around people from certain backgrounds and, you know, areas and stuff who are at these higher rates. And and then we know, too, like you were mentioning, you know, holding the it's difficult to hold down a job. Well, also you mentioned like, you know, looking at like, hey, is the prison even helping when people get out of prison, right? They have this this mark on them, right? So it's even it's still hard to get a job. And then when you factor in probation parole, it's difficult to socialize and it's difficult to do all these other things. So I guess one of my first questions, like about this is like, as you're explaining this, right, like, I hear you and I feel like I'm a sane person, Greg, you're making sense to me. So I'm trying to understand how does anybody look at the data, the numbers, the logic behind it and say, no, no, that person who got abused and, you know, had all these terrible things in life, we need to shovel them in a cell. Like, what is the counter argument? What is the logic behind that? Yeah, I think so, you know, it gets philosophical. I'm a philosopher. So I think at bottom, the kind of mentality we have, especially in the United States, this kind of rugged individualism that is very prevalent throughout the United States leads us to see individuals as morally accountable and seeing criminal behavior as the result of individual actions. And so if you see it all in terms of the issue of free will and individual responsibility, then you tend to have this idea of a meritocracy and that people could pick themselves up from the bootstraps and overcome poverty or prior abuse or, you know, homelessness or whatever hurdles they were presented with. Individuals have the free will to choose to do good or do evil. Now, part of, you know, so let me get set back. I mean, I offer a number of different arguments, both in this book and many of my other works, for why we should be free will skeptics. And I don't want to get overly complicated for the non experts out there. But I mean, there's two, there's two general routes. One is more technical, but basically it stems from the idea of what's called hard incompatibilism. And it's the idea that whether determinism is true or indeterminism is true. We would lack the kind of control and action required for individuals to be free and morally responsible in the sense required. I call them basic desert sense, the sense of making truly deserving of praise and blame. And this gets into longstanding traditional debates about free will. Let me just say for the, for those who don't know, determinism is the thesis that every event or action, including human actions or the inevitable result of preceding events and actions in combination with the laws of nature. So it's the idea that facts about the remote past and conjunction with the laws of nature, Intel is only one fixed future. Yeah, quick question. Did you watch that show Devs that came out? Yeah, I did. Yeah. Obviously, questions about determinism and free will. That's why I learned about it. Historical argument is that determinism is true. It seems to be a challenge to free will because individuals either wouldn't be able to do otherwise because of determinism is true. The only thing that occurs is the only thing that could have occurred. Or that individuals are the ultimate source of their actions because the source hood drains back to anteceding conditions, upbringing past how they were raised, what kinds of experiences they had all the way back to even before they were born. But then part of my argument is that even if you introduce indeterminacy, that's not going to preserve free will either, because it doesn't give the agent the ability to control the outcomes. Just introducing random indeterminacy is not going to preserve the agent's ability to settle what outcome actually occurs. It could get more complicated here and there are arguments like compatibilism. But let me just let me just add one other thing. And this is more to your point. I also say, regardless of all of the metaphysical stuff about determinism and quantum mechanics or indeterminism, the issue of luck is huge here. So there's a separate argument developed by philosopher, well, number of philosophers, but most recently, Neil Levy defended in a book called Hard Luck, which is the idea that luck swallows all. So the basic idea is that there's two kinds of luck that's relevant here. I mean, there are other kinds that other philosophers identified, but there's constitutive luck, which is the kind of luck that makes you the person you are that that constitutes your character, your psychological predisposition. So these are matters of luck. And you mentioned Rawls. Rawls is a big proponent of this part of the idea of Rawls is actually to come up with a theory of justice not grounded in dessert, because he was perhaps one of the first to be really aware of this idea that a lot of these factors are just contingencies of birth, you know, who you're born to, born into a white family, a black family, rich or poor, whether you're born with a learning disability, whether you have mental health issues. These are not things you earn. These are not things you deserve. And so in a certain sense, you know, we should have a kind of approach to justice that doesn't doesn't, you know, penalize people for bad luck and doesn't automatically reward people for things that weren't ultimately within their control. Yeah. So the constitutive luck is the kind of luck that makes you who you are. It's a kind of circumstances that shape you as an individual. And then there's what we could call present luck, luck around the time of action. And this is the kind of luck of what thoughts to come to me in that particular moment, what reasons I find most salient. But can also be the luck of, you know, whether, you know, I meet someone on a park bench or suspension bridge, the color of the wall, all of these things can affect my choices in ways I'm unaware of. And the idea is that the combination of constitutive luck and present luck, ultimately swallow all and undermine moral responsibility. So you mentioned even in your own recovery, that, yeah, there's effort. But a, there's, there are big factors of luck that helped you succeed, right? You had maybe a support system, you had your mother, you recovered, you had people who could afford to send you to rehab. And then there's the kind of luck that made you the person who could put the effort in, could overcome. And those are factors of constitutive luck. And so the idea is that whether it be present luck or constitutive luck, our actions are always being affected by factors beyond our control, whether those factors are determinism, whether those factors are randomness, or whether those factors are luck, my argument is that who we are, what we do is ultimately result of these factors that we don't control. And because of that, we don't have the kind of more responsibility that would be needed to justify this kind of fun. Yeah, it's, and I think one of the reasons I find it, you know, just the whole conversation so interesting is, is because like, I guess one, one quick question I have, right, when we're talking about the things outside of our control and like being skeptical of free will, like I, like, I don't know if I'm just like not thinking about it correctly yet, but is it, is this like an absolute 100% thing? Or are there great areas? So for example, right? I've been sober for nine years. If I, if I said, Hey, Greg, I'm leaving, I live in Las Vegas, I could go down the street, get alcohol, whatever, right, and relapse, right? There was a series of decisions that I made, right? So, you know, I work, you know, when I was working out of rehab with, you know, addicts, everything like that, you know, I, I try to give them this kind of agency and say, Hey, this is up to you, like when you leave this treatment center, if you go to meetings, if you follow up with your mental health, you know, whether it's a therapist or psychiatrist, if you decide to take your meds, like, so there's, there's all of those, right? But at the same time, I also get that, you know, maybe, maybe the person just wasn't born with that kind of will that drive that, you know, whatever some of those little factors are. So, so yeah, the question is, like, is there a balance? Or is it like, no, no, free will is just non existent? Well, I mean, you have to look at the arguments, I'm not going to tell people that, you know, ultimately, that they should, they should decide this because of what I say. But my view, my view is that the way the best way to get to the conclusion that it's all inclusive is the idea that well, look at all the other alternative accounts that try to make sense of free will. And my argument would be, once you look at them closely, you'll see that they fail for various reasons. And because all of the other leading accounts fail, as a default, I argue that free will skepticism is the only rational position to adopt. And it's because when you look at you look at the ways that the other theories try to preserve it, there's one approach that tries to just introduce, you know, random indeterminacy at the level of events, why would argue that's not going to preserve free will, because at least the agent unable to settle which outcome, there's one way that you can preserve free will by bringing in an agent who is capable of being like an uncaused cause capable of generating their own actions, devoid of antecedent events, have certain causal powers. But this view requires a kind of set of metaphysical commitments. I would argue it's hard to justify and reconcile with our best scientific theories about the world. And then the last view is this kind of compatibilist view that says, Well, you can be determined and free at the same time. And it's a matter of whether or not the action is coerced or uncoerced or whether the agent is has certain capacities of reasons, responsiveness. My response to those views is that look, all of those things matter. And just like you said, when you're working with other patients and other clients, you do want to stress agency, you want to stress the ability that your actions matter, your choices matter. I'm not denying that what I would deny is that the whether agents are reasons responsive or not, is not a factor they ultimately control how reasons responsive they are is not a factor they ultimately control. The choices they make are the result of inner psychological states. Well, those inner psychological states themselves are the result of factors beyond their control. Or auditory factors, environmental factors, factors about how, you know, they were raised, what kinds of experiences they had as a child, what kinds of social circumstances they've been exposed to, and all those other things I mentioned, whether they raised in poverty, low social economic, exposed to violence, those things will have a big impact on, on their inner psychology and how they think and how they weigh and how they make decisions. So yes, they're making decisions. Yes, they're, they're choosing to act in certain ways. But my argument would be the choices themselves are the causal result of factors beyond their own control. Now, of course, we could intervene. And that's partly what you do as a, as a counselor, or that's partly what I do as a teacher. Or that's partly what people do as parents, they intervene to try to alter those inner scales so that people make different choices moving forward. But that that itself would be the result of what I would call antecedent causes that my interventions themselves were causes and those causes have effects. So the idea is ultimately, you can't escape this, this, this web of cause and effects, and that everything is going to have causal antecedents that, you know, drain back the factors, the agent really can't control themselves. And then you have the additional factors about luck, and how heavily luck matters. But yeah, I don't want to go on. Yeah, no, I, I think about, you know, I just see a lot of luck. For example, I've had clients reach out to me and, you know, years later and be like, Hey, you really helped me or whatever. And I often talk about, you know, when I share my story and stuff, I'm like, there's people who said things just randomly said something in a meeting changed my life. It stuck with me. It's a new life philosophy I live by. And it's like the chance encounter that I was in the same room with them, they happen to say that thing. You know, if you have students and you change their lives, you know, they got you as a teacher and whatever led them to going to that, you know, school and all these other things, right? So I got a question for you. This this goes a little bit more towards the political side. And and I'm trying, I ask a lot of people this because I'm trying to figure it out. I am. I'm trying to find an excellent argument for just leaving capitalism intact. Okay, because it seems it seems like because we're in this idea of like the meritocracy and you work hard, you rise to the top and we have a free market and you can do all this, then it trickles down to even things like the justice system. So I guess what I'm getting at it is it feels like when we're living in a in a culture where we're we're instilling in people that if you work hard, you can get the results that you want, you're in control. So then when we look at something like the justice system, even though it seems something different, because of that idea of individualism, that same kind of idea goes over there and says no, you could have worked hard, you could have gone to, you know, who cares if you grew up in a crappy neighborhood, you live in America, the land of the free, you could have worked hard and busted your ass and all those other things. So, so yeah, my question, like, do you do you see that kind of being an effect trickling? I don't want to get too macro, because then sometimes it gets too connected from from the subtleties of these debates, but I do go there. And so, yeah, I mean, there's several things to say here. I mean, one, yes, I do think there's a linkage between different political ideologies and different attitudes toward free will and different attitudes toward responsibility and different attitudes toward dessert. And I do think, so let me even say, let me go one by one, there's a there's empirical evidence that supports this this view that, for example, the stronger one's belief in free will, the stronger one's belief in something called just worldly or belief in it. Also stronger, it turns out, the stronger one's belief in what's called right wing authoritarianism. So there seems to be a cluster of views that fit very nicely with this kind of conservative attitude towards economics and towards the belief in a just world. So the idea of a belief in a just world is simply the world is just and good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people and it sounds like an innocuous kind of belief, but psychologists have been studying it for decades and what they found is that it ultimately is a pernicious idea because it turns into a blame the victim approach. So I'll give you a couple examples. I mean, one very famous example is rape victims. So, for example, a woman who's raped, well, that's a horrific event. You can't imagine something more horrific happening to an individual. And in a just world, such a bad thing would never happen to a good person. So to preserve the belief in a just world, you flip the script and you somehow blame the victim. And this is why defense attorneys will question the integrity of the woman. They do it because it works and it works because people have this unconscious desire to preserve the belief in a just world. So the idea, well, she was dressed provocatively or she was walking where she shouldn't be walking or she was intoxicated and that's her responsibility. That's a way to blame the victim. But the reason you need to blame the victim is because they're trying to preserve this idea that only bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. Now, in our sober, more reflective moments, we can see that the world is not just. And the lottery of life is not always fair and bad things happen to good people all the time. But this unconscious desire to preserve this belief, I think, is very closely related to the idea of free will, in part because it's very closely alive with the idea of individual effort and meritocracy and dessert. And so not only we blame rape victims for their own victimhood, we blame those in poverty for somehow failing the work hard. They're lazy, they're luches, they have the opportunity but they fail to take use of it. We blame those who are incarcerated for the circumstances that got them incarcerated. We blame those who suffer from educational inequity by saying that somehow it's their parents fault or the students fault themselves. And so this preserves this kind of ideology, I think, which is very strong in capitalism because it drives this inherent belief that it is all a matter of effort, an individual accomplishment. There's actually a really good example. I think I might mention it, either in this book or the book with Dan Dennett, it references the speech that Obama gave. So Obama was giving a speech in front of a number of an audience of successful business owners and this blew up, it became a major issue. He said that well if you, if you succeeded in business, you didn't build it alone, you didn't build it yourself. That somewhere along the way you had help, you had an encouraging teacher or supportive parent or someone that lended you money to get your business started or a small business loan from the local business organization or some issues along the way, some factors of what, some things went your way and you didn't do it alone. And it really upset people with this very individualistic, conservative kind of cause a suey, you know, lifting yourself from the bootstraps kind of mentality. And in fact, it was a presidential election that year. They ran the Republican National Convention that year, at least two of the nights around the slogan, yes, we did. Like yes, we did, we built it ourselves. And I was trying to think just like you, why did they find this claim so, so insulting, so radically, you know, controversial? Because the next sentence Obama said is like, look, if you succeeded in business, you didn't do it alone, you had some help, you had some support, you had, you know, love ones that were behind you. That just seems factually correct to me. But I think it was such a such a resistant idea to the right, in part because it gets right to the core of this question of dessert, that individuals get what they deserve. If I succeed, it's because of my own effort. And if I fail, it's because of your lack of effort or your failure of effort. And so, and if you see if it's like, if you have a nail, everything, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, if you approach everything through the lens of individual, you know, individualism or individual responsibility, then the right response to crime is punitive, to punish it. Because it's not about the circumstances, it's about the individual. But all of those things tie together. And that's why some of my work, I do attempt to draw a connection between these larger, you know, these larger socio-political kind of beliefs, like belief in a just world, right-wing authoritarianism, religiosity, these things all seem to cluster very closely. The stronger the belief in free will, the stronger the cluster of these other beliefs seem to be a lot of evidence for that. Also seems to be a lot of evidence for the belief that the stronger one believes in free will, the more punitive they are. That is, they desire more punitive responses to wrong and bad behavior. And that makes sense, right? Because if you think the individual is free, then you think they're responsible and the right response is to punish them. But I would say not only are there these philosophical problems with retribution and these philosophical problems, you know, around free will, I don't think we have it, so I don't think we have the kind of dessert that would justify it. Also going back to what you said at the beginning, I also think it's ineffective. It just doesn't work. Yeah. And so, for example, we have the highest rate of incarceration known in mankind. We, we incarcerate roughly 700 people for every 100,000 people. Compare that to say Norway, Denmark, Sweden, they, they imprison roughly 60 people for every 100,000. So we literally imprison more than 10 times as many people. Yeah. And we have poor results to show for it. We have one of the highest rates of recidivism in the world. So, for example, 76.6% of prisoners who are released will be rearrested within the first five years of release. So nearly 80% of people who go to prison and come out are going to go right back in. Yeah. Whereas you look at Norway and Denmark and some of the Scandinavian approaches, they have a much lower crime rate. They have a much lower incarceration rate. And they have one of the lowest rates of recidivism in the world. Only 28%. Recidivism is repeat crime. People who go to prison, recomming. And part of the reason is the focus of the criminal justice system. So for us, the focus of the criminal justice system is punitive. It's to punish the individual. It's to give them their just desserts. And if you view, if you view the goal of prisons or the role of the criminal justice system as punitive, well, then you don't want to educate these people. You don't want to give them drug treatment. You don't want to provide them with, you know, mental health services. You don't want to provide them with books and things to improve their lives. Because well, that's just luxuries. They're there to be punished, right? Yeah. Upon their crimes. In the Scandinavian approach, they actually see the goal differently. The purpose of imprisonment is rehabilitation and then reintegration. Yeah. Over 90% of prisoners 90% of people who are convicted in Norway serve less than a year. Yeah. So the vast majority of people are going to serve nothing, no time at all, or less than a year in prison. Whereas we not only incarcerate more people than any other nation, we incarcerate them in some of the poorest conditions in the world and for some of the longest periods of time. We have some of the lengthiest sentences out there. And it's not making us safer. It's not reducing crime. It's not benefiting the individuals. In part because, you know, again, are the, let me just, I know I'm going on here, but this is No, no, I love it. Our prisons have become the facto mental health institute. Yeah. So more than 50% of people who are currently in prison in the United States suffers from a mental illness. I have some statistics here. 64% of jail inmates have a diagnosable mental illness, 54% of state prisoners. Among women, it's even greater, 75% of women have diagnosable mental illnesses. So the part of the reason for that is that we de-institutionalized our mental health institutions because, well, there was a lot of abuse in them. But that is supposed to be step one and a two-step process where we then reinvested in other mental health services. But we never did that. We just closed down the site wards and we never invested in mental health. And as a consequence, these people are now being housed in our criminal justice system. Whereas many of these people would be better served with mental health services. Many of the people, vast majority of the people in prison, are in prison because of low level drug possession or crimes committed due to drug addiction. Most of them would be better served with drug addiction or rehabilitation. Drug treatment, I meant to say, options instead of incarceration. Incarceration, in most cases, exasperates the problem because people who are incarcerated are separated from their loved ones. They lose whatever employment they had. It's difficult to regain employment upon release. Many of them end up falling into homelessness and revolving door of homelessness. The people who are homeless are more likely to become incarcerated. The people who are incarcerated are more likely to find themselves in conditions of homelessness. So there's this cycle. And ultimately, it sets people up for failures. And it disproportionately sets up black and brown communities for failure because those communities have been more devastated than any others from the mass incarceration crisis. Yeah, it's wild, too. Because like you were saying, we've been doing this for years. It's been going on for years. And if you look back, and if you look at any of the statistics or whatever, are crime rates dropping tremendously? Crime rates are going down and incarceration rates have not followed. In fact, they continue to increase. Yeah, so what's weird is is that in this system where we're all about business and profits and stuff, if I owned a company and I looked at it, and I'm like, hey, something's not adding up here. It seems like you would look at the data, and then you would look at your competitor, maybe, Norway or Sweden or whatever, and say, well, their rates are a lot better. What are they doing? So then I started thinking about how much of it is just with our prison system, is it like ego? I think about that with healthcare, too. Are we just too much ego to say, hey, maybe we should do what they're doing because it seems to be working better. But yeah, a couple of years ago when I got canceled on YouTube, I got really into human irrationality. That's why I love the book, too, because you have cognitive science in there, too. Because I look at the world, I'm like, how does this even make sense to you? Like, what are you doing, right? And like you mentioned, like the just world idea. And I've come to kind of realize it's just it feels like part of our human nature is that we're control freaks, right? We don't want to believe that anybody can get raped. Right? We don't want to believe that anybody could become an addict. We don't want to believe that you switch a few lucky situations and you might have become that person or, you know, whatever, right? Well, if you were in that situation, you would be that person. I mean, yeah, it's very, so that's an interesting, it's very hard for people to come to terms with that. Because I think a, especially why can't the U.S. follow other country models like with universal healthcare or with approaches of criminal justice, I think is in part, we just have a radically individualized culture. It's built in, as you say, into our economic system. It's built into our politics. It's built into the psyche. I don't know enough about why that is. I mean, it might have to do with Westward expansion. It might just have to do with the kind of individualism that was needed to survive in early America. It might have to do, but we are much more of an individualistic society where many European nations are much more collective. And there are even Asian countries that are even more so in regards to when a crime occurs, they see it not only, not as a failure of the individual, but really as a failure of the society. That somehow society failed that individual by not providing with the net of support that's necessary that they had to resort to crime. And that's why individuals see like this as a negative plight on the family or reflective of the family. It's not just that person who committed the crime. Somehow the whole family is impugned because somehow we're all responsible. America doesn't have that kind of mentality. And so I don't, again, I don't know really the sort of the anthropological or sociological reasons for how that came to be, but the fact is we are now very strongly individualistic. And we don't like to see luck playing such a big role, but there are, there are certain things that are just undeniable. So for example, I'll just give you a sports example because this is an example from Michael, sorry Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. And so in the book, he uses the analogy of NHL hockey players and he studied their, their birthdays and found, I'll try to do, they found some weird bell curve. And it was something like, you know, January and February, like the birthdays all sort of fell like within those two months. Yeah. They might have a July person who makes it to the NHL, but for some weird anomalous reason, the vast majority, I don't know if it was 70% or higher, but it was a good portion of the players that made it to the professional ranks had birthdays in these two months. I was like, how could that be? It can't be statistically explained because it's far outside the realm of chance. Yeah. And what he discovered was that many of them come from Canada. They're born like a hockey stick in their hands. And many of them start playing in the Pee Wee Leagues. Like I'm talking three, four, five years old, soon as they can walk, they're put on skates, right? And it just turns out that the cutoff date for the Pee Wee Leagues had it that if you were born in these two months, you would be the oldest in the league. Now, you could be someone who's born a day after, but you'll put in the lower league, right? The next league. And so the idea was, imagine being four or five years old and being nearly 12 months developmentally superior to the kid next to you on the skates. You have better hand-eye coordination. You're literally a year bigger, so you're stronger, more coordinated. And so you do better. You do better not because of natural talent or aptitude or effort. Yeah. You do better initially just because you're bigger and you're more developed. You're nearly a year older than the kid next to you and at ages four or five, that developmental difference is monumental. And so you do better. And because you do better, the next level up, well, maybe you put on the elite team. Maybe they take all the best players and put them on a single team. Maybe you get better coaching. Maybe eventually you're split into an elite league and now you get better facilities and you play tougher competition and you get better coaching and better equipment. And because of this initial, it looks to be a matter of luck. Like you have no control over what month you're born. That's just a lottery of life. That's just something yet we don't control. Yeah. Because of this initial factor of luck, it snowballs all over time and you end up with this unjust distribution. I say unjust because it's not based just on effort, right? Yeah. It's just on luck. And what they've found is that that's also true with education. If you're the oldest in the class, you tend to do better. For males, if you're the youngest in the class, you're more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. And it may be because these kids don't have attention deficit disorder is because they're 11 months younger than the kid next to them in class. And because they're the youngest, they have a harder time sitting silently for five, six hours a day. Between four and five, that's a big leap. And if you're not quite ready for that level of attention for that prolonged period of time, you might get tagged as having some kind of behavioral issue. And so it's been shown that this happens in terms of economics. It happens in terms of education. These initial inequalities don't equal out over time. They compound themselves. And so when I was debating Dan Dennett and that other book, Just Deserts, he's a compatibus. He said, I get it. Look, you know, luck matters. You know, we're not all born with the same opportunities or advantages. But then he uses this analogy of sports, too. He says, well, imagine a race. And someone has given a little bit of a head start based on their birthday, a matter of life. Would it be unfair? And Dennett says, well, it would be unfair if it were sprint because of the short distance. But life is not like a sprint. It's a marathon. And he says, over the course of life, luck equals out. And so that's his response. And I say bullshit to that. In fact, all of the empirical data shows the exact opposite. Luck does not equal out over time. Those initial social inequities compound themselves over time. And so part of my solution is that if we're going to successfully deal with criminal justice reform, we can't do so without simultaneously addressing issues of social justice. Criminal justice and social justice become much closer aligned because if the social determinants of violence, if the social determinants of criminal behavior are things like poverty and low socioeconomic status and regional inequity and homelessness and lack of access to health care, then the risk to prevent crime is not to punish people on the tail line. It's to address those social inequities to level the playing field so that people have an equal opportunity to compete. So prevention and social justice become the focus of my model rather than the punitive response to crime on the tail. And now I also have another thing based on my quarantine analogy, but we can talk about that. Yeah, no, it's interesting. Like, yeah, because I was just about to start talking to you about some of these solutions, right? And here's just a quick rant from me because I feel like there's a lot of the polarizing topics is because people can't agree on the definitions. And last year, you know, you heard all the defund the police and stuff like that, like with someone who comes from a mental health background, my girlfriend's in, you know, she's in a master's program for social work. What I hear is, hey, a little less go after people with mental illness with cops or guns, bring in some mental health professionals, have a little bit more community police and stuff like that, right? It's just kind of redistributing how our funds are spent, right? So then we're acknowledging that not every person with, you know, a drug addiction, a mental health problem needs to be put in a cell. And now, and like you were mentioning, how these things compound, right? Like once you once you go into a jail cell and, you know, they take your fingerprints, they put you in the system and all that, it can just get worse, right? You're in that revolving. It's hard to get out. Yeah. So there's a lot of solutions. I talk about a lot of them in the book. And I also addressed the cost argument, which some people worry that, you know, this kind of approach with cost more. It actually ends up saving more. But just education, for example, offering education in prisons. You end up saving five dollars for every dollar you spend. So every dollar we spend to offer college education to prisoners, it ends up saving us five dollars when you factor in things like property loss on court fees, the cost of incarceration. And it reduces recidivism by itself by 40 percent. Yeah. The other thing is things like there are what are called de-escalation sites. So some municipalities have tried to do this, like trained police officers that when they arrive at a crime scene, to assess things beyond just, you know, whether a crime is being committed, whether someone should be booked. But is this person suffering from a mental illness? Is this the result of, is this dispute somehow the result of the fact that they don't have stable housing or lack of help? And then to try to bring them to services that could address those needs rather than bringing them into the criminal justice system. So if I arrive and I see that this dispute is, and this person is clearly suffering from mental illness, rather than booking them and then say, well, they'll get help in the system, which rarely they do. Yeah. And once you bring them into the system, it often exasperates their mental illnesses because they don't have access to their treatment. Often it could just compound issues of stress that could make their conditions worse, to bring them to what is sometimes called de-escalation centers. So you have experts, mental health experts, drug treatment experts, people who could address the needs of the individual, try to figure out what the underlying problem is, and deal with it before the individual gets brought into the system. And they've been quite effective. Yeah. The other thing I'll just say is like, so as a free will skeptic people say, well, what do you do with serial killers and child molesters? I mean, and my argument is that, well, we're not going to just let them run free. So I have this analogy where I say, well, imagine, you know, imagine I come to talk to you in person and I want to visit Vegas, and somehow along the way I contract Ebola, or nowadays COVID, right? Yeah. And so I get out of the airport and they test me and I test positive, right? Well, I haven't done anything morally wrong. I don't deserve punishment. Retribution doesn't seem justified in this case, but I think everyone would agree that we are justifying quarantining that individual. And the justification for quarantining them is not punitive. It's not punishment. It's not retribution. As nothing new or free will or more responsibility, it's based on public safety. Yeah. And in my model, it's based on the right of self-defense and prevention of harm to others. And then so the argument is that by analogy, we could argue that serial killers, child molesters, people who pose a serious threat to the safety of other individuals can be incapacitated on a justification grounded in the right of self-defense and prevention of harm to others, analogous to the justification we have for quarantine. So when I first proposed this model, people didn't have any experience for quarantine. And now almost everyone has experience of quarantine. And so the idea, though, is that we often have cases where we could limit individual liberty for reasons other than punitive reasons. And one good case is just what we do in terms of public health institutions. We were allowed to justify quarantining the Ebola patient as to prevent a pandemic. And it's not because they are evil. It's not because they did anything wrong. It's not because they're blameworthy or they deserve punishment. It's simply a matter of public safety. Yeah. So my argument would be that we could adopt that kind of approach for those that need to be incapacitated. But also you have to know a couple of really important reforms follow. One is that this is not only a non-retributive approach. It's a non-punitive approach. It's not punishment at all. We don't punish the Ebola patient when we quarantine them. But no common definition is this punishment. And secondly, you can't treat them cruelly. I can't justify quarantining you, but I can't justify stripping you of your basic human rights, demoralizing you, de-enfranchising you, dehumanizing you, taking away your voting rights, stripping you of your ability to speak with loved ones. No, you're supposed to retain all of those rights. The only right you're really limited in is liberty. And that's only necessary so long as you pose a threat to society. So on my model, the purpose of the criminal justice system would be to rehabilitate or reintegrate individuals. We would also have to adopt what I call the principle of least infringement. You have to adopt the least restrictive measure possible, consistent with protecting public safety. So we don't quarantine people for the common cold. And for good reason. We accept a certain amount of risk in society. We accept that, yeah, if I sneeze on you and you get sick, I've called you some harm. But we restrict quarantine for these really radical cases, these really extreme cases, these ones that pose significant public health risks, like irreversible harms like death. And so what I would say is the vast majority of people that we currently incarcerate, we could better deal with alternatives that don't need incarceration. Let me ask you this. This is an example. I would be a favorite legalizing recreational marijuana. That's what I was going to say. I would be a favorite of providing alternatives to incarceration for people with mental health needs, with addiction problems. Low-level crimes can often be better dealt with parole or supervision or some kind of monitoring that incarceration should be the last resort. And it should only be for those really sort of, seriously violent crimes that can't be, that we can't successfully protect people by other means. And then the last thing is that we have a moral duty to treat you when we quarantine you with Ebola or with COVID and then release you the minute you're no longer a threat. I lose any further justification for limiting your liberty the minute you're no longer a threat to public health. And I would say the same with incarceration. We should not be keeping people longer than is necessary to protect society. And too much of what we find in our current system is with this punitive approach, especially with this retributive approach. We think such a serious crime proportionality requires a lengthy sentence, let's say. But people are aging out in prison. Yeah. And statistics show that after a certain age, the chances of recidivism drop dramatically. And they almost dropped to zero at a certain point. People who are 65 and 75 years of age pose very, very, most of them, vast majority of them, very, very little threat of recidivism or violent crime. Yeah. And so a retributivist could justify keeping them in prison because they deserve it, the crime they committed somehow, genes they need such a life in prison. Whereas on my model, it would drastically reduce the number of people and it would drastically affect this mass incarceration crisis because the vast majority of individuals don't pose a significant enough threat on my model to justify incapacitation. But I just want to say, I also want us to not myopically be obsessed with punishment. I understand we have to deal with certain people who end up committing serious crime, but I do want to shift the focus to prevention and social justice, which is not what the other approaches tend to do. Yeah, and I just often wonder, because there's so many debates, it's every other thing about policies, it's like, the money, the money, the money. And I'm just like, do people not understand how much money is going into our prison system? Like, do they not get it, right? It's a billion a year, yeah. Yeah, somebody gets pulled over for having some weed. So here in Nevada, we legalized it, so you don't really got to worry about that. But yeah, it's like, when we're putting people in here and just all the money getting funneled in there, but one of my last questions for you, because I want to end on a light note. I'm curious, is like, I'm not sure how involved in like policy you are, or I don't know if policymakers have grabbed copies of your book, but like, is there anything on the horizon or are there like education, like things going out there where we can educate communities on, hey, punishment isn't always the answer, this stuff is not working. Like, what's the light at the end of the tunnel, Greg? Help me out here. Yeah, yeah, so I work a lot with people who are trying to affect policy. My goal is obviously to affect policy. Yeah. So one of the things I do is I co-direct the network called the Justice Without Retribution Network, and it tries to bring together philosophers, scientists, criminologists, lawyers, judges, politicians, to look at non-retributive alternatives to addressing criminal behavior, ones that are ethically defensible, practically workable. I've been invited to speak to, you know, groups of judges and lawyers in the past, and very interestingly, I've been quite receptive to the idea. I do notice a difference in reaction when I'm speaking in Europe than when I'm speaking in the US. There seems, in some cases, there's almost, well, we already do this, or this just seems obvious. In the US, sometimes you get like, well, this is just unrealistic, and so you get really dramatically different kind of reactions to it. But, you know, I was recently spoke with the leading policy person for the Democratic Alliance, the second biggest political party in South Africa who's very interested in this kind of criminal justice reform. So the hope is that more and more people begin to both understand that our current systems are not working, they don't produce the outcomes we desire, they're not making us safer, but also philosophically, I want us to also realize that they're unjustified in many cases. So when you really look at it, crime is more a byproduct of circumstances than individual responsibility. The quicker we can see that, the more we'll be able to reorient ourselves to addressing the systemic causes. I mean, my broader belief is that once we abandon the belief in free will, and abandon with it the pernicious notions of just deserves, we'll be more able to look deeply into the systems that shape individuals, and that will allow us to get more effective and more humane practices and policies. And I think one of the easiest ways to do it is not all of these complicated arguments against free will based on determinism or indeterminism, but I think people are more capable of seeing the luck issue. That when you really show them that imagine just one or two things going different in your lives, you know, like we've all got, you know, you mentioned your past, but we've all done things in our past. Just the fact that you get caught and someone else doesn't get caught could change someone's whole course of life. Or there's this book, The Two Michael Mores, who's this political pundit, is it Michael? Not Michael Moore, The Two West Mores, Westmore. Who talks about the fact that he grew up in an inner city, I think it's Chicago, and there was another guy in his town with the same name, the other Westmore. And he talks about how the other person fell into drugs and then got into gangs and then spent their lives in and out of prison and how he escaped it by first joining the military and then getting into politics and then eventually now he's a talking head on cable and stuff. And part of what you realize is it's so easy that you were that other Westmore. It's just a matter of a few bad breaks going in one direction and your whole course of life could have been different. Not because of who you are, your moral principles, but because of luck. One thing I often think about, and this is very precedent when you think about Afghanistan and some of the conflicts around the world, we tend to want to condemn people. Like we say, look at that 16-year-old in the machine gun committing crimes and engaging in tribal violence. But then I think, well, what would you do if you were a 16-year-old with no source of income? You had two options in life. Jump on the back of that pickup and start killing one group of people or jump on the back of the other pickup and start killing a different group of people or try to remain neutral and have your hands cut off, watch your sister and mother raped and assaulted in front of you. Would you be capable of murder? Would you be capable of committing violence? And I think we too often forget that the circumstances in which we are allowed to be moral are factors beyond our control. And often if you were to find yourself in those kind of circumstances, you would be just as capable of those acts as the people we want to condemn. And so if you're just a little bit of understanding, a little bit of, you know, therefore, but the grace of luck, go I. We could begin to see from a bigger picture that maybe the right approach isn't always condemnation, but to... And again, I'm not going to let serial killers run free. I'm going to... I still think there's grounds for incapacitating them. But the idea is also not to just take a punitive approach, but to try to give us a more holistic approach that sees individuals as embedded in social systems, and then tries to address those social injustices, correct those social systems, so as to produce better outcomes. Yeah. I think there is hope for that. I just, you know, I'm going to keep on working. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the last thing I'll say, like as you were talking about that, the luck factor and just one little thing, like something that really clicked for me, like I try to be grateful for my, you know, my terrible experience as a drug addict because I can look back on it and realize how lucky I was like they just released the numbers. 93,000 people died of overdose. You know, that could have been me. But the other thing too, like when you're talking about like, you know, we've all done like, you know, things illegal, right? Like I have driven all over Las Vegas, blackout drunk, not one DUI, but a DUI can screw up your entire life. I have an old roommate from college. He got a DUI, lost his license. We had to drive him and limited what jobs he can get and all sorts of stuff. And I used to think that because I don't have a DUI and I've never been in an accident, therefore I'm not as bad as other people, right? And that's that false idea of, you know, control or the just world and all that stuff. But when I realized like, no, I just got lucky as hell. So it helps me be a little bit more understanding and realize like, hey, I just got the luck of the draw and realize that some people just, you know, didn't. So I don't know, I love the work that you're doing and I'm trying to figure out how to educate more people about this stuff too. But yeah, so you got a couple books out and I'm curious, are you working on anything new? Where's the best place for people to find you if they're interested in this stuff? The two new books are Rejecting Retributivism. It's Free Will Punishment and Criminal Justice is the subtitle. That's available everywhere, Amazon. There should be a paperback edition coming out and within the next couple of weeks. And then the other book that just came out, both of these are 2021 books, is called Just Desserts, Debating Free Will. And that's where me and Dan Dennett, another famous philosopher, debate our respective views on free will and punishment. I'm always working on papers. I'm working on a number of different responses, criticisms of my theory. Nice. So that should be coming out in the Journal of Legal Philosophy. But I'm also just thinking about talking to publishers about another book on punishment. So hopefully that'll be started soon and maybe within a year or so. Hopefully I'll get that finished. I would love it. And real quick, you mentioned Justice without Retributivism. Does there a website for that? Like so, like, because I kind of want to look into it. Well, you can find my personal website, which is www.grincurriso.com. It's spelled G-R-E-G-G-C-A-R-U-S-O. And on my website, you can find links to almost all my published works. And there are links to the books and everything else. Awesome. Cool. So I'm going to link all that stuff. I'm going to link your Twitter, because you're pretty active on there. That's how I got a hold of you. But yeah, thank you so much for your time, Greg. You helped me. You helped me have a little hope in all this. So I appreciate it.