Abstract

Experimental criminology promises a public good: when experiments generate findings about criminal justice interventions, everyone benefits from that knowledge. However, experimental criminology also produces a free-rider problem: when experiments test interventions on the units where problems concentrate, only the sample assumes the risk of backfire. This mismatch between who pays for criminological knowledge and who rides on it persists even after traditional critiques of experimental social science are addressed. We draw from medicine and economics to define experimental criminology’s free-rider problem and expose a dilemma. Either we distribute the costs of producing policy-actionable knowledge to the entire beneficiary population or we justify isolating the risk of experimental harm on that class of the population where ethical concerns are most acute.

中文翻译：

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实验犯罪学和搭便车的困境

摘要

实验犯罪学承诺会带来公共利益：当实验产生有关刑事司法干预的发现时，每个人都会从该知识中受益。但是，实验犯罪学也产生了搭便车问题：当实验在问题集中的单元上测试干预措施时，只有样本会承担适得其反的风险。甚至在解决了对实验社会科学的传统批评之后，谁为犯罪学买单和谁为犯罪学买单之间的这种不匹配仍然存在。我们从医学和经济学的角度来定义实验犯罪学的搭便车问题并揭开难题。我们要么将产生可采取政策行动的知识的成本分配给整个受益人群，要么证明有理由对道德关注最严重的那类人群隔离实验性损害的风险。