“Public safety” appears across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the stated justification for a range of criminal justice policies — drug prohibition, sex-offender registries, cash bail, and long sentences. In each conversation, the guest or host questions whether the policy actually serves the safety it claims to protect, and several argue that the measure itself produces the harm it purports to prevent.
Marijuana prohibition and victimless crime
In an October 2010 episode, Gary Johnson framed marijuana legalization as a question of rational drug policy rather than public safety. He argued that legalization would not make it legal to smoke pot, become impaired, get behind the wheel of a car, or do harm to others, and that kids would have less access to marijuana in a legalized environment where an ID is required to purchase it. He cited the scale of American incarceration — the highest rate in the world on a per capita basis, with 2.3 million people behind bars — and estimated that half of those have to do with drugs, and half of those with marijuana. His conclusion was to stop criminal prosecution of persons who commit victimless, non-violent crime. Bob Zadek responded, “Victimless, you said it exactly.” Johnson also described California as having “the high ground” and expressed hope that Prop 19 would be the domino bringing about rational drug policy nationwide, drawing an analogy to New York’s refusal to enforce alcohol laws as the domino that ended prohibition. A Better America (2010)
Sex-offender registries and the breadth of the list
In a May 2016 episode, Sarah Stillman described how sex-offender registries evolved from a narrow law-enforcement tool into broad public databases. She traced the origin to high-profile incidents in the ’80s and early ’90s in which young people were attacked by people with previous sexual offenses, and to the advocacy of Patty Wetterling, mother of a boy named Jacob Wetterling, who sought a public database to help law enforcement quickly find information on people with past sex offenses in a neighborhood. Originally intended as a database for law enforcement’s private use, the laws evolved so that anyone could go online and find who in a given geographic area had a previous offense on their record. Stillman said the list became so comprehensive that in some states it included people who may have publicly urinated, and cases like a 10-year-old girl who pulled down someone’s pants. What Wetterling had envisioned as a specific tool for law enforcement became, in Stillman’s words, a very broad thing that anyone could find on the internet, including many, many people. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)
Bail, protective detention, and the New Jersey model
In a July 2018 episode, Scott Shackford discussed protective detention as a factor judges weigh in bail decisions. He described the public safety concern that a defendant charged with a serious crime, even assuming innocence, might commit other crimes if released — for example, someone charged with dealing drugs returning to dealing drugs. Shackford explained that in many states there is a constitutional right to be free prior to trial unless the courts decide the defendant will run away or is a danger, but that some states have constitutional requirements for bail that do not take into account the nature of the crimes charged. He used New Jersey as an example of a state that completely changed its bail system and was seen as a potential model. New Jersey’s constitution had required that unless someone was charged with a capital crime, they be offered bail of some sort — money bail or some opportunity to get out of jail prior to trial. The result was that very dangerous people with lengthy histories of violent behavior, known gang members, and people stalking girlfriends still had to be offered bail. When New Jersey reformed its system, it had two goals: to let low-level people charged $5,000 bail they could not afford get out if they were not a threat or flight risk, and to change the constitution so that if someone is believed to be a danger to the community, bail need not be offered at all. Shackford noted that Governor Chris Christie was governor at the time the legislation passed, and that this goal helped attract conservatives and tough-on-crime supporters. In the new environment, either a person is released with conditions or not, and money is not a factor. How Bail Traps the Poor in Jail with Scott Shackford (2018)
Mass incarceration as a public safety question
In an October 2019 episode, Rachel Barkow addressed whether incarcerating large numbers of people serves public safety. She said the United States leads in incarceration rate, with more people incarcerated than any other country, and that incarceration rates are not tied to crime rates. She argued that the country has reached a tipping point where incarcerating so many people causes a risk of greater crime, because the experience of being incarcerated makes re-entry hard after long terms or pre-trial detention, and noted that 95% of people incarcerated in America come back out and rejoin communities. By historical comparison, comparison to other countries, and the question of whether the practice is good as a matter of public safety, she concluded that too many people are incarcerated. Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019)
Barkow also described the Federal Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in the 1980s, and its struggle to determine appropriate sentence lengths. She said the commission had economists and a retributive justice expert, and that then-Judge Breyer was on the commission, but ultimately could not determine the right sentence and ended up averaging past sentences by judges. She said legislators setting sentencing ranges pluck numbers out of thin air, favoring round numbers like five-year, 10-year, and 20-year mandatory minimums, with no science behind them. She cited a 2007 Federal Sentencing Commission adjustment to crack sentences, which were lowered and made retroactive, creating a natural experiment: comparing people who received the reduction with those who served their full sentences because the change came too late for them, matched for crime and criminal history, those released earlier had a lower recidivism rate over five years after release. Barkow said this was empirical evidence that the sentences were set higher than needed for public safety, and that lowering them produced a public safety benefit by lowering recidivism, clearing prison bed space, freeing money for other investments, and allowing more people to access prison programming. She added that states that lowered sentences did not see crime go up, and often saw crime go down. She also said the proportionality of punishment is out of whack — longer sentences for viewing child pornography online than for actually abusing a child, and longer sentences for selling drugs than for killing and raping. Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019)
Pre-trial detention and cash bail
In the same episode, Barkow explained pre-trial detention and cash bail. When someone is arrested and charged, the question is whether they are released pending trial or detained from arrest onward. In America, the usual measure is cash bail: the person posts money, often through a bail bondsman who charges a fee and keeps a percentage the person never gets back. In practice, people who are poor cannot afford even the bondsman’s fee — $100, $500, or $1,000 — and so are detained because they are poor, not because of safety risk or flight risk. Barkow said that if you have the money, even if you are dangerous, you can be released in these places. She said the best way to ensure someone returns to court is to send a reminder, like a doctor’s text message, because in upwards of 95–96% of cases people simply forgot rather than deliberately absconded. She described jails as usually city facilities, sometimes in rural communities, that offer nothing and are really just holding facilities. Bob Zadek offered Rikers Island as an example, and Barkow agreed, calling such places hellish, where people accused of all kinds of different crimes are intermixed — someone there for allegedly jumping a turnstile alongside someone accused of a vicious violent robbery — with no classification system like most prisons have, and no programming in almost any of these places. Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019)
Barkow described pre-trial detention as life-altering: a person held even a few days is likely to be fired, then evicted, and if they have no childcare, they often lose custody of their children. She said studies comparing two people accused of similar crimes with similar criminal records — one detained pre-trial, one released — show the detained person is more likely to commit crimes after release. She called pre-trial detention a public policy failure of the widest scale in America, one of the big government programs that completely fail. Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019)
Across episodes
The excerpts show the same question argued across four episodes: whether policies justified by public safety actually produce it. In 2010, Gary Johnson argued that marijuana prohibition and the incarceration it produces are not public safety measures but the prosecution of victimless crime. In 2016, Sarah Stillman described how a registry intended for law enforcement became a broad public database. In 2018, Scott Shackford described how bail systems can detain people for poverty rather than danger, and how New Jersey changed its constitution to allow detention of those believed dangerous. In 2019, Rachel Barkow argued that mass incarceration and pre-trial detention themselves cause crime and fail as public safety measures, citing empirical evidence from a 2007 sentencing change. The later episodes bring empirical studies and specific policy models — New Jersey’s bail overhaul, the 2007 crack sentence reduction — that the earlier episodes do not, but the excerpts do not show the guests responding to one another or a shared line of development.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcomes of the policies discussed — whether Prop 19 passed, how New Jersey’s bail system performed after reform, or whether the 2007 sentencing change was later altered. They do not give the names of bills, the amendments on which cases turned, or the titles and fields of most speakers beyond what the labels and introductions provide. The excerpts also do not include the portions of the conversations that followed the breaks or the ends of sentences that break off, so no conclusions can be drawn from those missing passages.