Russell Varriale 🧠 🏭

When it comes to preventing crime, the first response is often simple: harsher punishment. Long sentences, mandatory minimums, more incarceration. This is what most people’s intuition says should work. But there is another approach: make it harder to get away with crime in the first place. More eyes, faster identification. A world where committing a crime without getting caught is unthinkable. Since the 1980s, most of American criminal justice policy has been built on the first approach. But the most important finding in criminology is that it barely works. Daniel Nagin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has studied criminology for decades. His conclusion, confirmed by hundreds of studies and multiple meta-analyses: the certainty of being caught deters crime. The severity of punishment does not. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, put it even more clearly: if criminals think there’s only a slim chance of being caught, even draconian punishments won’t deter them. This makes sense when you think about it. Most crimes are impulsive. Most criminals don’t know the specific penalties. Only half of all crimes are reported to police at all. Several analyses have found that three-strikes laws actually increase homicide rates, because offenders facing life sentences had nothing left to lose. So severity doesn’t deter. Certainty does. That changes how we need to go about public safety. How do we put this into practice? Swift, Certain, Fair is one approach that’s shown promise. Offenders serve their sentences in the community, where they can work and contribute, under conditions that make getting away with a breach impossible. South Dakota took this approach to drunk driving. Offenders could serve time in the community as long as they passed a sobriety test twice a day. A failed or skipped test meant a night or two behind bars, not a 3 month minimum sentence. The program halved reoffending. It was so effective that arrests for drunk driving and domestic violence fell by around 10% for the county. And it cost the taxpayer nothing: participants paid the $2 a day for testing out of their own pockets. The US spends $270 billion a year on criminal justice. The average cost to incarcerate one person is about $61,000 per year, about the same as the median full-time American worker earns in a year. In New York City, it’s $507,000, closer to the earnings of a surgeon. What are we getting for that money? A system where 60% of released prisoners are rearrested within two years, all while nearly half of violent crimes and over 80% of property crimes go unsolved. And prison doesn’t just fail to rehabilitate. The evidence suggests it makes reoffending more likely. A meta-analysis of 116 studies found that custodial sentences actually increase recidivism compared to non-custodial alternatives. Every year of incarceration decreases the likelihood of getting a job upon release. Our $270 billion buys us a system that manufactures the next generation of criminals. Then there’s the problem of age. Prisoners over 55 now make up 15% of the incarcerated population, up from 3.4% in 1991. Because of healthcare needs, they cost 2-3x as much as younger prisoners to incarcerate, a total of $16 billion a year. And for what? 84% of people released at age 60+ are never rearrested. In 2012, 178 elderly people sentenced to life imprisonment in Maryland were released after a court ruling. In the four years afterward, not one of them was rearrested for anything more serious than a traffic violation. Criminologists Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argued that crime is most likely when three conditions are met: a motivated offender, a vulnerable victim, and the absence of a capable guardian. There will always be motivated offenders and vulnerable victims, but we can ensure that capable guardians are everywhere. This is where Flock Safety comes in. Flock operates in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. In Marietta, Georgia, areas with Flock cameras saw a 34% drop in crime, triple the citywide average. Communities we serve have reported up to 80% reductions in residential burglaries. Across all customers, Flock helps solve an estimated 700,000 crimes per year. And each new camera added to the network makes every other camera more valuable to the police departments, investigators, and first responders who rely on them. The deterrence research says severity doesn’t work. What works is the infrastructure of certainty. Cameras, networks, real-time alerts, cross-jurisdictional data sharing. A world where the odds of getting away with crime drop every year. That’s what Flock Safety is building. The goal is fewer victims, not more prison cells. The evidence says you can have both. Every community deserves that.

codex is so good at the toil — fixing merge conflicts, getting CI to green, rewriting between languages — it raises the ambition of what i even consider building

📁 Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, says the real AI moats will not be in apps, but in medicine and the physical world. Anyone can build on top of a model. Very few can navigate biology, regulation and real world complexity. The biggest AI companies may not be addictive software, but systems that quietly extend human life.