RT Article
T1 Experimental Criminology and the Free-Rider Dilemma
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 61
IS 1
SP 209
OP 227
A1 Koehler, Johann A.
A2 Riley-Smith, Tobias
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1745887539
AB 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.
K1 Ethics
K1 Experimental criminology
K1 Free-rider
K1 Iatrogenesis
K1 Medical model
K1 Risk of harm
DO 10.1093/bjc/azaa057