Our Writeup on Criminal Justice Reform

Editor’s note: Coefficient Giving was formerly a part of GiveWell under the name “GiveWell Labs,” and later operated as Open Philanthropy. This post originally appeared on the GiveWell Blog; uses of “we” and “our” in the below post may refer to GiveWell. Some content may be outdated; you can see our latest writing here.

Holden Karnofsky is a co-founder of GiveWell, and the former CEO of Open Philanthropy. He left Open Philanthropy in April 2024.

We’ve just published an extensive writeup on the cause of U.S. criminal justice reform, which was one of the causes we previously listed as a priority for investigation under GiveWell Labs.

We first became interested in this cause when our initial conversations around promising policy areas (in particular, our extended conversation with Steve Teles) highlighted it as having unusual political tractability. We heard from multiple sources that the combination of the adverse U.S. fiscal situation, low crime rates, and emerging conservative interest in an issue historically supported by progressives may have created a “unique moment” for criminal justice reform with a limited window.

Due to the significant amount of suffering and expense associated with incarceration, we believe there are high humanitarian stakes as well. And in initial conversations about the cause, we identified some approaches that we believe to have relatively little in the way of philanthropic support.

There are other causes that we see as having higher humanitarian stakes than criminal justice reform, and other causes that we see as being more philanthropically “neglected,” but such causes generally don’t have the same “window of opportunity” dynamic. So criminal justice reform is a plausible, though not the only plausible, candidate for “outstanding cause to work on.”^[1]To put this in “cost-effectiveness analysis” terms: the “window of opportunity” aspect implies that chances for influencing policy are unusually high in this domain; our analysis of potential policy impacts implies that such influence would have high humanitarian value; the fact that … Continue reading

When we started doing deep investigations of new causes, we chose to work on criminal justice reform first, because we had multiple leads already for potential grantees, and it seemed like a cause that we would quickly learn about and make progress on from the standpoint of finding giving opportunities. Since then, we have had many conversations and identified initial grantees that we find quite promising. These grantees’ activities include research, technical assistance and advocacy. They are taking what we see as promising approaches to reducing incarceration while preserving or improving public safety (and have substantial room for more funding).

We have paused work on this cause for the time being as we investigate other potential focus areas (more in future posts). However, we think it is quite likely that we will end up declaring criminal justice reform as an ongoing priority for GiveWell Labs.

Much more information at our full writeup.