Mark Kleiman, author of WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS, recently appeared in Washington, D.C., to discuss the ideas in his book on Capitol Hill, with Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, and at the American Enterprise Institute, with James Q. Wilson, among others. You can catch a video of the appearance at AEI here.

In addition, Kleiman was interviewed on “On Point,” the NPR show that airs from WBUR in Boston. Click here to hear the interview on “On Point.”

And finally, Kleiman spoke in detail about the new book with Larry Mantle, host of “Air Talk” on KPCC, the NPR station in Southern California. Listen here.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Mark Kleiman’s new book WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, was recently praised by economist Robert H. Frank in the New York Times for being not only effective, but actually cost-efficient. And with the current state of our economy, it seems that everyone is looking for ways to stretch a dollar…. Frank’s column, which appeared in the Sunday edition of the Business section, refers to Kleiman’s ideas as “revolutionary” and recommends applying the ideas of dynamic deterrence beyond crime to “help rein in corporate scofflaws who now feel free to violate environmental and safety regulations because they know that regulators are stretched thin.”

Read the entire article here.

Princeton has just published a new book by Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at UCLA and crime policy expert, called WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. The book has been generating much discussion as Kleiman proposes an innovative strategy for real and rapid change in the way this country deals with crime and punishment. Instead of instituting brute-force incarceration, substitute swiftness and certainty of punishment, and enforce probation and parole conditions so that community corrections become a genuine alternative to incarceration.

What’s exciting to learn is that Hawaii has created a program for dealing with crime and drug abuse called HOPE that uses many of these principles, and it’s generating much interest and discussion because of its documented success. In fact, the Honolulu Star Bulletin has just published an article about the successes of the HOPE program, and about how other states and even other countries are looking to institute similar program. Kleiman is interviewed in this article and his book mentioned. Read the article here.

And as a follow-up to the article, the Honolulu Star Bulletin published an editorial praising the program as a real and successful alternative to the current state of crime and punishment in the U.S. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“The program is in contrast with the failed “Three Strikes and You’re Out” system in California, where the prison population has soared from 76,000 in 1988 to nearly 167,000 today. California spends more on incarcerating adults than it pays to educate 226,000 students in its 10-campus University of California system.

HOPE has drawn worldwide attention and is being considered in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey as a model for convicts sentenced to probation or serving parole following prison terms.

[Circuit Judge Steven S.] Alm [who conceived the program] was invited to discuss drug policy in Portugal in April and has agreed to a similar agenda at Stockholm with the Swedish Carnegie Institute in November.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA and an expert on drug policy, said of HOPE, “As a recidivism prevention program, it’s unmatched, and as a drug treatment program, it’s unmatched.”"

Read the entire editorial here.

Albert Kahn, the French banker and philanthropist who decided to photograph the entire globe in 1909 using the latest autochrome technology, is endlessly fascinating for many reasons… including the incredible color photographs that still exist from the project. David Okuefuna’s THE DAWN OF THE COLOR PHOTOGRAPH presents these beautiful images as well as some of the story behind Kahn. Richard B. Woodward writes about Kahn in the Wall Street Journal, and the article includes an incredible slideshow of images. Check out the article and slideshow here. James F. X. O’Gara writes a very interesting review of the book and the darker side of the project in The Weekly Standard.

Amy Zegart, author of Spying Blind (now available in paperback) and the forthcoming book CIA 101, reads the CIA Inspector General’s Interrogation Report (an “eye-opener”) and posts her top five findings at Reality-Based Community.

1. The CIA was not a rogue elephant.
The Inspector General found that “there were few instances of deviations from approved [detention and interrogation] procedures.” (p.5) …The report also gives a picture of the agency repeatedly asking for– and getting — both authorization and reassurance from several NSC principals as well as the Department of Justice.

2. It’s the rules, not the exceptions, that alarm the IG. The IG was deeply concerned about the legal basis and political fallout of the detention and interrogation policies themselves.

3. We don’t know what interrogation methods work best.

4. All ten of the IG’s recommendations to improve detention and interrogation practices were redacted, which makes you wonder: are they blacked out because the CIA implemented them (making them current practice) or because the Agency didn’t?

5. Whither Congress? It seems that Congress has known about these practices AND about the violations that went beyond what DOJ authorized for at least three years, probably longer.

Click over to read the complete article.

Sociologist and Cop in the Hood author Peter Moskos joined fellow Law Enforcement Against Prohibition member Neill Franklin on MSNBC’s Conversations with Carlos Watson. Both men served as Baltimore City police officers and co-authored an op-ed published earlier this week in the the Washington Post.

Here’s the clip of the interview with Carlos Watson:

Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s the continuing avalanche of bad news. There could be many reasons that the strange and sometimes disturbing fairy tales of dada artist Kurt Schwitters seem to be hitting the spot with some reviewers and book buyers these days.

Quinn Latimer reviews the book on Bookforum.com, noting:

“Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales, which translates twenty-eight of Schwitters’s tales into English for the first time, provides the satiric mix of the familiar and the fantastic with which fairy tales regularly operate. As with Schwitters’s celebrated collages and assemblages, however, the tales’ expected elements are shattered and reassembled into riotous, deeply weird wholes. Beautiful maidens, destitute peasants, kindly farmers, and anthropomorphized animals are subject to a brutality both heretical and bruisingly familiar. That the horrors of World War I and the Holocaust bookended the writing of these tales comes as no surprise. Narratives are reliably brought to savage conclusions: A peaceful man who must decapitate a body in order to free an enchanted virgin is tripped up by his own gentility and is himself sent to the gallows; a “good man” who lets a hungry insect sting him is then sucked dry by a swarm of mosquitoes. The end.”

Hmm. This is the kind of stuff that is really resonating with readers in San Francisco. LUCKY HANS AND OTHER MERZ FAIRY TALES, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, made the City Lights hardcover bestseller list in June. Here is a post on the Stolen Apples site with the bestseller list.

Mark Kleiman’s new book WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment officially publishes in September, but that hasn’t stopped the information contained within the book from generating interest and debate in the news in the past week or so. Kleiman is professor at UCLA and main blogger on the Reality-Based Community site, and in the new book proposes a real solution to the vicious cycle of crime and punishment in our country.

Kleiman recently weighed in on a New York Times article about the newly reported dangers of marijuana use in the Times’s blog “Room for Debate.” In addition, Ezra Klein mentions the book on his Washington Post blog. Matthew Yglesias discusses the data on crime decline in major U.S. cities, and mentions the book on his Think Progress blog. And finally Patrick Appel, who blogs on The Atlantic Daily Dish site, has mentioned the book twice.

Princeton author and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos gives his expert opinion on the politics of racial profiling and the arrest last week of prominent Harvard history scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside of his home in Cambridge, Mass., on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog.

Read the entire discussion here.

Giusto Traina’s new book 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire takes a fresh approach to ancient history: instead of taking the reader through a chronology of earth-shattering events, he instead focuses his attention on the details of one seemingly ordinary year. However, it is really a year in which an entire civilization was about to change.

As Natalie Bennett writes in her review of the book on the Blogcritics site, “The “end of the Roman empire”: it is a popular topic, with some big questions around if: why? How? when? They’ve been some excellent, illuminated books written on it … but what tends to disappear in these accounts is the real lived experience of the people of the period. They can’t have been, in their own minds, living through the end of empire – they were living their lives, dealing with the local upsets, expecting the empire which in human timeframes had gone on ‘forever’, to continue. It’s to attempt to get at something of that lived reality that Giusto Traina has written 428AD: An Ordinary Year At The End of the Roman Empire.” Read the entire review here.

N.S. Gill, who writes about ancient history on the About.com site, also reviews the book, remarking: “The idea of covering a year intently is a great one. It’s on the order of television series that show the interconnection between myriad, seemingly unrelated events.” Read the entire review here.

On June 25th, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Horne v. Flores, the most important education case before the Supreme Court this year, in which, by a 5-4 vote, it reversed the lower court’s decision which had ordered the Arizona legislature to increase its funding for English as a second language programs.  An amicis (“friend of the court”) brief had been submitted which relied heavily on the newly published book, SCHOOLHOUSES, COURTHOUSES, AND STATEHOUSES by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, even though it had not been published at the time.  The majority opinion cites the book, along with several other research articles written by Hanushek, in support of a key proposition in the case, namely, that court ordered funding mandates have not been that successful in improving achievement. Although this book has only been officially out for less than a week, it is already having a national impact. Cal Thomas agrees with the argument in the book and has written about it in his syndicated column, and Jim Wooten writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Not bad to have a book published one week and be cited by the U.S. Supreme Court the next.” In addition, check out the blog Effective School Funding, which is updated regularly with news of the book and its impact on this important debate.