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 | When Brute Force Fails: |
Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults--a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken. Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work. Mark A. R. Kleiman is professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results and Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control. "One way to make apprehension and punishment more likely is to spend substantially more money on law enforcement. In a time of chronic budget shortfalls, however, that won't happen. But Mr. Kleiman suggests that smarter enforcement strategies can make existing budgets go further. The important step, he says, is to view enforcement as a dynamic game in which strategically chosen deterrence policies become self-reinforcing. . . . It is an ingenious idea that borrows from game theory and the economics of signaling behavior. . . . Revolutionary."--Robert H. Frank, New York Times "Absolutely buy this book and dedicate some time to it. . . . This is the most important social science book I've read in many years."--Reihan Salam, Bloggingheads.tv "Kleiman's recommendations appear to work. If they do, every community should be considering how to apply them. The current ways, the tough-sounding sentences, the random zero-tolerance, the throw 'em-in-jail-and-throw-away-the-key approach, feels right. But maybe it's wrong."--Royal Oak Daily Tribune Endorsements: "For two decades, Mark Kleiman has tried to rescue community corrections from its own incompetence as well as from its critics. In When Brute Force Fails he extends his reach to develop a more sensible system of criminal justice. The book is imaginative, thorough, and readable. It will make a difference in public policy."--Peter Reuter, University of Maryland "Mark Kleiman draws on a mixture of common sense, rationality, analysis, and individual case studies to develop clear policy recommendations about how to reduce crime while cutting costs. Policymakers, constrained by increasingly tight budgets, would be well advised to give serious consideration to his approaches and proposals."--Alfred Blumstein, Carnegie Mellon University "Ideas that make a real difference don't come along often. Mark Kleiman's got a big one here."--Robert H. Frank, Cornell University Acknowledgments xi Subject Areas: | |||||
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