Description 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.
He is the author of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results and Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control..
Kleiman is professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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About the Author Mark A.
Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.
Brute-Force Crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially.
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.
As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is Punishment capacity.
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.
Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy.
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.
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.
Description 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
