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.
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