The Volokh Conspiracy

When he invited me to post about crime and punishment, Eugene suggested that I might want to finish up with a response to comments.   That seems like a good idea.  So let me offer two general remarks, and some specific responses:

In general:

A.  I can’t read Eugene’s mind, but I suspect that he invited me to guest-blog (despite our basic disagreements) for the same reason that I regularly follow  this blog and other libertarian and conservative information channels.  The basic lesson of Bayesian analysis is that you can learn only from information that disconfirms some part of your current belief set.  But of course the natural tendency of the mind is to minimize cognitive dissonance by accepting confirming evidence and rejecting disconfirming evidence, and that tendency is emphasized when beliefs get to be badges of group membership.

This is a deeply unhealthy tendency, and it tends to defeat one of the basic evolutionary strategies of homo sapiens, which Karl Popper summed up as “letting our beliefs die in our place.”  Unfortunately, it has been on full display in the comment threads to my posts, which consisted (when the comments related to the posts at all rather than merely ranting about unrelated topics) mostly of vigorous attempts to prove that the thoughts offered in the posts were worthless or wicked, and the poster an ill-intentioned idiot.

Eugene no doubt thought he was doing his readers a favor by offering them some reading that might challenge their precoceptions.  There is little evidence in the comment thread that the VC readership shares that view, but it’s possible to hope that the comments are not a representative sample of reader reaction.

B.  The suggestion that various non-punitive programs might control crime, and that doing so was preferable, ceteris paribus, to controlling crime by inflicting damage on offenders, met with an especially furious response, mostly centered on the phrase “liberal social engineering.”  But the project of putting 1% of the adult population behind bars – an incarceration rate five times as high as any other advanced democracy, and five times as high as the U.S. ever had before 1975 – is itself a massive, massively risky, and expensive  social-engineering project, and no less massive, risky, or expensive for never having been thought through.   It also involves a completely unprecedented expansion of the power of the state over the individual.

If all taxation is theft, then the $200 billion required to support the current policing, adjudication, and corrections systems is just as much “stolen” as the much smaller sums that might be usefully expended on improving parental performance by poor young first-time mothers, removing lead from the environment, or improving classroom discipline.  If people who call themselves fiscal conservatives understood that a sentence of life without parole imposed on an 18-year-old represented a present-value expenditure of $1 million, the enthusiasm for “throwing away the key” might be diminished.  (An execution, including the due process required – but not sufficient – to prevent the execution of the innocent, costs more.)

In my view, crime at current levels is such a social problem that even substantial increase in the $200 billion criminal-justice budget would be justified by even modest decreases in crime.  If we can spend an extra $10 billion a year to have reduced crime and reduced incarceration, so much the better.

Now for the specifics:

1.  Evidence about the capacity of nurse-family partnerships to reduce offending by more than 50% (based on a randomized controlled trial) is here.

2.  Evidence about the impact of lead on crime takes two forms:  individual-level studies, and econometric studies. The results are consistent, and the effect sizes are large. Moreover, the biology is understood: lead, even at low levels, damages cognitive function, and lower-level cognitive functioning reduces deterrability, thus increasing crime. Moreover, lead does specific damage to impulse control.

Therefore, lead causes crime, and removing lead reduces crime.  It does so more cost-effectively than increasing incarceration, and it has side-benefits rather than side-costs.

3. I have no doubt that a minimum legal drinking age of 21 reduces drinking among minors, and that relaxing that rule would increase drinking (and drinking-related problems) in that population. It also generates massive disobedience and the mass acquisition of false ID.   Increased alcohol taxes are effective in reducing drinking, and especially in reducing heavy, problem drinking (since an extra tax of a dime a drink wouldn’t much bother someone who averages a drink a day). The biggest impacts are on heavy drinking by minors, whose incomes tend to be limited.  A combination of relaxing the age restriction and raising the price could reduce heavy drinking while avoiding the criminalization of mass behavior.

As the last in my series of guest-posts on crime and punishment, here’s a list of fairly specific recommendations.  They are designed to simultaneously reduce crime and incarceration, by (1) using prison cells more efficiently; (2) using punishments other than incarceration; and (3) controlling crime by means other than punishment.  The detailed justifications can be found in the book.

General and Budgetary

• Treat arrests and punishments as costs, not benefits.
• Emphasize swiftness and certainty of punishment rather than severity.
• Design punishments with the maximum ratio of deterrent efficacy to (1) the suffering inflicted and (2) the damage to the non-criminal opportunities of those punished.
• Concentrate enforcement rather than dispersing it.
• Directly communicate deterrent threats.
• Shift the burdens of crime and punishment away from otherwise disadvantaged groups, especially poor African-Americans who face much more of both.
• Increase the budgets of criminal justice agencies when doing so will reduce either crime or incarceration.  Money is cheap compared to liberty.
• Shift the mix of correctional budgets away from institutions (prisons and jails) and toward community corrections (probation and parole).  Spend more on controlling the behavior of those awaiting trial.

Policing

• Add police to areas with high ratios of crimes to officers.
• Focus on reducing crime and disorder, not on making arrests.
• Identify and target high-rate serious offenders, with the goal of incapacitating them by incarceration.  Don’t neglect domestic violence in this analysis.
• Identify those who only barely miss being targeted as high-rate serious offenders – the junior varsity – and warn them that continued criminal activity will result in their being added to the varsity list.   Select specific easy-to-observe crimes for “zero tolerance” treatment, either jurisdiction-wide or in specific areas.  Publicize those choices, with “narrowcast” warnings aimed at identified offenders as well as “broadcast” announcements.
• Don’t try to destroy street gangs as social organizations, but warn them that gunfire by any member will bring the wrath of the law down on the entire group.
• Give the service of bench warrants connected with focused enforcement efforts or absconders from community supervision, the highest rather than the lowest priority.

Prosecution, Courts, and Sentencing Rules

• Economize on the use of scarce prison and jail cells.  Focus on high-rate serious offenders and not on people whose crimes are mostly in the past.
• Allow sentencing judges access to juvenile criminal records.
• Substitute probation (and probation-enforced alternative sanctions such as “community service”) for prison.
• Provide some non-trivial punishment even for first-time misdemeanor offenders.
• Enforce bail conditions, including desistance from the use of expensive illicit drugs.
• Move high-rate offenders up the queue for trial dates.
• Consider both the offender’s broader criminal history and the broader driving history – especially a history of accidents with personal injury – in sentencing drunken or reckless drivers.
• Prosecute felonies committed by parolees as new crimes, rather than allowing them to be treated as mere parole violations.
• Coordinate with police to carry out specific deterrent threats aimed at individuals or at classes of behavior.
• Move toward “community prosecution” programs where policies are allowed to vary by neighborhood and are made after active consultation with both police and community leaders.
• Make some period of post-release supervision part of every prison sentence and most jail sentences.

Institutional corrections

• Re-examine the size of individual prisons.  Smaller is probably better.
• Strive to reduce noise and other sources of stress.  A prison should resemble the neighborhoods offenders come from as little as possible.
• Offer every prisoner a tightly-disciplined therapeutic community as an alternative to a conventional cellblock.
• Since skills such as literacy are portable across the boundary between prison and the community, stress skill acquisition rather than attempts at behavior change such as drug treatment.  Put a computer in each cell.
• Stop tolerating inmate-on-inmate violence.
• Experiment with not-for-profit “charter prisons.”
• Make recidivism a key performance measure for prison managers.
• Mine recent releasees for detailed information on prison conditions, using interviewers who are not Corrections Department employees.

Community Corrections

• Impose few rules on probationers and parolees, and enforce every rule consistently and swiftly.
• Avoid revocations for technical violations, other than absconding from supervision. Treat rule violations, and short jail stays as sanctions for them, as routine incidents of community supervision, not as a reason to end it.
• Use GPS monitoring to prevent new crimes and to convert probation and parole into genuine alternatives to incarceration.
• Make more use of “community service” (i.e., unpaid punitive labor).
• Reward good behavior as well as punishing bad behavior.
• Focus on employment.
• Evaluate probation officers, supervisors, and offices based on recidivism.

Juvenile corrections

• Experiment with short periods of isolation (a weekend alone in a room without a television set) as a sanction for juvenile offending.

Drug policy

• Raise alcohol taxes.
• Forbid the use of alcohol, at least for some period, to those convicted of drunken assault, drunken driving, drunken vandalism, or repeated disorderly conduct under the influence.  Enforce this at the seller level.
• Abolish the minimum drinking age.
• Cut back on routine drug law enforcement and associated sentencing. Halve the number of dealers in prison.
• Use low-arrest crackdowns to break up flagrant retail markets.
• Focus enforcement attention and sentencing on violence, disorder, and the use of juveniles, not on the mere volume of drugs sold.
• Expand the availability of drug treatment.  End the prejudice against substitution therapies in diversion programs and drug courts.
• Permit the consumption of cannabis, and its individual or cooperative production for personal use or gratis distribution.
• Force probationers, parolees, and those on bail to desist from the use of expensive or criminogenic illicit drugs.
• In neighborhoods where drug dealing is prevalent, focus in-school and community-based prevention efforts on preventing dealing.

Guns

• Close the private-sale loophole.  [Update: This does not mean banning private sales, but rather requiring private sellers to verify the purchaser's eligibility to own a firearm, as FFLs must now do.]
• Aggressively trace crime guns back to their last lawful transfer.
• Increase the penalties for gun trafficking.
• Allow concealed carry by anyone who passes a gun-safety course, and require every state to recognize concealed-carry permits from other states.

Social services and other non-punitive anti-crime measures

• Provide a nurse as a “parenting coach” to every first-time mother.
• Replicate the “good behavior game” experiment and make it part of routine teacher training if it works.
• Make preventing vengeance by the victim and his friends a central part of shock-trauma care for gunshot and knife wounds.
• Start middle school and high school later in the day, and end them later.
• Focus TANF management on reducing crime among the children of beneficiaries.
• Minimize exposure to lead with tighter regulations on smelters and public subsidy for scraping the remaining lead paint from dwellings.

Once again, thanks to Eugene for the opportunity to offer my thoughts in this space.

The burdens of crime and incarceration are not evenly spread; instead, they are highly concentrated by race and class. Neither race nor class alone is a sufficient explanatory variable. (Bruce Western has done groundbreaking work on this.)

The picture is worst for African-Americans; even adjusting for overall lower incomes, African-Americans suffer much more crime than do members of other ethnic categories. Homicide provides the most dramatic example; representing less than 15% of the population, blacks suffer more than 50% of the murders.

Like all crime problems, this problem tends to be self-sustaining. Since enforcement and prosecution resources are much more equally distributed than is crime, an offender who commits a crime where crime is common is less vulnerable to arrest, vigorous prosecution, and a stiff sentence than an offender who commits the same crime in a more law-abiding neighborhood.

Strong patterns of residential segregation by race and class plus differential crime rates together mean that the average poor African-American grows up in a higher-crime environment than a white American of comparable income or a more prosperous African-American. And since higher-crime areas are also lower-punishment-per-crime areas, crimes committed against poor black people draw lower-than-average punishments.

Thus the current system fails to fulfill the Constitutional mandate of “equal protection of the laws,” if “equal protection” means that a crime against a poor or black person will be investigated as diligently, prosecuted as forcefully, and punished as severely as the same crime against a rich or white person.

Assuming that the threat of punishment has some deterrent effect, growing up where that threat is smaller – and licit economic opportunity less available – should be expected, other things equal, to lead to a higher rate of criminal activity. And indeed that is what we find. African-Americans are far more heavily victimized than others, but not as a result of cross-ethnic aggression; crime is overwhelmingly intra-racial.

Despite the effective penalty discount for crimes committed in areas where poor African-Americans concentrate, higher crime rates there lead to much higher levels of incarceration. An African-American man who fails to graduate from high school has a better-than-even chance of serving prison time before his thirtieth birthday.

High rates of African-American incarceration have not escaped public notice. But, paradoxically, efforts to reduce the racial disproportion in the prison population are likely to intensify the implicit racial discrimination among victims that results from lower per-crime rates of punishment, leaving African-Americans even more exposed to victimization. The critique of the current system in terms of imposing prison terms and the consequent social stigma on a much higher proportion of African-Americans than of whites is fully justified by the facts, but the mechanisms involved are far more subtle than conscious, or even systemic, racial discrimination by officials against black perpetrators.

Indeed, racial disproportion in incarceration has grown even as racial prejudice and discrimination have become less marked, in part at least because the criminal justice system has become more diligent about punishing crimes against black victims. Providing something closer to “equal protection of the laws” would make the problem of racial disproportion in punishment worse, not better, unless and until higher per-crime punishment risks caused black crime rates to fall. While the standard critique portrays a melodrama, the reality is a tragedy.

Worse, insofar as the impact of incarceration rates on crime rates is subject to the law of diminishing returns, it is likley that further increasing the incarceration rate among poor African-Americans would have modest – or perhaps even negative – net impacts on crime.

The urgency of finding means of reducing crime and incarceration simultaneously – by using punishment more efficiently, but using punishments other than confinement, or by using means of crime control other than punishment – is therefore especially high in poor, black neighborhoods.

[This is the fourth in a series of posts drawn from my book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment Previous posts covered the logic of crime control policy,  positive feedback and strategic enforcement, and benefits and costs.  A final post will provide a laundry list of specific recommendations.]

Crime has been a badly underestimated problem: more so among scholarly experts than among ordinary citizens or elected officials.  A1% reduction in crime provides economic value – measured in terms of willingness-to-pay – of something like $15 billion a year.

The material losses due to victimization are only a small part of the crime problem.  For example, property losses from residential burglary average out to $4 per house or apartment per month.   And yet, in a survey, people asked how much they would be willing to pay out of their own funds to reduce burglary in their community by 10% gave an average answer of $100 per year.

One difference between victimization losses and other costs is that victimization doesn’t just happen.  Victimization is done to someone by someone else.  Being singled out – even anonymously – by another person for ill-treatment is a different experience than being the victim of mere happenstance. “Even a dog,” said Justice Holmes, “knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.”  

As a result, people make extensive efforts to avoid being victimized:  everything from double-locking doors to moving to the suburbs.  How, in the absence of crime, could one account for the coexistence of housing abandonment and new housing construction only a few miles apart?  The direct and secondary costs of crime avoidance easily swamp the immediate costs of victimization.  

Now, it might seem that if avoidance costs exceed victimization losses, the avoidance costs must be irrationally high.  Not so.  The victimization losses we observe are those that remain after potential victims have taken countermeasures in the forms of locks, burglar alarms, gated communities, and suburban addresses. One reason crime has fallen in the past decade is that potential victims – households and businesses – have moved away from high-crime neighborhoods into low-crime neighborhoods.

Much crime-avoidance behavior is wasteful from a social perspective, but not from an individual perspective.  If my putting a burglar-alarm sticker on my front door simply leads a burglar to break into my neighbor’s home instead, the victimization loss is shifted rather than avoided, and in effect I incur a real resource cost to make sure that someone else suffered the cost of being burglarized.  But that fact makes putting up the sticker no less rational for me as an individual. 

Crime-avoidance behavior can impose costs on others beyond shifting crime risk.  Residents and businesses fleeing high-crime neighborhoods generally make things worse for those who stay behind; abandoned houses make bad neighbors and shuttered factories and stores provide no jobs.  Crime thus becomes an important sustaining cause of concentrated poverty, turning an old notion on its head.

Costs and Benefits in Crime Control

The current total budget for law enforcement and criminal justice, adding together all levels of government, comes to about $200 billion a year.  If a 1% reduction in crime is worth $15 billion, even modestly successful crime-control efforts can easily justify their budgets.  Even as wasteful a use of prison resources as California’s Three Strikes law would have – had California actually built all those prisons – provided crime-control benefits to California’s residents that would have more than covered its monetary costs.

Money, however, is not the only thing we should try to economize.  We should strive to be economical in imposing suffering.  Having fewer prisoners is desirable: not, primarily, because prisons cost money but because prisons are horrible places, imposing misery not only on those confined in them but to the people who care about those prisoners:  their families, their friends, and their neighbors. 

The notion that deserved suffering somehow “doesn’t count” is a piece of mere hand-waving with no rational basis in terms of benefit-cost analysis; desert may be, morally, a reason to punish, or a limit on punishment, but it can’t be a reason to ignore the fact that punishment hurts.  And in the usual case the suffering of the families, friends, and neighbors of prisoners is entirely undeserved. 

Policing and community corrections involve a higher ratio of threat to actual punishment than do prisons or jails. That means that non-prison spending should be preferred to prison spending if we can achieve a given crime-control gain for the same additional dollars by spending it on cops and probation officers rather than spending it on further expanding institutional corrections.

Expanding even these less punitive parts of the system has a cost in terms of liberty, and that too should be economized. But we should keep in mind that the living under the threat of crime is also liberty-reducing; “freedom from fear” applies to more than fear of arrest.

By the same token, controlling crime by providing services, where it works, is greatly preferable to controlling crime by threatening or inflicting damage.  The positive-feedback nature of the crime problem means that services, though they may compete with criminal-justice operations for budget dollars, are synergistic with criminal-justice operations in the field.  Whatever shrinks the baseline level of offending increases the pressure on the remaining offender population from any given criminal-justice effort.

The problem is to find actual, practicable, scalable social programs that actually reduce crime, for amounts of money comparable to the cost of reducing crime using force and the threat of force.  Given the extent of social gains from reducing crime, any substantial crime reduction we could bring about just by spending practicable amounts of money will be cheap at the price.

If a group of individuals subject to some rule face an enforcement mechanism that is limited in its capacity, their rates of rule-violation will be interdependent.

Imagine a classroom of well-behaved children.  When Johnnie throws a spitball at Suzie, Ms. Jones can give him her full attention, and Johnnie learns (and the others learn vicariously) that he can’t get away with throwing spitballs in Ms. Jones’s class.

Now imagine a classroom full of unruly children.  When Johnnie throws a spitball at Suzie, Ms. Jones is too distracted by the need to break up the fight between Dick and Fred to have time to rebuke Johnnie, let alone the six others who are acting out at the same time.  Johnnie and the others learn that they can get away with almost anything in Ms. Jones’s class.

Thus both the well-behaved and the ill-behaved classroom are self-sustaining situations.  Indeed, they can be two equilibria of the same system:  the very same children with the very same teacher may wind up either well-behaved or ill-behaved as the result of random accidents at the beginning of the period.    This is an instance of the classic “tipping” model introduced by Thomas Schelling and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.

In such a situation, the following statements can be rigorously demonstrated using fairly minimal behavioral assumptions, as Beau Kilmer and I show in a paper called “The Dynamics of Deterrence” (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and adapted as Chapter 4 of When Brute Force Fails):

1. Increasing enforcement capacity can lower not only violation rates but the volume of punishment actually administered.
2. A temporary increment to enforcement capacity can have a lasting impact on violation rates if it succeeds in “tipping” the system from its high-violation to its low-violation equilibrium.
3. Even if increased enforcement capacity cannot be obtained, the same effect can be created by “dynamic concentration”:  focusing enforcement effort on a subset of offenders until their behavior comes under control, and then using the enforcement capacity freed up by reduced violation rates among that initial focus group to expand the size of the group.

The logic of these claims can be illustrated in a simple two-person game.  Let Al and Bob by rational, risk-neutral actors, both be subject to some rule, and let the cost of complying with the rule be $10 while the penalty for non-compliance is $15.  Assume that Al and Bob are not conscientious about the rule:  each treats a penalty dollar and a compliance-cost dollar as of equal value.

Let Al have the first move:  he either complies or violates, and then Bob chooses whether to comply or violate.

Assume that the enforcement system is constrained to be able to punish only one violation each round.  Thus if Al alone violates, he is punished with certainty; if Bob alone violates, Bob is punished with certainty.  But if both violate, each is punished with probability ½.

What should Al do?  If he complies, he pays $10.  If he violates, he pays $15 with certaintyif Bob complies, but pays $15 with probability ½ if Bob also violates.  Since Al is risk-neutral, he values that ½ chance of a $15 penalty at $7.50.  So Al wants to do whatever Bob does:  he would prefer to violate, if Bob also violates, but would prefer to comply, if he thinks Bob will comply.

Under the standard “common knowledge” assumptions of game theory, Al can predict Bob’s behavior by assuming that Bob will act rationally.  If Al violates, then Bob’s choice is between violating also, paying an expected cost of $7.50, or complying, paying a cost of $10.  Thus Bob ought rationally to violate in that situation, and Al can be confident that he will do so.

Since Al prefers to violate if Bob violates also, and since Al knows that Bob will violate if Al violates, Al will indeed violate, as will Bob.  Thus the score for each round is:  violations 2, sanctions 1.

If the sanctions capacity constraint is relaxed so that two punishments per round can be given, then both Al and Bob know that violation will lead to certain punishment.  Therefore, they both comply, and neither is punished:  violations 0, sanctions 0.  This illustrates the claim that greater sanctions capacity can lead not just to lower violation rates but to less actual punishment:  a convincing threat never has to be carried out.

But – and this is the key point – it is not necessary to relax the constraint.  A strategic enforcement authority can bring both Al and Bob in to compliance by establishing a priority order for punishment.

Say the enforcer announces that, if both Al and Bob violate, it is Al who will be punished.  In that case, Al will certainly comply.  But once Al has complied, Bob will also face certain punishment if he violates, so Bob will comply as well.  Violations 0, sanctions zero.  (The same is true if Bob is given priority; Al knows that Bob will comply, and therefore that if Al violates he will be punished.)

And the system can be extended to Charlie and Dan and Edgar:  in theory to countably many potential violators.  If no one wants to be the first violator, then no one will violate at all.

That, in a nutshell, is the key to having less crime and less punishment.  The trick is making it work in practice.  The HOPE probation-enforcement experience and the High Point low-arrest drug crackdown illustrate the feasibility of building actual enforcement programs on this basic principle.

[graf staring "What should Al do?" edited to fix error]

Thanks to Eugene’s generosity, I will have access to this space all week to expound what I see as a great moral and practical imperative:  to put our new knowledge of what controls crime into use, with the goal of achieving “half and half”:  half as much crime and half as many people behind bars in a decade as we have today.  (Here’s the a book-length version of the argument.)

*********

Engineers have a sardonic saying:  “When brute force fails, you’re not using enough.”  For three decades, in the face of the great crime wave that started in the early 1960s, we have been trying to solve our crime problem with brute force:  building more and more prisons and jails. We now keep 2.4 million of our fellow human beings under lock and key at any one time, and that number has continued to grow despite the spectacular drop in crime between 1994 and 2004, which took crime rates to 50% of their peak levels.

Imprisonment at five times the historical level in the United States, and at five times the level of any of the countries with which we would like to compare ourselves, has not been sufficient to fully reverse the growth in crime; current crime rates are still at 2.5 times the level of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Even that discouraging number understates how much worse things are now than they were half a century ago; today’s high crime rates persist in the face not only of ferocious punishment but also of greatly enhanced – and very costly – adaptations by potential victims to avoid being victimized.  Those adaptations range from buying alarm systems to moving to the suburbs.  Most of all, they involve avoiding risky situations.  The need to take such precautions leaves all of us less free than Americans were half a century ago.

The burdens of crime, and of punishment, are not evenly spread across the social landscape.  Homicide is the leading cause of death among black men between 18 and 30 who did not finish high school, and a black male dropout also has a better than even chance of serving prison time before turning 30.   William Stuntz has calculated that the incarceration rate among African-Americans today is higher than the incarceration rate in the Soviet Union the day Stalin died.

Is there an alternative to brute force?  There is reason to think so, and pieces of that alternative approach can be seen working in scattered places throughout the world of crime control. But the first step in getting away from brute force is to want to get away from brute force:  to care more about reducing crime than about punishing criminals, and to be willing to choose safety over vengeance when the two are in tension.

If for a moment we thought about “crime” as something bad that happens to people, like auto accidents or air pollution or disease, rather than as something horrible that people do to each other—if we thought about it, that is, as an ordinary domestic-policy problem—then we could start to ask how to limit the damage crime does at as little cost as possible in money spent and suffering inflicted.

The answer to that question will not be the only factor that influences, or should influence, crime-control policy.  Justice both requires and limits punishment. Laws, customs, and institutional arrangements—including the Constitution and ideas such as “innocent until proven guilty”—limit, and ought to limit, the range of options.   Still, thinking about the advantages and disadvantages—what economists quaintly call “benefits” and “costs” —of different approaches to crime control is one place to start the inquiry.

Crime causes damage: directly to victims, and indirectly as people incur costs, and impose costs on others, to avoid victimization.   The value of the total damage is hard to reckon, but serious estimates (even excluding “white collar” crime) run as high as $1.4 trillion per year:  more than 10 percent of GDP. Furthermore, this damage falls most heavily on the poor and socially marginal people least able to bear it; crime not only concentrates around social disadvantage but also sustains it, increasing costs for consumers and employers alike and thereby driving away resources and opportunities.

One way to frame the general problem of crime-control policy is, “What set of actions would result in the least total harm and cost, from crime and crime-control efforts combined?” Neither across-the-board lenity nor maximum severity offers the right answer to that question.   In order to squeeze the maximum crime prevention benefit from every prisoner-day of incarceration, we need to learn to deliver the minimum effective dose of punishment and to make as much use as possible of convincing and clearly communicated threats rather than actual punishments.

The principles of effective deterrence are straightforward, though making actual institutions implement those principles is complex.  Punishment should be swift and certain rather than severe; those subject to it should know precisely what actions will lead to punishment; efforts should be concentrated, rather than dispersed, to enjoy the benefit of the positive-feedback process in which reduced offending leads to increased deterrence.

Since punishment is always a cost and not a benefit, we should also be alive to the many possibilities to reduce offending without punishment:  everything from a later school day (to shorten the burglary-friendly time period when adolescents are out of school but grown-ups have not returned from work) to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.

Our current crime rates and our current incarceration levels are national disgraces.  We know how to fix both halves of that problem, and there is no good excuse for not doing so.