Criminal Justice Policy

Goals of Criminal Justice Policy

• Deterrence

• Incapacitation

• Justice/Retribution

• Rehabilitation

• Public Order

• Efficiency

Crime in America: Major changes in crime rates

• Surge and decline

• Recent increase

Crime in America: Cross-national perspective

Crime in America: Crime and deterrence

• Certainty, swiftness, and severity

Policing: Key features

Policing: What works and what doesn’t

Policing: Race and policing

Policing: Police reform and “Defund the police”

Prisons and correctional policy in the age of mass incarceration

• Costs and benefits

• Rising prison populations

• Prosecutors and mandatory sentencing

• Prison bottleneck

Myth of “Non-violent drug offender” solution

Myth of “It’s the private prisons” solution

Prison alternatives/smarter deterrence

Race and mass incarceration

Drugs and Crime

• Drug use

• The “War on Drugs”

• Assessing on it

• Treatment/public health/harm reduction

• Legalization/decriminalization (like thc)

• Smarter enforcement

• Politics and public opinion

Guns in crime and gun ownership

America and guns

Effectiveness of gun control?

Potential gun policy solutions, also Constitutional

Politics of reforming gun laws

Death penalty as public policy

Death penalty

• incredibly rare

• US is capital punishment outlier

• Highly geographically concentrated

• Public support is declining

• The paradox of death penalty deterrence