Deterrence and Crime Prevention: Reconsidering the prospect of sanction

by David M. Kennedy

Deterrence is at the heart of the preventive aspiration of criminal justice. Deterrence, whether through preventive patrol by police officers or stiff prison sentences for violent offenders, is the principal mechanism through which the central feature of criminal justice, the exercise of state authority, works - it is hoped -- to diminish offending and enhance public safety. And however well we think deterrence works, it clearly often does not work nearly as well as we would like - and often at very great cost. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly literatures and real-world experience, Kennedy argues that we should reframe the ways in which we think about and produce deterrence.He argues that many of the ways in which we seek to deter crime in fact facilitate offending; that simple steps such as providing clear information to offenders could transform deterrence; that communities may be far more effective than legal authorities in deterring crime; that apparently minor sanctions can deter more effectively than draconian ones; that groups, rather than individual offenders, should often be the focus of deterrence; that existing legal tools can be used in unusual but greatly more effective ways; that even serious offenders can be reached through deliberate moral engagement; and that authorities, communities, and offenders - no matter how divided - share and can occupy hidden common ground. The result is a sophisticated but ultimately common-sense and profoundly hopeful case that we can and should use new deterrence strategies to address some of our most important crime problems.Drawing on and expanding on the lessons of groundbreaking real-world work like Boston's Operation Ceasefire - credited with the Boston Miracle of the 1990s - Deterrence and Crime Prevention is required reading for scholars, law enforcement practitioners, and all with an interest in public safety and the health of communities.

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 18, 2007

About the author

David Michael Kennedy is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University[1] and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.

Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically a much more straight-forward and organized presentation of a lot of the same information in the same author's Don't Shoot, with added info on pertinent studies and variations. He does use more jargon and the prose can get a little dense, but while it isn't always light reading, it is pretty readable.

He basically points out that we as a culture have been over focusing on deterrence as punishment, to the point that our usual solution to "this isn't working" is "more of the same" (throw more people in prison with longer prison sentences, for example). But this form of deterrence is neither the most effective nor the most proactive (it is, by definition, imposed after the crime), plus in many cases it has become doubly counter productive; first, because some of the people it's aimed at react by adding more crime to their activities, and second because it so often punishes people who're not actually doing anything particularly wrong, meaning the community and the police end up in opposition, despite the fact that they share many goals.

It would have benefited from another edit, though. And I say that as someone who generally reads right past missing words and the like -- it's got errors even I notice, like principal for principle and sentences that charge off into nowhere. Not too many of them, but more than I'm used to, I guess.