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This chapter analyzes how New York's democratic process has been informed by a mix of pragmatism and elitism, a tension between providing for the public good and private self‐interest. In this insular and underdemocratized polity, state officials and experts control government and have created a more managerial approach to crime control, a move which defused some of the emotional and moral undertones of penal sanctioning. Crime was perceived to be a threat to public health, a contagion to be quarantined, rather than an indication of moral depravity. New York created a bifurcated penal regime: harsh for certain kinds of crimes and lenient for others, supporting surprisingly moderate imprisonment rates over thirty years. This bureaucratized polity has been insulated from crime victims movements and their demands for harsh justice but has nevertheless pursued some tough anticrime legislation such as the Rockefeller drug laws.

Evidence‐based crime prevention is a part of a larger and increasingly expanding movement in social policy to use scientific research evidence to guide program development and implementation. In general terms, this movement is dedicated to the improvement of society through the utilization of the highest quality scientific evidence on what works best. In this chapter, the strengths and weaknesses of common research designs, such as randomized experiments, are described in order to place our discussion of prioritization of research findings in context. Results of three rigorous research reviews that assess the crime prevention value of hot spots policing are then presented. The important issue of whether focused police efforts in hot spot areas lead to displacement of crime to other locations or a diffusion of crime control benefits to nearby locations is also considered. Using scientific evaluation evidence as a criterion, there is substantial support for the crime prevention effectiveness of hot spots policing.

In both criminology and the sociology of punishment there has been a rebirth of the political economy of crime and punishment, where the relationship between these phenomena and levels of inequality within a given society is a key aspect, to assess the transformation and features of the crime control fields of contemporary societies and to relate them to different typologies. This chapter will discuss and problematize this perspective through the analysis of Latin American crime control fields. Considering the flaws of general typologies, usually coming from the global north, the chapter will stress the need for a more detailed comparative analysis of the penal state and the institutional structures, dynamics and dispositions present in every jurisdiction, in both the global north and south, that have a direct impact on penal policy and its outcomes.

This chapter details the case study of California. It shows how a democratic process based on polarized populism led to a retributive penal regime, with high rates of imprisonment for all kinds of offenders. It analyzes the success of the crime victims movement, facilitated by the direct democracy measures such as the initiative process, in transforming the moral calculus of punishment. The victims movement helped to bring about a more emotive, passionate, and punitive approach to crime control, making crime victims' pain central to the justification, legitimation, and authority of criminal law and penal sanctioning. The chapter analyzes how a more conservative populist movement challenged state authority, weakened social trust, and demanded a tough law‐and‐order approach to crime and fears over growing ethnic and racial diversity, intensifying social divisions and social exclusion.

This chapter is about a second “great divide” in attitudes about government and appropriate crime policy. The focus is not on the well-known ideological battle between left and right about crime policy, but on a more subtle contrast between optimism and pessimism about the effectiveness of governmental policies to control crime. Crime-control optimists are persons who think that what they regard as appropriate government efforts can dramatically reduce crime. A pessimist thinks that even the best tools available to government will have a minor impact on crime rates. The chapter considers the factors that influence how strongly experts, as well as citizens, believe that governmental actions can significantly influence crime rates. The main thesis is that a long period of declining crime provides an environment where those concerned about crime policy tend to believe that this year's actions by government can have substantial impact on next year's crime rate. Sustained eras of good or bad news push moods about effectiveness further than the facts warrant— what tends to happen is an overreaction rather than merely an empirically based set of changed perceptions.

This chapter discusses what the entire two decades of the New York experience teaches about the major assumptions Americans have been making about methods to control crime and violence. It argues that the entire four-fifths decline in New York safety crime has important implications for thinking about crime control, even though over half that crime drop has no clearly established cause. It shows that it is more important to know that robbery rates can go down 84% than it is to know that police strategies apparently were responsible for about 40% of that decline. The volatility and variability of crime rates is a major signal to policy analysts, independent of a complete account of contributions to a decline.

This chapter identifies the chronic long‐term differences in American penal sanctioning, highlighting unexplained subnational imprisonment variation. It asks why the American states established different kinds of penal regimes when faced with similar kinds of policy problems of the late 1960s and 1970s: high crime, social unrest, war, declining trust and confidence in government. It argues that the way Americans engage in the democratic process shapes the way America punishes criminal offenders. When we see variation in democratic process, we are likely to see variation in penal sanctioning. It also links penal regime variation to the discourse on crime control that is rooted in the cultural tools and schemas of particular places rather than uniform or generalized trends. It introduces the case studies of California, Washington State, and New York.

This chapter is a four-part down payment on the comprehensive portrait of the New York experience that the two-decade history of policing deserves. The first section provides a short history of police methods and social science understanding of the effectiveness of police circa 1990 in the United States. It describes a crisis of confidence in orthodox theories of policing produced in large part by systematic evaluation efforts that deconstructed decades of received but unproven wisdom. This left the field more open to new leadership and ideas in the 1980s and 1990s than in previous decades, but without proven methods of crime control and prevention. The second section briefly describes the three major changes in city policing and when they occurred: changes in numbers of police, changes in organization and accountability, and changes in the strategies and tactics of street policing. These changes were the inputs of the new approach to policing—the series of shifts that were supposed to prevent and control crime. The third section shifts focus from how policing changed in the city to the question of whether the sum of changes reduced crime, whether the magnitude of police crime prevention in New York can be measured, and whether the effectiveness of different segments of the multi-part shifts in policing can be separately assessed. The fourth section addresses the lessons that can be learned from available data, as well as the things that can't be known until the slow and painful bean counting of policy science displaces storytelling and salesmanship.

This chapter summarizes the key findings of the study and points to theoretical, empirical, and public policy implications. It highlights the role of civic engagement, social trust, the resiliency of path dependencies, black incorporation, and crime control discourse rooted in particular places as key explanatory factors in American penal sanctioning. The research shows that higher levels of civic engagement tend to support milder punishments whereas lower levels tend to support more coercive criminal justice policies. Contrary to conventional policy proscriptions, this chapter argues that the public needs to be more, not less, involved in penal reform as public support is necessary for the legitimacy of state action and is especially critical in policy areas fraught with moral and emotional dilemmas. Crime and punishment raise unresolved moral questions about pain, suffering, the value of human life, justice, safety, and security. These questions should be resolved through a democratic process, and specifically a deliberative democratic process.

Two bail reform movements are presented in this chapter. The first concerns the national bail reform movement that emerged in the 1960s, emphasizing justice for the poor and seeking to reduce pretrial detention of criminal suspects, while the second, due to the rising crime rates, concerns the interest in crime control by seeking preventive detention laws designed to allow judges to deny bail to defendants deemed “dangerous” to the community. The chapter begins by presenting the elements involved in bail decision: decision points, decision makers, and the bail-setting process. Then, bail, as a discretion problem is illustrated in this chapter. Attempts to control discretion in bail setting take several forms. However, based on the evidence gathered on the two bail reform movements here, the chapter asserts that formal controls, at best, have only limited capacity to control bail-setting discretion.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions are examined in depth to illustrate the inconsistencies and other problems in the current application of the Miranda ruling. Conflicting values of due process and crime control–both very salient in our society-are employed to explain these inconsistencies.

This chapter explains the recent developments in crime control from the point of view of the governmental agencies and political actors directly responsible for policy formation. It describes the recurring forms of calculation and decision-making that gave rise to the practices of the contemporary period. It illustrates the kinds of considerations that drove decision-making in this period, and the sorts of policies that emerged in consequence. This chapter examines the problems posed by the challenge to penal modernism. This problem-solving account of institutional change finds support in the fact that historical periods in which institutional arrangements are undermined also tend to be ones in which there is an outpouring of reform proposals and policymaking inventiveness. It focuses on the problem of crime control as it was perceived and managed by the agencies and authorities of the criminal justice state, and the considerations and contexts that shaped their decisions.

This chapter argues that the rules modern human social systems devise to maintain system order are, almost exclusively, territorially based. That is, each system, or society, is situated in a territorially circumscribed space to which it lays claim by the tenets of some applicable law, by the force of weapons, and/or by whatever other standard applies. This is a trait human social systems share with the systems established by other biological species, but, the modern nation-state has taken the systemic focus on territory to a new level.

This chapter proposes a hybrid distributive principle centered on empirical desert. A summary of the proposed distributive principle includes: primary principle of empirical desert, inconspicuous deviations, deviations to more effectively control crime, deviations to advance interests other than crime control, and method of punishment. Deviations from empirical desert, strategies for avoiding deviations from empirical desert, and the limits of criminal law's distributive principle are discussed.

This chapter focuses on the crime-control value of the empirical desert. It argues that a number of specific crime-control powers become available to a system if, and only if, it earns with the community a reputation as a reliable moral authority. How such a reputation can be won and lost is examined. The chapter then considers how a distributive principle might be constructed that would earn such a reputation for moral credibility and some of the problems that might be encountered in the effort.

This chapter argues that the historical trajectory of British and American crime control over the last three decades has been almost exactly the contrary of that which was anticipated as recently as 1970. It provides a genealogical account that aims to trace the forces that gave birth to present-day practices and to identify the historical and social conditions upon which they still depend. The chapter draws upon the evidences from the UK and the USA on crime control and criminal justice to indicate the most important currents of change occurring over the last thirty years. It suggests the pattern of risks, insecurities, and control problems to which American and British governments, corporations, and citizens have been responding are those typically generated by the social, economic, and cultural arrangements of late modernity — even if the specific politics, institutions, and cultural adaptations that shape their responses are not.

This chapter describes the genesis of the ‘partnership’ approach and the recent rebirth of appeals to ‘community’ and ‘prevention’ within contemporary British crime-control policy and practice. It begins with a brief historical account of earlier forms of local governance in crime control and some of the transformations in policing and criminal justice which have occurred over the past 200 years. Then, it examines the recent interest in ‘prevention’, ‘community’, and ‘partnerships’ within crime-control policy. Each of these concepts is considered, outlining the most important policy developments, academic debates, and practical initiatives. The ways in which and the extent to which these notions have impacted upon different criminal justice agencies and their work are examined. Throughout the analysis, special attention is placed on the recurring critical relationships between formal and professionalized systems of crime control and the attraction of informal or community-based models.