More on how to have less crime and less punishment. Fewer “ums” than I normally use.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com View all posts by Mark Kleiman
An informative interview.
What's the state of the evidence for the idea (which you mention at the end) that heavy users (the "best customers") are (mostly) already under supervision? If I remember, 10-12 years ago you offered a rough estimate that about half of them are – about 3/4s of heavy users depending substantially on criminal income, w/ about 2/3s of that 3/4s under supervision – , but I don't know the literature or the state of the evidence. (I recognize the inherent difficulty of any estimate. Limited anecdotal experience left me w/ the impression that a surprisingly large share of heavy users may remain beneath the radar at any given moment. Still, many or most will've been under supervision in the past, or likely will be in at least the middle-term future.) How quickly they come under supervision is partly a policy decision.
A trifling chronological ambiguity at pp. 44-45 of WBFF. As you tell us elsewhere, before Lee Brown's Alphabet City intervention of the early ‘90s, an earlier Commissioner, Benjamin Ward, had established an "Operation Pressure Point I" in the Lower East Side (incl. Alphabet City) when he took office in Jan. 1984 (while Brown was still the Houston Police Chief). The OPP you refer to as having preceded the Tactical Narcotics Teams – est. after Eddie Byrne’s death in Feb. 1988 – was the one Ward established, not Brown's. The source you cite here, your article “Crackdowns” (1988), discusses Ward's OPP & appeared before Brown left Houston. Brown's innovations may ultimately have been more important, & in any case had the good fortune to be implemented nearer the turning-point in the neighborhood & city, but at least some of the rudiments of dynamic concentration were already present in the crackdowns of the unloved ‘80s. The ambiguity doesn't affect the substance of the argument, but people do want a good story.
On heavy users: The calcluation was based on the old DUF/ADAM arrestee drug monitoring system. That's no longer in operation, but what evidence we have suggests that the ratios haven't changed much.
On Pressure Point: Ooops! That's what you get for relying on memory rather than going back to the sources.