David Dagan, Steve Teles, and I have a piece in the Washington Post‘s PostEverything section today:
In the past decade, two major movements for criminal justice reform have arisen: the push against mass incarceration and Black Lives Matter’s mobilization against police brutality. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attacked both, arguing that the movements would touch off a new crime epidemic.
He’s wrong. The research we have shows that we know how to fight crime without using more handcuffs and prison cells.
We didn’t always have the evidence we do now. When crime began to spike in the United States in the 1960s, experts were caught flat-footed. Most criminologists thought crime was driven by sociological factors, beyond the influence of the police. They had little to say about how prevention measures short of fundamental economic, educational and social reforms might curb the violence.
This was hardly a message politicians could take to their voters. So legislators came up with their own…
More here.