Approaches to reducing both imprisonment and crime

The excellent and broad-ranging article by Durlauf and Nagin (2011, this issue) represents a wise policy document that builds on their excellent previous article (Durlauf and Nagin, in press), which provided a strong analysis of the issue of factors contributing to deterrence of offending. In this review, I build on what I see as the strongest points of their article, particularly their contrast of the relative importance of certainty and severity and their highlighting of certainty over severity. That observation, which many would have difficulty challenging today as the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, strongly argues for reduction of severity as reflected in the sentences imposed on convicted offenders. In exchange, it argues for using the resources thereby made available for increasing the certainty of punishment to strengthen the deterrent effect. Their primary emphasis is on providing resources to policing as a means of increasing certainty of arrest. This is certainly one important approach to using the deterrent sanction more effectively. But it also opens the door to using those resources in other ways that could contribute to less crime, thereby achieving their fundamental goal of less imprisonment (shorter sentences) and less crime: increasing certainty or pursuing other actions enabled by those resources to reduce crime. In this essay, I would like to pick up on Durlauf and Nagin’s (2011) basic objectives and discuss other approaches that should be considered as part of the policy agenda. It may well be that more and stronger policing is the best way to use those resources, but that case is far less clear than the desirability of reducing severity. Then, there should be examination in a broader systems context of the costs and benefits of a variety of other means of generating less crime.