When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment

Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults-a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into this trap, and how we can cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade.

Mark Kleiman describes the recent revolution-largely unnoticed by the press-in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But it is possible-and essential-to create focused zero tolerance for offenders on probation and parole, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.