The U.S. is the world´s biggest jailor and one of the most affluent murderous countries, and yet its citizens pay more taxes to sustain law and order than their European counterparts. Yet, the U.S. has the most data in the world on the use of incarceration and its failure. Its researchers have identified more projects able to prevent violence than the rest of the world put together. Its legislators have access to pioneering data banks on cost effective ways to use taxes to reduce crime. We are left wondering why we cannot implement measures that we know will work, reduce crime, and cost less for law and order. Smarter Crime Control shows how to use recent knowledge and best practices to reduce the extraordinarily high rates of murder, traffic fatalities, drug overdoses, and incarceration, while avoiding the high taxes paid by families for policing and prisons. Providing detailed examples, Irvin Waller offers specific actions our leaders at all levels can take to reduce violence and lower costs to taxpayers. He focuses on how to retool policing and improve corrections to reduce reoffending and crime, while limiting criminal courts. He also shows how programs and investments in various strategies can help those youth on the path to chronic offending avoid the path all together. Waller shows how to get smart on crime to shift the criminal justice paradigm from the failing, outdated, racially biased, and exorbitant complex today to an effective, modern, fair and lean system for safer communities that spares so many victims from the loss and pain of preventable violence. He makes a compelling case for reinvesting what is currently misspent on reacting to crime into smart ways to prevent crime. Ultimately, he demonstrates to readers the importance of reevaluating our current system and putting into place proven strategies for crime and violence prevention that will keep people out of jail and make our streets and communities safer for everyone.

Science and Secrets of Ending Violent Crime is not just about the solid violence prevention science but for the first time the secrets of how to transform our world to get that science used. It presents strategies to get smart investment in ending violent crime instead of misspending on law enforcement and jails.

Rather than sending more people to jail or hiring more and more police, Waller argues that research shows that addressing problems in the community does more to prevent crime. Here, Waller shows that hiring public health nurses and investing in helping youth at risk to complete school and get job training is better than hiring more police; preventing family violence, banning hand guns and dealing with drugs through public health saves more lives than incarceration; getting close neighbors to watch out for us and better industrial design are more effective than criminal courts; smarter policing is better than more police; paying for services to support victims and guaranteeing them rights is better than more rhetoric - from publisher description.

Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins's first premise is that our criminal justice system is a moral busybody, unwisely extended beyond its proper role of protecting persons and property. But they go further and systematically cover the amount, costs, causes, and victims of crime: the reduction of violence; the police; corrections; juvenile delinquency; the function of psychiatry in crime control; organized crime; and the uses of criminological research. On each topic precise recommendations are made and carefully defended.

Are crime rates rising or falling around the world? Are specific types of crime more prevalent in some cultures than others? Do different cultures vary greatly in their attitudes toward crime prevention? Students will find answers to these and similar questions in this unique resource of 15 case studies exploring the problems of crime and crime control in different countries, ranging from Germany to Ghana, to around the world. Cross-cultural comparisons examine the history, the public perceptions, contemporary problems, and the future of crime and crime control in each country. The comparisons also provide readers with the opportunity to discover both the many differences and the many similarities that exist among the different cultures in their rates of crime, forms of prevention, and attitudes toward it. Each of the 15 chapters opens with a brief overview, which includes the type of government and the living environment of the country to introduce readers to the population. The countries were chosen to represent every region of the world and to provide as broad a picture as possible when exploring the issues presented by the problem of crime and different cultures' efforts to control it. The user-friendly format of the volume, with each chapter following the same outline, makes it easy for readers to compare specific aspects among the 15 cultures. These different views of the crime problem around the world and what it means to different people will help students to understand it in a broad sense as a social issue that affects all of humanity.

What is meant by crime, crime prevention and crime control? Who defines the acts which are deemed as criminal? Who devises the sanctions and who acts as agents of social control? This timely and challenging book brings together a group of leading international criminologists from all sides of the political spectrum. They first examine the formation and implementation of official crime prevention and control policies. In the second part they look at a range of critical perspectives which explore the definition of crime and discuss proposals for its prevention and control.

This book is about how public funds and human resources can be allocated to optimize the control of crime in a modern democratic society. The authors build a model of crime generation, and control - through the imposition of sanctions - that provides insight into alternatives for social policy-makers. Econometric techniques are used to analyze policy issues such as: establishing control policies; determining monetary measures of the seriousness of crime; discerning community priorities for fighting crime; choosing between alternative drug-control programs; and extracting useful information from crime data. These techniques are also used to determine: the effect of economic opportunities for youth on crime rates; the influence of rising crime rates on police effectiveness; the cost of police effectiveness; and the possibility for deterring violence. Additional issues examined are: the effect of handgun control on homicide rates; the relative merits of jail and probation; the rate of police manpower growth needed to keep pace with crime rates; and the necessary data needed for planning an optimum level of public safety. The analysis starts with single-equation estimations and builds to system and multi-equation models. The statistical results are based on several data sets with the earlier studies using time series from the 1950's and 1960's. The estimation of the more complex model is based on cross-sectional data from the 1960 and 1970 census for the counties of California.