Crime, Punishment, and Mass Incarceration

Various Authors (Zack Carpenter)
November 2023

Americans seem to feel that crime is bad and getting worse. To what extent is this true? 

How are our perceptions of crime influenced and can they become distorted? How do we move forward from a place of low quality access to information on a topic of high importance?

Some questions to consider: 

• Where do you get your information about crime? Social media? Nextdoor? Word of mouth? TV news? 

• Both in your cities and neighborhoods, and broadly in America, do you feel like people are getting more scared of crime as time goes on?

• When someone is really scared of something, rightfully or not, how do they get un-scared of that thing? How do we overcome fears and phobias?

• What does an evolved system of justice look like to you? 

Reading:

On crime perceptions:

• LA Times - Killings in the U.S. are dropping at a historic rate. Will anyone notice?

• Gallup - Crime, American Public Opinion and the Election

• Paul Krugman - This is Your Brain on Crime

On solutions:

• Rethinking Prison as a Deterrent to Crime

On the issue of mass incarceration generally:

• The Economic Costs of the US Criminal Justice System

• Mass Incarceration - The Whole Pie 2023 

• William Stuntz - The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

• Joshua Kleinfeld - Two Cultures of Punishment (Stanford Law Review)

Around 2001, Americans' perception of crime and actual reported violent crime start trending in different directions. Why is that?

When a Republican is President, Dems more likely to think crime is worse than last year. That flips when Dem is President.