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Can we make violence a source of competitive disadvantage, rather than competitive advantage, for Mexican drug traffickers?
Archive for the ‘Crime Control’ Category
January 25th, 2012
Category: Crime Control
I have a short, and possibly provocative, essay up at the website of the LA Guardian Angels organization. Shorter version: citizens see more crime than cops do, and citizens with flying mobile cameras (available as toys at your local mall) could see still more. Is there a way to gather and process that information that [...]
January 21st, 2012
It is very difficult for elected officials to talk seriously about drug policy reform (It is easy for them to talk about it non-seriously, but that’s a separate matter). The issues require nuanced dialogue, but the debate is dominated by polarized shouting matches. Reform minded politicians are typically reduced to un-sound-bite-worthy statements such as “I’d [...]
January 14th, 2012
Category: Crime Control, Film
How much would you charge to dig a 100 foot long tunnel, install supports and lighting throughout it and then break through more than a foot of concrete at the end? Surely more than the 6,000 pounds (about 10k USD) earned by these thieves in the UK. The tunnel diggers did all their work to [...]
January 6th, 2012
Drug policy research is at best a modestly sized field. Nonetheless, its findings have significant potential to help societies develop more effective public policies regarding marijuana, heroin, cocaine, nicotine and other psychoactive drugs. I am therefore very glad to announce that an extension of the international drug policy research integration conducted for the book Drug [...]
December 9th, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Popular Culture
I view it as a sign of social progress that jokes about sexual violence against women have gone out of fashion in mainstream television shows and in polite conversation. But laughing about men raping men in prison continues to be disturbingly normative. Consider for example David Letterman’s top 10 list about former Illinois Governor Blagojevich. [...]
December 1st, 2011
Category: Britain, Crime Control
Much has been written about the problems created when a very large generation (e.g., the Baby Boom) is followed by a small generation, most notably fiscal strain on age-based social welfare programs. But in his informative book “The Pinch” (thoughtful review here), David Willetts, MP makes the point that there is also an advantage to [...]
November 27th, 2011
Category: Prisons and penal policy
I have long agreed with Mark Kleiman that part of the solution to prison overcrowding is to use technology to monitor lower-risk offenders in the community. But as I start to work with some brilliant and dedicated Stanford law students on the reduction of California’s prison population, I move from the theoretical to the practical [...]
November 20th, 2011
When the Alameda County Sheriff’s cops suited up in their riot armor and, AFAIK with our campus officers , beat a bunch of our students and faculty with batons, my chancellor was in Shanghai setting up a branch campus; I don’t know who was nominally in charge and forgot to be in charge. When the [...]
November 20th, 2011
It’s time to remind ourselves what the “rotten apples” metaphor means and what it does not. It means that a even very few corrupt individuals in an organization need to be detected and dealt with quickly, because the rot otherwise quickly spreads and infects the whole system. Someone getting away with stuff is an object [...]
