The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking Our Response - Hardcover

Henry S. Ruth; Kevin R. Reitz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067400891X ISBN 13: 9780674008915

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

The development of crime policy in the United States for many generations has been hampered by a drastic shortage of knowledge and data, an excess of partisanship and instinctual responses, and a one-way tendency to expand the criminal justice system. Even if a three-decade pattern of prison growth came to a full stop in the early 2000s, the current decade will be by far the most punitive in U.S. history, hitting some minority communities particularly hard.

The book examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime. Concentrating on meaningful areas for change in policing, sentencing, guns, drugs, and juvenile crime, they discuss such topics as new priorities for the use of incarceration; aggressive policing; the war on drugs; the need to switch the gun control debate to a focus on crime gun regulation; a new focus on offenders' transition from confinement to freedom; and the role of private enterprise.

A book that rejects traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime takes a major step in offering new approaches for the nation's responses to crime.

About this title

About the Authors

Henry Ruth has served in many criminal justice roles, including the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the Deputy Attorney General's Office of the U.S. Department of Justice, and President Lyndon Johnson's National Crime Commission.

Kevin R. Reitz is Professor of Law, University of Colorado.

Reviews

Having displaced both South Africa and the former Soviet Union as the world's top jailor, America urgently needs the kind of unflinching analysis offered by these two leading authorities on dealing with crime. The authors show why our police, state prosecutors, juvenile courts, and penitentiaries have grown increasingly punitive in the three and a half decades since Lyndon Johnson's 1967 National Crime Commission, which stressed the rehabilitation of offenders and the establishment of government programs for the disadvantaged as the best hope for reversing the alarming upsurge in crime. Ruth (a member of Johnson's commission) and Reitz acknowledge that the American public lost faith in such liberal solutions and turned to conservative activists who promised to restore civic order by imprisoning, not coddling, criminals. Though conservative policies have indeed delivered lower crime rates, the authors cogently argue that the mounting monetary and political costs of incarceration compel consideration of alternative strategies, including more federal monitoring of gun sales and more restraint in imprisoning nonviolent criminals. Balanced and sober, an indispensable reference for students of criminal justice. Bryce Christensen
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067400891X
• ISBN 13: 9780674008915
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384