Smarter Crime Control: A Guide to a Safer Future for Citizens, Communities, and Politicians

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Waller shows how to get smart on crime to shift the criminal justice paradigm from the failing, outdated, racially biased, and exorbitant complex today to an effective, modern, fair and lean system for safer communities that spares so many victims from the loss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.

Irvin Waller is internationally renowned for helping policy makers use the best evidence to make communities safer from crime. He is a passionate speaker, Professor of Criminology, and President of the International Organization for Victim Assistance (in consultative status with ECOSOC). He has advised the governments of more than 50 countries in both the advanced and developing world. The government of Mexico recently recognized his significant contributions to violence prevention and victim rights in Latin America. He was a member of the National Criminal Justice Commission in the US (1996), the South African Minister of Safety and Security’s Task Force (in the Mandela government) on Safety and Security (1997) and the Council of Canadian Academies Panel on Policing Canada in the 21st Century (2013). From 1980 to 1986, he was elected to the Board of the US National Organization for Victim Assistance. In 1982, he began persuading non-governmental organizations and governments around the world to support the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, which was adopted only three years later by the General Assembly of the UN with the active support of the US. He won awards in the USA and internationally for this achievement, The Declaration has become known as the magna carta for victim rights. In the 1990´s, he won recognition from several advanced nations for his work to get investment in the prevention of violence, as the founding executive director of the International Centre for Prevention of Crime, affiliated with the UN. Waller lectures in English, French, and Spanish and is a prolific writer whose works are translated into many languages. He is the author of a trilogy of influential books that are shaping the world, including Less Law, More Order and Rights for Victims of Crimes. Smarter Crime Control. www.irvinwaller.org