The Challenge of Crime – Rethinking Our Response - Hardcover

Ruth, Henry S

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 debate will be by far the most punitive in US 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 Author

HENRY S. RUTH JR, 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067400891X
• ISBN 13: 9780674008915
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448