Series:

Studies in Crime and Public Policy

7 total works

Cover of American Youth Violence
This is the definitive examination of adolescent violence in the United States as both a social phenomenon and a policy problem. Franklin Zimring, one of America's most esteemed scholars of law and crime, scrutinizes criminal statistics and demographic trends in order to authoritatively address public worries. The result is a thorough debunking of Congressional predictions of "a coming storm of juvenile violence" and the half-baked policy proposals that accompany such warnings. The book sets forth comprehensive and dispassionate analyses of three key areas of youth violence policy: adolescent firearms possession and use, standards for transfer from juvenile to criminal court jurisdiction, and legal sanctions for adolescents who kill. Throughout American Youth Violence, the core issues of youth violence in the 1990s are examined with an unprecedented degree of analytic rigour. Zimring also offers an appropriate set of responses to youth violence that are consistent with a positive future for the juvenile court and for American youth.

Cover of The Next Frontier
Today, two-thirds of the world's nations have abolished the death penalty, either officially or in practice, due mainly to the campaign to end state executions led by Western European nations. Will this success spread to Asia, where over 95 percent of executions now occur? Do Asian values and traditions support capital punishment, or will development and democratization end executions in the world's most rapidly developing region?

David T. Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin E. Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, combine detailed case studies of the death penalty in Asian nations with cross-national comparisons to identify the critical factors for the future of Asian death penalty policy. The clear trend is away from reliance on state execution and many nations with death penalties in their criminal codes rarely use it. Only the hard-line authoritarian regimes of China, Vietnam, Singapore, and North Korea execute with any frequency, and when authoritarian states experience democratic reforms, the rate of executions drops sharply, as in Taiwan and South Korea. Debunking the myth of "Asian values," Johnson and Zimring demonstrate that politics, rather than culture or tradition, is the major obstacle to the end of executions. Carefully researched and full of valuable lessons, The Next Frontier is the authoritative resource on the death penalty in Asia for scholars, policymakers, and advocates around the world.

Cover of Punishment and Democracy
This book is the most comprehensive treatment of the politics and the impact of the 'get tough' criminal sentencing legislation in the US. It includes a major empirical study of the celebrated California 'three strikes' law, the law that imposed a 25-years to life imprisonment the moment of a third felony conviction. 'Three Strikes' is the single most important assault on criminal recidivists in the twentieth century. This book tells the story of how such a revolutionary shift in punishment policy became law, the impact of that legislation on criminal punishments and crime rates in California, and the broad implications of Three Strikes for the ways in which punishment policy is made in democratic governments.

Cover of The Great American Crime Decline
Many theories--from the routine to the bizarre--have been offered up to explain the crime decline of the 1990s. Was it record levels of imprisonment? An abatement of the crack cocaine epidemic? More police using better tactics? Or even the effects of legalized abortion? And what can we expect from crime rates in the future? Franklin E. Zimring here takes on the experts, and counters with the first in-depth portrait of the decline and its true significance. The major lesson from the 1990s is that relatively superficial changes in the character of urban life can be associated with up to 75% drops in the crime rate. Crime can drop even if there is no major change in the population, the economy or the schools.

Offering the most reliable data available, Zimring documents the decline as the longest and largest since World War II. It ranged across both violent and non-violent offenses, all regions, and every demographic. All Americans, whether they live in cities or suburbs, whether rich or poor, are safer today. Casting a critical and unerring eye on current explanations, this book demonstrates that both long-standing theories of crime prevention and recently generated theories fall far short of explaining the 1990s drop. A careful study of Canadian crime trends reveals that imprisonment and economic factors may not have played the role in the U.S. crime drop that many have suggested.

There was no magic bullet but instead a combination of factors working in concert rather than a single cause that produced the decline. Further--and happily for future progress-- it is clear that declines in the crime rate do not require fundamental social or structural changes. Smaller shifts in policy can make large differences.

The significant reductions in crime rates, especially in New York, where crime dropped twice the national average, suggests that there is room for other cities to repeat this astounding success. In this definitive look at the great American crime decline, Franklin E. Zimring finds no pat answers but evidence that even lower crime rates might be in store.

Cover of Incapacitation

Incapacitation

by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins

Published 9 February 1995

The one, sure way that imprisonment prevents crime is by restraining offenders from committing crimes while they are locked up. Called "incapacitation" by experts in criminology, this effect has become the dominant justification for imprisonment in the United States, where well over a million persons are currently in jails and prisons, and public figures who want to appear tough on crime periodically urge that we throw away the key. How useful is the modern prison in restraining crime, and at what cost? How much do we really know about incapacitation and its effectiveness? This book is the first comprehensive assessment of incapacitation. Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins show the increasing reliance on restraint to justify imprisonment, analyze the existing theories on incapacitation's effects, assess the current empirical research, report a new study, and explore the links between what is known about incapacitation and what it tells us about our criminal justice policy. An insightful evaluation of a pressing policy issue, Incapacitation is a vital contribution to the current debates on our criminal justice system.

Cover of Crime Is Not the Problem
This book has three main aims: the first is to show that what separates the USA from other countries is not crime rates but lethal violence. Crimes like burglary and theft are a part of modern urban life worldwide; shootings and stabbings are not - they are particularly American. Why is this so? Secondly , the book seeks to clarify the causes of violence by looking at the proximate causes of deadly violence - guns, violence in the media, drugs and the tradition of lethal violence are all examined. The concluding section of the book concerns the prevention of lethal violence as a priority issue. The authors discuss a range of anti-violence alternatives from change in the criminal law to social and physical environmental factors and social values and attitudes.

Cover of The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment
Why does the United States continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it? Why does capital punishment become more problematic each year? How can the death penalty conflict be resolved?
In Contradictions in American Capital Punishment, Frank Zimring reveals that the seemingly insoluble turmoil surrounding the death penalty reflects a deep and long-standing division in American values, a division that he predicts will soon bring about the end of capital punishment in our country. On the one hand, execution would seem to violate our nation's highest legal principles of fairness and due process. It sets us increasingly apart from our allies and indeed is regarded
by European nations as a barbaric and particularly egregious form of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, the death penalty represents a deeply held American belief in violent social justice that sees the hangman as an agent of local control and safeguard of community values. Zimring uncovers the most
troubling symptom of this attraction to vigilante justice in the lynch mob. He shows that the great majority of executions in recent decades have occurred in precisely those Southern states where lynchings were most common a hundred years ago. It is this legacy, Zimring suggests, that constitutes both the distinctive appeal of the death penalty in the United States and one of the most compelling reasons for abolishing it.
Impeccably researched and engagingly written, Contradictions in American Capital Punishment casts a clear new light on America's long and troubled embrace of the death penalty.