Name: When brute force fails
ISBN: 9780691148649

When brute force fails

Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults, a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. This work explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. The author demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, he says, there has been a revolution, largely unnoticed by the press, in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As the author shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible and essential to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.

What Hacker News says

hackeraccountSep 2026

See Mark Kleiman's - When Brute Force Fails. The book mentions the Hawaiian HOPE project. The dealt with parolees by punishing violations with immediate mild punishment (i.e. you're back in jail over this weekend)instead of allowing violations to accumulate over time and then coming down on the person like a ton of bricks ( on your 10th positive urine test you go back to jail for a month).

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gdudemanJun 2026

For anyone trying to figure out how to build a society where no one wants to be a criminal, I highly recommend When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark Kleiman.

There are evidence-backed ways of reducing criminality.

One counterintuitive way of reducing crime is to increase the likelihood of being caught, to have small-but-increasing consequences for committing crimes, and to increase the swiftness of sentencing.

For example, if you are caught drinking and driving, you immediately spend 1-2 days in jail.

Long sentences are not very productive at reducing crime or at least are a very inefficient way to do so.

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_jalOct 2019

Anyone interested in the topic should take a look at _When Brute Force Fails_, by Mark Kleiman[1].

Briefly, a drug policy guy makes the case that "swift and certain" punishment with pretty usually not very severe outcomes does a lot better as deterrence than what we do now.

There's a lot to digest, and I don't think anyone is going to agree with all of it - he gores a lot of oxen. But it is meticulously researched and reasoned, and hard for this non-policy professional to argue with. Really worth at least borrowing at the library for folks who like grappling with reality at a policy level.

Mark was also a prolific blogger who died recently. I didn't know him, but did read his blog.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/When-Brute-Force-Fails-Punishment/dp/...

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dangoldinMay 2014

I'm pretty far removed from this world of crime and only relay what I read coupled with my biased experiences but I suspect crimes build on top of one another. If you get away with a small crime earlier you'll end up breaking the seal and moving on to higher risk crimes. If you keep on getting away with it you end up taking on more and more risk. At the same time there are not enough resources to enforce a low level crime so fixing the underlying problems is a much better idea.

If you're interested in this topic take a look at When Brute Force Fails (http://www.amazon.com/When-Brute-Force-Fails-Punishment/dp/0...) - I found it a good take on crime in the US.

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monosOct 2010

    > Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them
    > to pay restitution?

Why restitution? In some cases - violent crimes - any amount of money would not be enough. Punishment has no positive effect for society.

Discussing and admitting the crimes would help the victim and be cheaper. In our current law system the victim, who is the one we should pay most attention to, is mostly ignored.

For more on this controversial standpoint read up on how Tutsi & Hutu learnt to live together after the genocide.

or:

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0691148643

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frankusAug 2012

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy.

- If there's an open-air bike market at 7th and Market, it seems like you could use some of the same strategies that have been used to shut down open-air drug markets.

- Police in the greater Vancouver area have had a lot of success with bait cars, but I'm not aware of bait bikes being used more than experimentally (cf. tocatchabiketheif.com)

- If one could devise a concentrated enforcement strategy, one might not need to "take six guys off a murder" for very long. Basically the idea would be to tip a high-crime-low-probability-of-punishment equilibrium and into a low-crime-high-probability-of-punishment equilibrium that should presumably remain equally stable. One approach would be to target a geographic area and communicate (and follow through on) a threat to throw the book at anyone caught stealing a bike.

(pretty much all of these are stolen from the book When Brute Force Fails).

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