In an era of scarce public resources, many jurisdictions are being forced to take drastic measures to address severe budgetary constraints on the administration of criminal justice. As prosecutors’ offices around the nation are being scaled back and enforcement priorities are being narrowed,...

The nationwide trend to criminalize juvenile delinquency in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the placement of large numbers of adolescent criminal offenders in adult correctional facilities. Prior research has assessed the consequences of this practice through comparisons of youth in juvenile...

Emboldened by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration lost no time establishing a policy that authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," that is, torture and abuse. Cofer Black, head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, testified at a joint...

Some see criminal law as essentially or predominately an exercise in retributive justice. And some see private law as essentially or predominantly an exercise in corrective justice. There is considerable discussion of the relation between retributive and distributive justice in criminal law...

Criminal sentencing policy has moved into the spotlight over the last two decades, as determinate sentencing and greater democratic oversight have brought new scrutiny to the question of how we punish. Much of the focus has been on two facts: first, that the United States incarcerates a...

This essay is a new chapter in An Introduction to Law and Economics (Third Edition, forthcoming 2003). It discusses how the state should determine the length of a jail term to impose on an individual if he has committed a crime and how much to spend on trying to catch criminals. The analysis...

This chapter surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law—the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of the analysis addresses the following basic questions: Should...

We propose and test a new survey methodology to assess the public's criminal justice spending priorities. Respondents are explicitly forced to trade-off one type of crime prevention or control policy for another and to consider the fact that any money spent on crime prevention or control...

For a rational choice theorist, the absence of crime is more difficult to explain than its presence. Arguably, the expected value of criminal sanctions, i.e. the product of severity times certainty, is often below the expected benefit. We rely on a standard theory from behavioral economics,...

We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the United States over the period 1980–2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the ‘‘Reagan revolution'' in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic...