Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

OVERVIEW
Hard times
Professor Steven N. Durlauf and Professor
Daniel S. Nagin give a US perspective on
crime control in a time of budget austerity
Steven N. Durlauf is Vilas
Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow
Professor of Economics at the
University of Wisconsin, USA
England and Wales are in the
throes of doing what we on the
other side of the Atlantic are
just beginning to address – the need for
massive cuts in government spending
We have recently completed an essay
titled Imprisonment and Crime: Can Both
Be Reduced?, which may provide useful
perspective on how your government’s
planned reductions of 20 per cent or
more in spending on police, courts and
imprisonment should be implemented
The conclusions of this essay suggest
to us that Britain would be wise to make
these cuts in a fashion which leaves
policing with a larger share of the smaller
overall public resources committed
to crime control. But we also make a
challenge to police leadership to commit
itself to using police resources in ways that
have been demonstrated to be effective in
reducing crime.
A common mistake on both sides of
the Atlantic is to equate police numbers
with crime control. We argue that it is
the way police are used that is critical
in determining their effectiveness in
preventing crime.
We reviewed the evidence on the
deterrent effect of imprisonment. We
concluded that lengthy prison sentences
are not, on the margin, an effective
deterrent (although may be important to
detain a small number of the genuinely
dangerous) but that the changes in
policing, if properly done, can achieve
substantial crime reductions.
Based on these two conclusions
we argued that there is a realistic
possibility that crime, prison costs
and imprisonment numbers can be
simultaneously reduced if crime control
policy shifts from a primary reliance on
severity-based tactics, mandating lengthy
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H.
John III University Professor of
Public Policy and Statistics at
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
“Lengthy prison sentences are
not, on the margin, an effective
deterrent (although may be
important to detain a small number
of the genuinely dangerous).”
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