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An assessment of incapacitation in which the authors expose the increasing reliance on restraint to justify imprisonment, analyse the existing theoretical literature and empirical research on incapacitation's effects, and explore the links between incapacitation and criminal justice policy. In the STUDIES IN CRIME AND PUBLIC POLICY series

This text has three aims: the first is to show that what separates the USA from other countries is not crime rates but lethal violence. Secondly, the book seeks to clarify the causes of violence by looking at the proximate causes of violence. The last section concerns the prevention of violence

This book presents a comprehensive examination of the drug control policy process in the United States. How are policy choices identified, debated and selected? How are the consequences of governmental policy measured and evaluated? How, if at all, do we learn from our mistakes. The first section deals with four different ways of understanding American drug policy: drug control as ideology, drugs as an issue of definition and measurement, an historical analysis of drug control, and finally, drug control as an occasion for debating the proper role of the criminal law. Zimring and Hawkins also discuss priority problems for drug control and provide a foundation for an improved policy process. They argue that protection of children and youth should shape policy toward illicit crime, with attention to the fact that youth protection objectives may limit the effectiveness of some drug controls

This article argues for principles governing the creation of federal crimes. It first profiles the offenses that compose the major elements of federal criminal jurisdiction in current circumstances and then discusses the need for jurisdictional principles, using the history of recent federal criminal legislation as a case study. Against this background, the article puts forward a set of guiding principles for the selection of appropriate crimes for inclusion in a limited federal criminal code. When we compare the principles available to govern federal criminal jurisdiction with the current pattern of federal versus state criminal justice activity, the result is that no set of principles matches the current reach of the federal criminal code. Requiring both federal interest and some distinctive federal stake in the subject of criminal legislation would substantially reduce the number of federal crimes. The authors' preference would be for the narrower principles combined with the expectation that legislators will not infrequently cheat on the requirement of a distinctive federal stake when constituent pressures are great. A principled standard is valuable even if it is sometimes honored in the breach.