More Than Lightning in a Bottle and Far From Ready‐Made

• Author: Nicholas Corsaro
• Date: 01 February 2018
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12354

POLICY ESSAY

FOCUSED DETERRENCE STRATEGIES

AND CRIME CONTROL

More Than Lightning in a Bottle and Far

From Ready-Made

Nicholas Corsaro

University of Cincinnati

The Pareto Principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto who developed the

“80/20” rule in the late 1800s, specifies that 80% of the effects come from

20% of the causes. During the past century, researchers focused on business,

product consumption, medicine, and the behavioral sciences have observed the same basic

persistent pattern regarding the “vital few and trivial many” (Juran, 1954). Notsurprisingly,

criminologists have lent further support to this principle, or various adaptations of it, by

showing that a fraction of offenders commits a majority of crime (Moffitt, 1993), that a

small number of geographic locations (such as hot spots, street segments, and even cities)

accounts for the majority of observed crime patterns (McCall, Land, and Parker, 2011;

Sherman, Martin, and Buerger,1989; Weisburd, Bushway, Lum, and Yang, 2004), and that

a small number of groups of offenders is responsible for a disproportionate level of street

crime such as gun violence and drug offending (Zimring, 1981). Academics and criminal

justice practitioners alike are intimately familiar with this concept.

Nevertheless, there is often a wide disconnect between what is known and what

is done. Pioneers in Boston in the late 1990s developed the Ceasefire strategy by

drawing on principles of crime prevention that have shown to have crime reduction

benefits in a variety of settings (Braga, Kennedy, Waring, and Piehl, 2001). They

developed a model that (a) used data to identify the high-risk gangs and groups of

chronic offenders that were responsible for the Pareto Principle in action within Boston;

(b) generated networks of capacity between criminal justice agencies including police,

prosecution, probation, parole, and social services; (c) channeled criminal justice resources

to suppress, deter, and alter high-risk offenders’ perceptions of the enhanced sanctions,

as well as potential for victimization, related to the continuation of violence; and

Direct correspondence to Nicholas Corsaro, School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, 660-S Dyer

Hall, Clifton Avenue, P.O. Box 210389, Cincinnati, OH 45221 (e-mail: corsarns@ucmail.uc.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12354 C2018 American Society of Criminology 251

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 1