'Long prison terms are wasteful government spending': criminologist Mark Kleiman on replacing severity with swiftness and certainty.

• Author: Weissmueller, Zach
• Position: Interview with Mark Kleiman - Interview

UCLA CRIMINOLOGIST Mark Kleiman says he's "angry about having much too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars." Kleiman believes America's astronomical incarceration rate isn't making us safer. In his recent book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton University Press), he argues that when it comes to punishment, there is a tradeoff between severity and swiftness. For too long the U.S. has erred heavily on the side of severity, he says, but concentrating enforcement and providing immediate consequences for lawbreakers can reduce crime while putting fewer people in prison.

reason.tv's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Kleiman late last year. To see a video version of the interview, go to reason.tv/video/show/professor-mark-kleiman-on-too.

reason: What motivated you to write this book?

Mark Kleiman: I wrote When Brute Force Fails because I'm both excited and angry. I'm angry about having much too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars, and excited because out in the field people are doing things that could change that.

There are more people behind bars in the United States than in any other country in the world. We have more prisoners than China does. We have 5 percent of the world's population; we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners. If the criminal justice system were a parent, we'd call it abusive and neglectful. It punishes too much and not often enough. We have a criminal justice system that does not know what every competent parent knows: that you change people's behavior by giving them clear rules and by enforcing those rules consistently and quickly and fairly.

reason: What are the main reforms you're suggesting?

Kleiman: The worst thing about our criminal justice system is its randomized draconianism. We're very severe in the way we punish people, but we do so very irregularly and very erratically. The basic reform is to substitute swiftness and certainty for severity.

The average probation violation leads to no punishment at all, but an occasional probation violation will lead to six months in prison. That's the best possible way to fill up your prisons and not change anyone's behavior. The typical probation department does drug testing and tells people that they're not supposed to use. If the test comes back positive, the probation officer says, "Don't do that again:' The next time it happens, the probation officer says, "Don't do that again." The third...