David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

charge me with this, I’ll admit to that, and so let’s make a deal. And then third, I’m going to only serve half the time. Weigh ...

benefits of committing a crime in California much greater than the risks. The answer, he felt, was to raise the costs of committ ...

increases in the cost of crime by committing fewer crimes. This is clearly true when the penalties for breaking the law are real ...

drivers and a local car service called Murray Hill Limousine Service over the right to pick up passengers from the airport explo ...

breaking the law and having some penalties—just as there’s a big difference between a class of forty students and a class of twe ...

I put forth an effort to try not to think about [getting caught....It’s] too much of a distraction. You can’t concentrate on doi ...

care at the time. Even when pressed, the criminals interviewed by Decker and Wright “remained indifferent to threatened sanction ...

attempted a carjacking in broad daylight. And remember what Walker said? I wasn’t really thinking much a nothing, you know. When ...

him any respect.” Reynolds’s own words contradict the logic of Three Strikes. Joe Davis killed Kimber Reynolds because she would ...

very small likelihood of an already very serious sanction will stand ready tomorrow to take the same chance on what they still v ...

felony and been released at the age of forty-eight. With Three Strikes, he would serve, at minimum, twenty-five years—and get ou ...

Longer sentences work on young men. But once someone passes that crucial midtwenties mark, all longer sentences do is protect us ...

criminals at the point that they become less dangerous. Once again, what starts out as a promising strategy stops working. Now f ...

number of the men who get sent to prison, for example, are fathers. (One- fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children. ...

he returns to his old neighborhood. There’s a good chance he’s been psychologically damaged by his time behind bars. His employm ...

outweigh the benefit.^3 Clear and a colleague—Dina Rose— tested his hypothesis in Tallahassee, Florida.^4 They went across the c ...

wasn’t caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins ...

equivalent of Brownsville? Reynolds is convinced that his crusade saved six lives a day, because crime rates came tumbling down ...

lower crime. Others said that it worked but that the money spent on locking criminals up would have been better spent elsewhere. ...

California finally gave up. In a state referendum, the law was radically scaled back.^7 ...