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

breaking the law and having some
penalties—just as there’s a big
difference between a class of forty
students and a class of twenty-five. On
the left side of the inverted-U curve,
interventions make a difference.
But remember, the logic of the
inverted-U curve is that the same
strategies that work really well at first
stop working past a certain point, and
that’s exactly what many criminologists
argue happens with punishment.
Some years ago, for example, the
criminologists Richard Wright and Scott
Decker interviewed eighty-six convicted
armed robbers. Most of what they heard
were comments like this: