Filling Up Prisons Without Fighting Crime: Mark Kleiman on America's Criminal Justice System

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:45:00 EDT

UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is "angry about having too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars." The United States is home to five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners, yet, says Kleiman, our high incarceration rate isn't making us safer.

In his book, When Brute Force Fails, Kleiman explains that, when it comes to punishment, there is a trade-off between severity and swiftness. For too long the U.S. has erred heavily on the side of severity, but if we concentrate enforcement and provide immediate consequences for law-breakers, Kleiman says we can both reduce the crime rate and put fewer people in prison.

Approximately 7 minutes.

Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Alex Manning. Edited by Weissmueller.

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Robert K. Elder on The Last Words of The Executed

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:05:00 EDT

What's the cultural and political significance of the dying utterances of people condemned to death?

Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie sat down with Robert K. Elder, author of The Last Words of the Executed, to discuss the final words people executed by the state, ranging from Sarah Goode, a victim of the Salem Witch Trials, to Gary Gilmore, the Utah murderer who became a pop phenomenon in the 1970s, to Karla Faye Tucker, a killer who famously said she had an orgasm every time she swung a pick axe into flesh during a brutal double murder.

Approximately 8.30 minutes. Shot by Dan Hayes, Meredith Bragg and Josh Swain. Edited by Josh Swain.

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Filling Up Prisons Without Fighting Crime: Mark Kleiman on America's Criminal Justice System

Robert K. Elder on The Last Words of The Executed