WORKSHOP: Social Policy as Crime Prevention, Cambridge, MA, Summer, 2010.

人们犯罪的原因多种多样，有些与长期存在的社会问题有关，如贫穷、同龄人的负面影响或官员的忽视，有些与未经治疗的精神健康问题或药物滥用有关，还有一些与人类决策的更基本特征有关，这些特征在年轻人中特别普遍，并导致冲动和短视的行为。这些促成犯罪行为的因素可能会以复杂的方式相互作用和加强。然而，目前还没有适当的论坛将来自经济学、社会学、犯罪学、人口学、心理学、法学和其他领域的研究人员聚集在一起，以促进与犯罪研究相关的跨学科讨论。尤其是美国学者的犯罪研究的第二个局限性是，它往往是局部性的，因此忽略了来自其他国家或地区政策和社会状况变化的潜在见解。今年夏天的研讨会将汇集来自美国和其他地方的经济学家和非经济学家，讨论与犯罪相关的实证研究。讲习班的主题是社会政策作为预防犯罪工具的潜力。这一专题的动机是，越来越多的研究审查将资源从选定的刑事司法活动转向以证据为基础的社会政策干预是否可能提高效率。这一讲习班的学术价值来自于它提供了机会，将来自广泛学科的经验研究人员聚集在一起讨论犯罪问题，从而丰富了犯罪研究的跨学科性质，并加强了与犯罪有关的现象的理论研究。这个项目还可能给整个社会带来重要的好处。自1970年以来，美国的监禁率增加了近七倍。财政问题迫使一些州大幅减少监狱人口，同时越来越多的政策制定者表达了兴趣，即是否有成本更低的替代方案来替代大规模监禁来防止犯罪。本次研讨会的参与者将明确探讨这一可能性。

People commit crime for a wide variety of reasons, some related to persistent social problems such as poverty, negative peer influence, or official neglect, others related to untreated mental health problems or substance abuse, and still others to more basic features of human decisionmaking that are particularly prevalent among young people and lead to impulsive, short-sighted actions. These contributing factors for criminal behavior may interact and reinforce one another in complicated ways. Yet there is currently no adequate forum for bringing together researchers from economics, sociology, criminology, demography, psychology, law and other fields to promote inter-disciplinary discussions relevant to the study of crime. A second limitation of crime research by American scholars in particular is that it tends to be provincial, and so ignores potential insights derived from variation in policy and social conditions within or across other countries.This summer workshop will bring together economists and non-economists, from the U.S. and elsewhere, to discuss empirical research related to crime. The theme of the workshop is the potential of social policy as a tool for crime prevention. This theme is motivated by a growing line of research that examines the possibility of efficiency gains from redirecting resources from selected criminal justice activities to evidence-based social policy interventions.The intellectual merit of this workshop comes from the opportunity it affords to bring empirical researchers from a wide range of disciplines together to discuss crime, thereby enriching the interdisciplinary nature of research on crime and enhancing the theoretical study of phenomenon related to crime. There are also potentially important benefits to society as a whole from this project. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in America increased nearly seven-fold. Financial problems have forced a number of states to dramatically reduce their prison populations, while a growing number of policymakers have expressed interest in whether there are lower-cost alternatives to mass incarceration for preventing crime. Participants in this workshop will explicitly explore this possibility.