RCN: Reducing Criminal Behavior by Developing Human (and Social) Capital

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No single discipline has sufficient breadth of perspective and tools to address the societal challenges posed by crime, violence, and lawlessness. Yet currently there is no adequate forum for creating a sustained inter-disciplinary community of researchers to address these issues and train new scholars to adopt this broader perspective. A second problem is that while some of the most cost-effective alternatives to incarceration may include efforts to address human capital deficits and change the social environment, research on those issues too often ignores crime-related outcomes. A third limitation is that research on crime tends to be provincial, and ignores potential insights from variation in policy or social conditions within or across other countries. This proposal is to establish a research coordination network (RCN) that would seek to create an international inter-disciplinary network of researchers to study these issues, and which would include: annual meetings to discuss new research; a training component via an interdisciplinary cohort of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral "NSF / NBER fellows" to help organize the meetings and actively participate; a data component through which fellows would identify new data sources to add to the those available on the NBER websites and other sources; and a dissemination component that leverages the outstanding capacities of the NBER website. The scientific benefits will flow from shared data and research methods, new research collaborations across disciplines and nations, the expanded consideration of crime-related outcomes in conjunction with the cost-benefit evaluation of social programs, and mentorship of junior researchers. New knowledge generated from this process will serve the public interest in reducing criminal behavior at lowest possible social cost.