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

任何一门学科都没有足够的视角和工具来应对犯罪、暴力和无法无天带来的社会挑战。然而，目前还没有足够的论坛来建立一个持续的跨学科研究人员社区来解决这些问题，并培训新的学者采用这一更广泛的观点。第二个问题是，尽管一些最具成本效益的监禁替代办法可能包括努力解决人力资本不足和改变社会环境，但对这些问题的研究往往忽视了与犯罪有关的结果。第三个限制是，对犯罪的研究往往是地方性的，忽略了其他国家或地区政策或社会状况变化带来的潜在见解。这项提议是建立一个研究协调网络，力求建立一个研究这些问题的国际跨学科研究人员网络，其中将包括：讨论新研究的年度会议；通过博士后和博士后“国家科学基金会/国家研究中心研究员”组成的跨学科培训部分，以帮助组织会议和积极参与；数据部分，通过该部分，研究人员将确定新的数据来源，以便在国家研究中心网站和其他来源提供的数据来源的基础上加以补充；以及一个传播部分，利用国家科学基金网站的强大能力。科学收益将来自共享数据和研究方法、跨学科和国家的新研究合作、扩大对与犯罪相关的结果的考虑，以及对社会项目的成本效益评估，以及对初级研究人员的指导。通过这一过程产生的新知识将服务于以尽可能低的社会成本减少犯罪行为的公共利益。

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.