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

人们犯罪的原因多种多样，有些与持续存在的社会问题有关，如贫困、消极的同伴影响或官方忽视，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，导致冲动和短视的行为。这些犯罪行为的促成因素以复杂的方式相互作用、相互强化。然而，目前还没有一个适当的论坛，将经济学、社会学、犯罪学、人口学、心理学、法律和其他领域的研究人员聚集在一起，促进与犯罪研究有关的跨学科讨论。美国学者的犯罪研究的第二个局限性是，它往往是狭隘的，因此忽视了从其他国家内部或其他国家之间的政策和社会条件的变化中获得的潜在见解。这个夏季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，讨论与犯罪有关的实证研究。讲习班的主题是社会政策作为预防犯罪工具的潜力。这一主题的动机是，越来越多的研究审查了将资源从选定的刑事司法活动转向循证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的机会，使来自广泛学科的实证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，促进了对犯罪相关现象的理论研究。这个项目对整个社会也有潜在的重要好处。自1970年以来，美国的监禁率增加了近7倍。财政问题迫使一些州大幅减少监狱人口，而越来越多的政策制定者表示有兴趣了解是否有成本更低的替代方案来预防犯罪。本次研讨会的与会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.