'Less Prison + More Policing = Less Crime': Professor Lawrence Sherman

Cambridge Law: Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law MOVED

A presentation by Professor Lawrence Sherman, Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology and Director, Police Executive Programme. Repeated experiments show that focused policing reduces crime. Yet research shows that prison increases offenders’ crime rates, especially after they are sent to prison for the first time. New forecasting tools allow criminologists to predict the few people who are too dangerous to divert from prosecution, and the vast majority of minor offenders who are “super-safe” in terms of serious violence. By letting police manage these low-harm offenders, prosecuting them as a last resort rather than the first option, we may be able to cut crime, cut costs, and reduce the prison population. This Cambridge Criminology video talk describes the key experiments for testing this hypothesis.