Franklin Zimring Subscribe

Franklin Zimring is a Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. His most recent book is The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (2013).

October 28, 2015|Broken Windows Policing, Criminal Justice, Criminal Law, Sentencing, The City That Became Safe

Crime and Sentencing in America: A Conversation with Frank Zimring

by Franklin Zimring|

This next podcast is with criminal law expert Frank Zimring, author of The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, on the state of policing, crime, and sentencing in America. We discuss the revolution in policing and criminal deterrence in New York and what it has meant overall for criminal justice in America. In addition, our conversation focuses on recent efforts to reform state and federal sentencing laws.

November 5, 2013|Drug War, Police Violence, Rise of the Warrior Cop, SWAT Teams

Are We Witnessing the Rise of the Warrior Cop?

by Franklin Zimring|

The central concern of Radley Balko’s new book is what he calls “the militarization of America’s police forces.” The main symptoms of this disease are specialized SWAT teams that were formed to deal with violent emergencies but which now frequently turn “no knock” home invasions in pursuit of drug offenders and evidence into violent and frequently injurious confrontations. The blame for this overkill is shared in Balko’s account by (1) drug warriors creating legislative licenses for no-knock entry, (2) the SWAT team innovation of Daryl Gates in Los Angeles that is now a status symbol in police departments nationwide, (3) the permissive trust of constitutional courts in the motives and veracity of the cops, and (4) public willingness to tolerate excessive force as a law enforcement style against criminals. All of this is encouraged as well by federal programs to share military equipment and provide financial incentives for drug policing.

June 9, 2012|Decriminalization, Drug Prohibition, Drug War, Ed Meese, Judge James Gray, Milton Friedman, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It

The Shifting Politics of Drug Control

by Franklin Zimring|

The angry debate about the proper role of the criminal law in drug control does not organize conveniently around the traditional left-versus-right divisions of political geography in the United States. For a generation now, a civil war of ideas has been waged within the American right between libertarian opponents of state drug control and more traditional law and order conservatives. At the zenith of the American drug war around 1990, prominent conservative and libertarian intellectuals provided leadership for extreme state controls (William Bennett, the first drug tsar) and radical deregulation (Milton Friedman). One of the major amusements that liberal criminologists had when visiting drug conferences at the Hoover Institute back then was to witness the passionate division between distinguished law and order resident fellows like Ed Meese and the libertarian Professor Friedman on the ends and means of the American Drug War. Hoover didn’t have to order out for lively differences of opinion on drugs, then or probably now.[1]

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.