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"Can Less Punishment Reduce Crime?"
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
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Since the 1960s, the U.S. prison population has increased fivefold. Prisons today hold one inmate for every one hundred adults — a record rate in American history, and one unmatched by any other country. But despite the high prison population, crime has stopped falling. Punishments can seem random in their severity and implementation, minorities and the poor still disproportionately become victims and inmates, and enforcement — particularly of probation and parole — is haphazard. How can crime be controlled? UCLA Public Policy professor Mark Kleiman, author of When Brute Force Fails, visits Zócalo to offer a new strategy for cutting crime, reducing the prison population, and still enacting swift, certain, and fair punishment.
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The Limits of American Power
MONDAY, JUNE 21 , 2010, 7:30 PM
Iraq isn’t the first war that began with an overestimation of American power. Woodrow Wilson and the pro-war progressives believed World War I would transform the world. Lyndon Johnson and the Camelot intellectuals thought America could stop any communist movement from taking power anywhere on earth. George W. Bush and the ... WATCH FULL VIDEO
How to Grade Barack Obama's First Year
TUESDAY, JUNE 15 , 2010, 7:00 PM
Barack Obama rose to the presidency at a critical time in American history. Propelled by a galvanized left, admired for his cool temperament and high intellect, challenged as inexperienced, and provoking fierce and often racially-tinged opposition, the young Senator from Illinois took the oath of the highest office amid celebration despite the ... WATCH FULL VIDEO
Reforming Prisons from the Inside
THURSDAY, JUNE 10 , 2010, 7:30 PM
Wilbert Rideau spent 44 years in one of the country’s most infamous prisons, Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary. After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau was sentenced to death at 19, later amended to life imprisonment. From within Angola, long the sight of prison reform activism ... WATCH FULL VIDEO
How the Hoover Dam Made America
TUESDAY, JUNE 8 , 2010, 7:30 PM
The Hoover Dam was once thought to be a remote regional project, approved as an afterthought by a Republican president before the stock market crashed. But by the time it was completed, and in the 75 years since it was dedicated, the Dam has come to symbolize American resilience and ingenuity at one of the worst times in our history. ... WATCH FULL VIDEO
