Justice committee  I will take a couple of them. The ones that I think are more appropriate to Professor Doob, I might pass on. On the Levitt question, I'm actually equally as staunch a critic of Steven Levitt as is Professor Doob. And no, I don't believe any other work exists. In fact, I believe

Justice committee  You make the distinction that there is a time to talk about the big issues but this is a specific problem we need to address. With all due respect, that's the thinking that has governed the United States policy for the past thirty years and that has gotten us into problems. If

Justice committee  Very quickly, in August 2003, then Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum to federal prosecutors, essentially instructing them not to plead cases down. The official position at the federal level of the Department of Justice is that there is not supposed to be any of t

Justice committee  I want to echo my colleague's remarks. Nobody's suggesting that for handgun crimes, when there's violence involved, that these people are not going to prison. I think the distinction is the role that mandatory minimums play and their tendency to overreach. From our experience, t

Justice committee  In about a minute. From the American perspective, our crime rates are shaped by a number of complex issues, and they are historically linked to post-war development and evaporation of economic opportunity in urban cities. Frequently what has been left in a lot of urban areas is e

Justice committee  Just briefly, approximately 650,000 Americans come out of prison every year, to give you a sense of the scale in our country. One of the buzzwords in Washington in the last five to six years has been this notion of re-entry. These numbers have become so significant that we have

Justice committee  I'll describe the organization.

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon. I'm Ryan King, a policy analyst with The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice policy organization located in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to broaden the discussion regarding criminal and justice policy in the United States by brid

Justice committee  First, empirical research has demonstrated that mandatory minimum sentencing fails to achieve the intended goal of a reduction in criminal offending. Secondly, this twenty-year experiment with mandatory sentencing has had catastrophic consequences for law enforcement in the cri

Justice committee  Yes, from Washington, D.C.

Justice committee  Thank you. I appreciate the invitation.