Institute on Crime and Public Policy

The Institute on Crime and Public Policy was established in 2005 to support faculty scholarship on legal, empirical, and normative issues concerning crime and public policy. Participating faculty are involved in projects that cluster into five categories: American sentencing and corrections, comparative criminal procedure and process, juvenile justice systems, normative theories of punishment, and crime control policy. The institute is the home of four major publication series, including Crime and Justice—A Review of Research and Criminology in Europe, and sponsors several scholarly conferences each year, alone or in collaboration with various European research institutes.

All of the institute's principals work in all five subject areas. Major sentencing and corrections projects include Kevin Reitz's role as Reporter for the Second Edition of the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, and his editorship with Joan Petersilia of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections.

Comparative projects include Tonry's recent Crime, Punishment, and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Chicago 2007) and ongoing projects in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Barry Feld's American and comparative Dutch-American projects on police interrogations and his editorship with Donna Bishop of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Justice are among major juvenile justice projects.

Current theoretical projects include Richard Frase's Proportionality Principles in American Law (with E. Thomas Sullivan, Oxford 2009) and two ongoing conference series on the philosophy of punishment. Recent books by Reitz (The Challenge of Crime, with Henry Ruth; Harvard 2003) and Tonry (Thinking about Crime; Oxford 2004) and Tonry's forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Crime and Public Policy are among the major policy projects.