For the American criminal justice system, 1975 was a watershed year. Offender rehabilitation and individualized sentencing fell from favor. The partisan politics of “law and order” took over. Among the results four decades later are the world’s harshest punishments and highest imprisonment rate. Policymakers’ interest in what science could tell them plummeted just when scientific work on crime, recidivism, and the justice system began to blossom. Some policy areas—sentencing, gun violence, drugs, youth violence—became evidence-free zones. In others—developmental crime prevention, policing, recidivism studies, evidence mattered. Crime and Justice in America: 1975-2025 tells how policy and knowledge did and did not interact over time and charts prospects for the future. What accounts for the timing of particular issues and research advances? What did science learn or reveal about crime and justice, and how did that knowledge influence policy? Where are we now, and, perhaps even more important, where are we going?

The contributors to this volume, the leading scholars in their fields, bring unsurpassed breadth and depth of knowledge to bear in answering these questions. They include Philip J. Cook, Francis T. Cullen, Jeffrey Fagan, David Farrington, Daniel S. Nagin, Peter Reuter, Lawrence W. Sherman, and Franklin E. Zimring.

For thirty-five years, the Crime and Justice series has provided a platform for the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists as it explores the full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and it remedies.