CriticPartnership, accountability, and innovation: clarifying Boston's experience with pulling levers

Authors:
  • ABAnthony A. Braga
    Anthony A. Braga
  • CWChristopher Winship
    Christopher Winship
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Abstract
The pulling levers focused deterrence strategy has been embraced by the US Department of Justice as an effective approach to crime prevention. In his address to the American Society of Criminology, former National Institute of Justice Director Jeremy Travis (1998) announced “[the] pulling levers hypothesis has made enormous theoretical and practical contributions to our thinking about deterrence and the role of the criminal justice system in producing safety.” Pioneered in Boston to halt youth violence, the pulling levers framework has been applied in many American cities through federally sponsored violence prevention programs such as the Strategic Alternatives to Community Safety Initiative and Project Safe Neighborhoods (Dalton 2002). In its simplest form, the approach consists of selecting a particular crime problem, such as youth homicide; convening an interagency working group of law enforcement practitioners; conducting research to identify key offenders, groups, and behavior patterns; framing a response to offenders and groups of offenders that uses a varied menu of sanctions (“pulling levers”) to stop them from continuing their violent behavior; focusing social services and community resources on targeted offenders and groups to match law enforcement prevention efforts; and directly and repeatedly communicating with offenders to make them understand why they are receiving this special attention (Kennedy 1997; Kennedy in this volume). Despite the enthusiasm for the approach, there is relatively little rigorous scientific evidence that pulling levers deterrence strategies have been useful in preventing violence beyond the Boston experience (Wellford, Pepper, and Petrie 2005).

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