Journal Article #1: Blumstein, A. (2016). From incapacitation to criminal careers. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53(3), 291-305

Abstract: Thinking about reducing crime through incarceration inevitably leads to deterrence and incapacitation, and incapacitation inevitably leads to measuring individual offending frequency or lambda, since the high-lambda offenders would be priority candidates for incarceration. A second major issue involves estimating the duration of a criminal career, and especially the residual career after a particular intervention, since longer sentences would waste prison capacity. That immersion in criminal careers inevitably leads to questions of sequences of crime types over the course of a career, their seriousness, and specialization. And that raises questions about the distribution of all these parameters and their determinants. With all these questions on the table, it was natural for the National Academy of Sciences to create a panel to start sorting them out and pointing directions for the future.

Journal Article #2: Kleck, G., & Barnes, J. C. (2010). Do more police lead to more crime deterrence? Crime & Delinquency, 60(5), 716-738

Abstract: Does increasing police strength deter more crime? Some studies have found apparent negative effects of police manpower levels on crime rates, and the most common explanation of such findings is that greater police strength increases perceptions of arrest risk, thus reducing crime via general deterrence mechanisms. The authors directly tested this hypothesis by estimating the association between survey respondents’ perceptions of arrest risk and the level of police strength prevailing in the counties where they live. No relationship between the number of police officers per capita and perceptions of the risk of arrest was found, suggesting that increases in police manpower will not increase general deterrent effects and decreases will not reduce these effects. The authors also considered the possibility that police manpower levels influence the number of criminals incarcerated, and thus affect crime rates via the incapacitative effects of incarceration, but concluded that such an effect is unlikely. These findings point to a need to reconsider previous interpretations of findings as supportive of a deterrent effect of increased police manpower on crime rates.