Monthly Archives: June 2018

Keeping the Peace: Patrick Sharkey on Sustaining the Great Crime Decline



Patrick Sharkey, the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, discusses the wider costs of violence and the threat posed by inequality and disinvestment to the current fragile gains. He points to the signal role of community organizing and community-based nonprofits in combating violence and building safer, more resilient cities.

Full show notes (includes pictures, episode transcript, and resources & references section)


How Do We Tell What’s Working? Disrupting the Justice Evaluation Model



Who gets to decide which reforms to the criminal justice system receive the imprimatur of “evidence-based”? To combat what she sees as the monopoly over these decisions created by the high cost of the current evaluation model, Angela Hawken founded BetaGov, offering free and fast evaluations of public policy programs. What is more, as Hawken explains on our New Thinking podcast, the ideas tested generally come from practitioners, or even clients, inside the systems themselves.

Full show notes (includes pictures and episode transcript)