Evidence for safer cities.

I'm a Distinguished Senior Fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, the organization's highest distinction for researchers, and I direct its Center on Public Safety & Justice. The Center brings criminologists, economists, demographers, and public health researchers together to give policymakers and practitioners data they can act on, including the Chicago Public Safety DataHub.

My research focuses on the economics of crime and justice policy: what crime costs, which programs reduce it, and how governments can pay for prevention that works. I've led randomized trials of DNA in police investigations, cost-benefit studies of violence intervention, and evaluations for city, state, and federal agencies and national foundations. Before NORC, I spent nearly two decades at the Urban Institute, where I became a Senior Fellow.

I wrote What Is the Price of Crime? and co-edited Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control and Juvenile Drug Courts and Teen Substance Abuse. I'm an elected Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology and an elected member of the Council on Criminal Justice, where I chaired the Crime Trends Working Group. I serve on the editorial boards of Criminology and the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and I've taught graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy.

I hold a BA from Kenyon College, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a PhD from the University of Maryland.