Dr. Mark Kleiman

Dr. Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, teaching courses on methods of policy analysis and on drug abuse and crime control policy. His current focus is on the design of deterrent regimes to take advantage of positive-feedback effects, and the substitution of swiftness and predictability for severity in the criminal justice system generally and in community-corrections institutions specifically.

Dr. Kleiman is the author of Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control and Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, and has recently completed When Brute Force Fails.  He edits the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin.

His academic interests include political philosophy and the study of imperfectly rational decision-making and how to make policy to accommodate it. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Kleiman provides advice to local, state, and national governments on crime control and drug policy. Before coming to UCLA in 1995, Dr. Kleiman taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Rochester. Outside of academia, he has worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (as Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division), for the City of Boston (as Deputy Director for Management of the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget), for Polaroid Corporation (as Special Assistant to the CEO, Edwin Land), and on Capitol Hill (as a legislative assistant to Congressman Les Aspin).

Dr. Kleiman graduated from Haverford College (majoring in political science, philosophy, and economics) and did his graduate work (M.P.P. and Ph.D.) at the Kennedy School.

• J. The Road (Back) to Eleusis:  Hallucinogens, Mystical Experience, and Religious Freedom

  Mystical or unitive experience - at the Burning Bush, under the Bodhi Tree, or on the Road to Damascus - lies at the roots of many great religious traditions. These primary religious experiences precede rituals and congregations, and sometimes give rise to them. There is growing evidence that, used under the proper conditions and with the right intentions, some of the "psychedelic" drugs - including psilocybin, the active agent in "magic mushrooms" - have a high probability of allowing any serious seeker at least a glimpse of the Beatific Vision. The courts are now considering whether religious liberty ought to extend to the use of otherwise banned chemicals by those seeking enlightenment rather than just a party. But is this society ready for the challenge of having Nirvana break out all over?

• I. Torture and Terror

  Does torture sometimes work?  Probably. Is it always a bad idea anyway?

  Absolutely!

  How to stop politicians and the mass media from turning us into a nation of cowards.

• H. Dukenfield's Law and No Child Left Behind

  "If a thing's worth winning, it's worth cheating for."  What W.C. Fields has to teach us about the perils of high-stakes standardized testing as a tool of education policy, and how to apply the principles of statistical quality assurance to the problem.

• G. Drugs and Terrorism

  How do the illicit drug markets contribute to terrorism? And what can we do about it? Most of the obvious answers turn out to be wrong.

• F. Alcohol: The Most Abused Drug

  Alcohol causes more damage than all the illicit drugs combined. We know how to make that damage shrink. But can we muster the political will to make it happen?

   

• E. Against the Drug War and Drug Legalization

  Half a million people behind bars. Violence and disorder around drug markets. A $60 billion a year illicit industry. Planted evidence and no-knock raids in which innocent people sometimes get killed. It would be hard to imagine anything worse than the current War on Drugs. But drug abuse is a real problem, and commercial legalization on the alcohol model would make it worse. Fortunately, those aren't our only choices. We know how to suppress flagrant dealing to protect neighborhoods and prevent violence, and how to shrink the illicit markets by forcing criminally active drug users on probation and parole to quit. It's time to get past the stale legalization debate, roll up our sleeves, and fix our broken drug policies.

   

• D. Time to Legalize Pot?

  California's voters will decide this fall whether to tax and regulate marijuana sales. But there's just one thing: anyone who pays the tax or files the regulatory paperwork would be confessing to a Federal felony. So there's no way pot is going to plug the hole in the  state budget.  Even if the feds got out of the way, do we really want a pot industry that looks like the beer industry?  Why a grow-your-own system would be better than either the current mess or full commercial legalization.

   

• C. Marijuana as Medicine

  Since cannabis is a useful medicine, why can't you get it at a drug store?  And how did the California "medical marijuana" system go from allowing cancer patients to grow their own to a billion-dollar-a-year business serving mostly people who aren't sick? The history, the science, and the politics of cannabis therapeutics illustrates much of what's wrong with drug policy.

• B. Getting Smart on Crime

  Could the United States have half as much crime and half as many prisoners a decade from now? Yes. But not the way either liberals or conservatives normally think about the problem: not by building more prisons or "fixing root causes," not through "zero tolerance" or "restorative justice," not by "winning the drug war" or "ending prohibition," not with "more guns, less crime" or national gun registration. The current system of randomized severity gets us the worst of all possible worlds: high crime rates and mass incarceration.  We need to get smarter on crime.

• A. The New Opium Wars

  If we want to win the war in Afghanistan, it's time to stop confusing it with the War on Drugs.  "Everyone knows" that since drugs fund the insurgency, fighting drugs is part of fighting the Talbian. But what "everyone knows" is wrong. Thanks to vigorous counter-narcotics efforts by the U.S. and Afghan governments, twenty-seven out of 34 Afghan provinces are free of poppy-growing.  The other seven are controlled by the Taliban.

  Why do we want to give our enemies a monopoly?

   

• Prof. Kleiman was an engaging and enlightening speaker who attracted a large and diverse crowd eager to hear his insights on crime.

  Zocalo Public Square

• Mark gave a fascinating, provocative talk that was well attended, challenged people to think deeper, and provided critical balance to our conference.

  MAPS

• Prof Kleiman was really appreciated by the audience. He presented his content with a lot of energy and in a simple way.

  École de criminology, Université de Montréal

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  August 2009

  When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment

  Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults--a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade.