{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03125, 'fraction_numerical': 0.025669642857142856, 'mean_word_length': 4.878688524590164, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What If Psychology Redesigned the Criminal Justice System

291 When we embarked upon this project, it arose from a simple question: How can expert psychological knowledge about shaping prosocial behavior be applied to design a criminal justice system? Our point of departure was the widely shared recognition that the criminal justice system was falling far short of its elementary objective of protecting public safety. The focus of our project and book is on violent offending, and we have portrayed what behavioral science has established about its causes and its remedies. Violent offending has serious implications for public health and public spending. Violence imposes a major burden on the well-being of populations, both worldwide (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002 ) and in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2006). In the United States, the costs of gunshot and stab wounds in 1992 were $53 billion (Miller & Cohen, 1997 ), and the costs associated with nonfatal injuries and deaths due to violence in 2000 were more than $70 billion (Corso, Mercy, Simon, Finkelstein, & Miller, 2007 ). When one adds the value of lost life and the value of injuries to simple monetary costs, the true costs of violent crime in the United States have been estimated to exceed $574 billion annually (Anderson, 1999 ). Soares ( 2006 ) estimated the social cost of violence across 73 countries and put the yearly cost of violence in the United States at 2.9 % of gross domestic product. While such cost estimates and criteria vary, it is unmistakable that violence imposes a substantial burden for society Violent offending also threatens public safety, evokes fear, and can serve as a political lightning rod. In this book, we have attempted to leave behind