Commencement Weekend Policy Dialogue on Criminal Justice

In this podcast, recorded during the Pardee RAND Graduate School’s 2014 commencement weekend, Susan L. Marquis, the school’s dean, moderates a policy discussion on criminal justice with a panel of experts.

About the Speakers

Charlie Beck is chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, where he manages approximately 10,000 sworn and 3,000 civilian employees and an annual budget in which cumulative salaries exceed $1 billion. As the police department of the second-largest city in the United States, LAPD serves a population of approximately 3.8 million people living in an area of 473 square miles. By promoting his predecessor's successful reengineering and reform effort, Beck continues to evolve and refine these strategies to further LAPD's position as the most effective and progressive law enforcement agency in the nation. Beck was appointed to the LAPD in March 1977, after serving two years in the Los Angeles Police Reserve Corps. He steadily rose through the ranks and was assigned as chief of the Detective Bureau prior to his appointment as police chief.

Angela Hawken is associate professor of economics and policy analysis and the James Q. Wilson Fellow at Pepperdine University. Her research focuses on drugs, crime, and corruption. She is the principal investigator of several randomized controlled trials that test strategies to reduce recidivism and incarceration. Currently, Hawken is leading a project to test the marijuana gateway hypothesis and drug/crime nexus. She is also the director of BetaGov, which will launch in the fall of 2014. BetaGov is a center for practitioner-led trials that provides tools for practitioners to conduct experimental tests of changes in operations and policy. The goal is to dramatically increase the rate of learning about which innovations are promising—and which are not—in criminal justice and other policy areas. Hawken is coauthor of Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know and Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know (both published by Oxford University Press). She holds a Ph.D. from Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Joan Petersilia is the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She has spent more than three decades studying criminal justice agencies' performance. A criminologist with a background in empirical research and social science, Petersilia is faculty codirector for the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, focusing on policies related to crime control, sentencing, and corrections and developing nonpartisan analyses and recommendations to aid public officials, legal practitioners, and the public in understanding criminal justice policy. At RAND, Petersilia directed the Criminal Justice Program and was a corporate fellow. She also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and directed its Center for Evidence-Based Corrections. Petersilia was recently honored with the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology for her work on prisoner reentry and supporting ex-offenders during the high-risk period immediately following release from prison.