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LOOKING after small children is never easy. Many dribble; some bite. But for Joyce Chavis, the problem until a few years ago was that she could not let toddlers in her care step outside her house. The street was packed with prostitutes. Drug-dealers loitered aggressively with pit bulls at their heels. In the local playground the bushes concealed only some of the things that crack-addicted young women were doing to earn their next fix.

Until 2004 the West End neighbourhood in High Point, North Carolina, was an open-air drug market. Gun shots punctuated the night. Honest folk were scared to walk to the shops. Jim Summey, a local preacher, recalls a Sunday when his flock could not park because the street was jammed with johns seeking sex and drugs. When he remonstrated with the dealers, they smashed up his car and shot out 58 windows in his church.

Yet West End is now as peaceful as evensong. It is still poor, but thugs with dogs no longer menace passers-by. The prostitutes have gone, or gone indoors. The corners are quiet. What happened?

The High Point police used to deal with drug-dealers in the traditional manner. They would “come rolling in like an occupying army,” as Jim Fealy, the police chief, puts it. They would grab young men, pat them down and arrest the ones with drugs in their pockets. They sent many to jail, but never shut down the drug market for more than a few hours. African-Americans in neighbourhoods like West End detested the police, and the police grew frustrated that no one in these places called them to report crimes.

But then they tried something different. On the advice of David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, they started talking to community leaders in West End. They found out who the street drug-dealers were. There were fewer than they had expected: only 16, of whom three were habitually violent. Patiently, they compiled dossiers on each of them. Then they arrested and prosecuted the violent ones, and invited the rest in for a chat.

The young dealers were shown the evidence against them, and given a choice. If they stopped dealing drugs and carrying guns, they would not be prosecuted. A “community co-ordinator” sat down with each of them and asked him what he needed to go straight: a job? Drug treatment? A place to stay? An alarm clock to get to work on time? The community promised to help with all these things. The dealers' neighbours and even grandmothers stood up and told them that what they were doing was wrong, and had to stop. Then prosecutors warned them that if they did not stop that day, they would be sent to jail, possibly for the rest of their lives.

It worked. Nearly all the dealers reformed, bar the odd bit of shoplifting. You can still buy drugs behind closed doors in High Point, but the intervention was never about drugs. It was about making the neighbourhood liveable again. Fears that the open-air drug market would simply move elsewhere proved unfounded. As the same technique was tried in other neighbourhoods and for other types of crime, such as gang-related muggings, the city's overall violent crime rate fell noticeably, from 8.7 per 1,000 people in 2003 to 7.3 in 2008.

The debate about crime is often emotional. Voters want vengeance. Politicians oblige. Barack Obama supports the death penalty even though he believes it “does little to deter crime”. It is justified, he says, because it expresses “the full measure of [a community's] outrage”. Such reasoning is widespread, but Mark Kleiman, the author of “When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment”, argues that it is unwise. The only good reason to punish, he says, is to prevent crime, either by locking criminals up so they cannot reoffend, or by deterring others.

More threats, less force

Prison sometimes works. Some credit tougher sentencing for the sharp drop in crime since the early 1990s. The number of incarcerated Americans has quadrupled since 1980, to 2.3m, and many of these people make the streets safer by their absence. But some 500,000 are non-violent drug offenders. And it “ought to bother us” that the incarceration rate for black Americans exceeds that in the Soviet Union at the peak of the Gulag, ventures Mr Kleiman. Incarceration hurts criminals' friends and relatives. It upsets the sex ratio in high-crime areas, making it very hard for young black women to form stable families. The lesson of High Point is that you can reduce crime by making credible threats, without having to lock up so many people.

To deter, a punishment must be swift, certain and severe. Of these, severity matters the least, reckons Mr Kleiman, and there is a trade-off: the harsher the punishment, the more legal safeguards are required to ensure it is not misapplied. States that execute murderers do so only after decades of appeals. This costs millions in legal fees. So they hardly ever do it, which means it is not much of a deterrent.

It turns out that milder sanctions can be swifter and more certain. For example, in Hawaii, until recently, felons ignored the terms of their probation because the only punishment available was a harsh one: being sent back to prison for the remainder of their term, typically five to ten years. Courts and probation officers were too swamped to handle the necessary paperwork and rebut the legal challenges to such harsh penalties. So violators typically got off scot free. This led people to conclude that they could misbehave with impunity. The chaos only ended when a judge started handing out instant sentences of a week or so. The certain prospect of spending a few days behind bars straight away made most of the probationers behave.

Mr Kleiman suggests several other promising, non-macho approaches to curbing crime. Raise alcohol taxes. Start school days later to prevent after-school crime. Force probationers to wear GPS tags, thus making probation a tough (and much cheaper) alternative to prison. Americans should experiment with such ideas, he says, and if they are serious about justice, the object should be to cut crime, not to make criminals suffer.