But the laws didn't start working until police effectively started enforcing them, said Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced.

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Zimring also touches upon the role of aggressive, stop-and-frisk policing in the violence decline, though he notes its impact is small, its costs potentially large.

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Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America.

NEWYORKER: The Caging of America

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities.

NEWYORKER: The Caging of America

For Asia as a whole, according to David Johnson and Franklin Zimring writing in the online Asia-Pacific Journal, 16 out of 29 jurisdictions have abolished the death penalty, either definitively or in fact, whereas 13 retain it.

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