Crime & Responsibility

In 1980, 1,450 fatalities were attributed to drink driving accidents in the UK. In 2020, there were only 220. Drink driving fatalities dropped overall and as a percentage of all road deaths. Viewed from the 1960s and 70s, this dramatic improvement in road safety would have looked impossible. Many researchers even questioned whether it constituted a social problem at all. But drink driving was tackled to a significant extent in the UK and around much of the world. How it happened shows us how we can reduce many other crimes. Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not to punish individual offenders but to change the way whole communities respond to dangerous behaviour.

Picture a scientist – who do you imagine? The image of the lone genius with bushy white hair wearing a lab coat may be fading but there are still some people that often get left out of science, and science teaching. In this talk, Dr. Sarah Sauvé will discuss how the systematic inclusion of historically marginalised communities such as rural and coastal populations, aging populations and areas of high deprivation can improve policy, access to information and care for all. This shift begins with how research is done and continues in the classroom as we train the researchers, policy-makers and practitioners of the future.