David M. Kennedy (photographer: Lisa Helfert) and Anthony A. Braga.
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is awarded annually, and winners share the amount of 1.5 million SEK. The international jury announced the winners in a ceremony at Stockholm University on November 3. The awards will be presented in Stockholm on June 15, 2027.
The 2027 prize recognizes Anthony A. Braga of the University of Pennsylvania and David M. Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for their work in designing, implementing and evaluating strategies of “focused deterrence” to prevent lethal violence in criminal networks.
The theory of focused deterrence states that many homicides, including youth homicides, can be prevented by working with of a small number of individuals who are linked together to other small groups of individuals in opposition. Police cannot be everywhere at all times that such violence may occur, no matter how likely it is to occur in a small number of “hot spot” locations. By focusing on the individuals most likely to commit such violence, police and other community carers can use a range of tactics with exactly the best people to deter from violence. The application of this theory to loosely linked criminal networks has helped reduce youth murders in the US, UK and elsewhere. The method is currently also being used in Sweden.
The work of Anthony Braga, who is the Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, has provided highly systematic impact assessments of the focused deterrence strategy, also known as “pulling levers” or “Operation Ceasefire”. With his colleagues reviewing all available impact evaluations (including some studies led by Braga himself), by 2026 he assembled 50 impact evaluations, including 9 randomized trials. The analysis showed that:
• Across all 50 studies, the strategy reduced lethal violence by a mean of 23%;
• Across the 9 most rigorous studies, the reduction was 16%.
The Stockholm Prize Jury noted that applying these effect sizes to millions of young people would—or already has—saved thousands of lives.
Yet the Jury also lauded the work of David Kennedy of John Jay College, City University of New York, for creating by his leadership so many of the tests evaluated by Anthony Braga. In city after city, from Boston to Baltimore, Detroit to Kansas City, and many other places, Kennedy provided the analytic framework as well as persuasion to try something different. By linking his initiatives to the impact evaluations, Kennedy made Braga’s production of systematic impact evidence possible.
The fact that Braga and Kennedy’s respective work showed such success in saving lives was an “exemplar” of criminology creating a great benefit for humankind.
Biographical Details
Anthony A. Braga is the Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of the Crime and Justice Lab and has taught since 2021. Prior to that he taught at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice, where he earned his PhD, and at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, as well as a winner of the August Vollmer Prize, the Joan McCord Award for Experimental Criminology, and a Herman Goldstein Award for problem-oriented policing.
David M. Kennedy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the Director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he worked for many years at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the recipient of two Herman Goldstein Awards for Problem-Oriented Policing, as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Law from Swarthmore. He received two Innovation in Government Awards from the Ford Foundation: in 1997 for the Boston Ceasefire Project, and in 2007 for his work in High Point, North Carolina.
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