Bulls00@... asked this question on 4/11/2000:

Does stiffer punishment deter crime.

STB56 gave this response on 4/11/2000:

Your question has many different facets that is hard for me to decide exactly what you mean, however I will give you the best answer to you question that I think I can. In first discussing this issue it is important to note two people who have made a very profound way we deal with criminal and how we look at crime. The first one would be Cesare Beccaria who wrote, I can't underline so "Dei deliti e delle pene" translated (On Crimes and Punishments) which was written in 1764. He was the first to point out that crimes harm society, and that it is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. He felt that prevention could be accomplished through deterrence. He said that in order for a crime to deter someone, the punishment has to be certain, speedy, and fair in the application of punishment to fit the crime (meaning not to give them capital punishment for speeding). He felt that the later was less important than the first two, and that no matter the punishments severity if it was certain that you would get the same thing, or that you would receive some penalty every time you broke a law, and that it was fast, that would be a deterent even if the penalty was slight. He held that the severity of punishment was just and that it did hold a detterant to a certain point.

The next early reformer of the Criminal Justice, system some of whose beliefs are still followed and incorporated, is Jeremy Bentham. Without getting into as much detail his major contribution was if the pleasure you recieve outweights the percieved risks associated with getting caught or the penalty itself then the person will commit a crime. If the penalty's pain is worth more than the pleasure you will recieve you will not do the crime. Now both of these early reformers basically were sick of the way the English were using the criminal justice system and most of their work is about changing the system, and did not include any prisoners or convicts in their studies. They basically used broad terms for human behavior.

Even if it is said that they used broad terms without any investigation into actual behavior, a lot can still be said. Pavolok a classic Psycologist found that dogs can be trained to associate certain things with other things. If a dog smells food and is given food he salivates. After a while the dog salivates weather or not there is food as long as he still smells the smell. This is said to work in humans. If EVERY time a child touches a hot burner they get burned the child will automatically associate pain with touching a burner and will not touch it even when it is turned off.

Now I am going to take a direct quote from a book I am using entitled "Criminology: Explaining Crime and Its Context" written by Stephen E. Brown. "Contemporary analyses of deterrence theory also have suggested that, all things being equal, crime should decrease as punishment severity increases. Rarely, however, is all else equal. Beccaria and Betham were cautious about declaring that deterrent effects are contingent upon the severity of punishment. They clearly opposed what Zimring & Hawkings termed a FORTRESS APPROACH to punishment, an assumption that all crime can be deterred if the price exacted is great enough. The alternative STEPLADDER EFFECT, advocated by the early classicists and most contemporary neoclassicists, assumes that not all crime will be detrred and advocates that punishments should be proportionate to the harm done. Other factors might also erode the deterrent erffect of increased severity of punishment. The wide range of discretion available to police, prosecutors, and judges may be used for attenuation or elimination of punitive responses. Little is known about the effects of punishment severity, but amoung the few studies completed, most have not supported the deterrence proposition"(181).

To make things even tougher than what I have just stated is that studdies have found that "some indivduals may be totally deterred by the threat of punishment, others only partially deterred, and still others not deterred at all"(183). So while the ways in which crimes are carried out has an effect on whether or not they will deter people, the individual may also have biological or social influences that also effect how much some thing will deter him or her.

To make things even more complicated for you :o) there is also General deterrence which is what I think you are talking about and Specific deterrence. General deterrence is when some one sees or knows what happened to someone else and does not want the same fate to happen to them. Specific deterrence on the other hand is that some thing will deter them from making the same mistake next time. You could also be speaking about Absolute deterrence in which the threat is what really deters you from doing the crime. The threat of going to jail. You would not know someone personally who went to jail but you would know it is there and that it was possible to you to go there if you do that offense. This could also be what you are talking about.

It seems that the most promising evidence of deterrence is how much your social ties are effected and how strong they were in the first place. If you have a lot of family support as well as family and to other positive role models, such as a coach or pastor, who would be dissapointed in you if you did some thing bad it would almost be sufficient enough to stop you without the threat of legal sanctions. You can be shamed into not breaking the law. However there are many people who do break the law and when they get caught commit suicide because they do not want to face the stigma associated with the guilt. They did use the stock in early colonial times, where you would get tied up and people would come and laugh at you and throw rotten eggs on you or beat you. This did not completely deter crime. However you were also put there for being suspected of being a witch, so this punishment was not fair or evenly applied.

In conclusion I do not think that any form of punishment can get people to behave the way society expects them to behave. This may be due to personality disorders (Anti-social personality disorder) or the way the system actualy works (A person may say that I am never going to get caught and even if I do I will sit on death row for 10+ years before I die). So as long as there are individual differences in the way people think, and holes to say in the criminal justice system, not everyone will be a law abiding citizen. If you made it a capital offense to speed, and caught eveyone who speed. I think that it would greatly reduce the number of speeders, however you would always be putting people to death for speeding forever, someone would always try to test their luck and say it will not happen to me. Then again who wants to go through all that work and kill speeders in the first place? I hope that I answered your question, I am sorry that it is as long as a book, however I felt that was the only way I could do justice to a question that was so broad. If you feel that I have helped you please grade my response, thank you.