Crimes Punishable by Imprisonment: A Note

Abstract

IN a 1975 Journal of Legal Studies article, Michael Block and Robert Lind developed a model of criminal behavior for crimes punishable by imprisonment.1 The model, which is based on a multi-attribute approach to the criminal choice problem-the offender's utility function is defined over wealth and the length of any prison term received-was shown to yield the deterrence predictions: an increase in the probability of conviction or severity of punishment will reduce the incentive to commit offenses. To derive these standard implications, Block and Lind focused on the crime-no crime decision; that is, the model was concerned with the incentive to commit a single offense (or, more broadly, to commit a particular set of offenses). Moreover, within this crime-no crime framework, a number of fairly strong preference restrictions were required to generate deterrence implications. However, when their model is generalized in order to examine the determinants of the individual's offense rate, 2 the strong preference restrictions assumed do not lead to any unambiguous deterrence results in general. To demonstrate this, consider the following generalization of the Block and Lind model. Using their preference assumptions, the offender's utility in state of the world i is defined by