Abstract
This article reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police, imprisonment, and capital punishment and additionally summarizes knowledge of sanction risk perceptions. Studies of changes in police presence, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment provide no useful information on the topic. Four high-priority areas for future research are identified: developing and testing an integrated model of the effects of the threat and experience of punishment, measuring perceptions of sanction regimes, developing and testing a theory of criminal opportunities, and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences and identifying high-deterrence policies.
Highlights
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing individuals who break the law
This article reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police, imprisonment, and capital punishment and summarizes knowledge of sanction risk perceptions
Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect
Summary
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing individuals who break the law These activities may prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms. The subject of this review is the preventative effect of the threat of punishment, which I refer to as deterrence. The other behavioral mechanism concerns the effect of the experience of punishment on reoffending In criminology, this effect is termed specific deterrence. Recent work by Johnson & Raphael (2013) on the crime-prevention effect of imprisonment suggests that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of imprisonment They find substantial declines in the number of crimes averted per prisoner over the period 1991–2004 compared with 1978–1990. For extended reviews of the theoretical and empirical literature both within and outside economics, readers are referred to Durlauf & Nagin (2011b) and Nagin (1998, 2013)
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