> So if there was no threat of punishment you would become a murderous, thieving, drug user?
Many years ago I worked in a startup, as it turns out the primary owner of the business is what a typical person would likely consider a con-man. I have a rolodex filled with people who were harmed by this man's lies.
Good luck seeking justice if you don't have a bank-roll to fund a strong lawsuit.
I've long since let it go, but for a solid year or so I was consumed by hatred for this man and very much would've loved to take a tire-iron to this man's knees. Some of the other people hurt are close personal friends, I can say with certainty that I'm not the only one who wanted retribution. These people also have family / relationships, some amount of wealth, opportunity, etc.
As it turns out, the risking non-trivial amounts of time in prison serves a deterrent for certain classes of individual. People with something to lose. That, statistically, it doesn't quite appear to serve the purpose should make you question the circumstances, the incentives at play as relates to the people committing those crimes.
Do be cautions when drawing black-and-white conclusions from statistics.
The GP is talking about a bartender refusing to allow drinks to be taken outside. I think it’s fair to say that if there was no threat of the bartender getting in trouble, the GP could have walked outside with the drink, no problem.
This argument can be extended to cover murder, theft, drug use and any other crimes you might think of by examining people’s value systems. I think we can all agree that murder is against most people’s values but you can’t say it’s universal. Some people are okay with murder in different circumstances but they may not necessarily be psychopaths who crave murder to the detriment of all else. It’s these people that I think may be deterred by the threat of punishment for murder.
Furthermore, to complicate matters a little bit, there is the principle of marginal deterrence. If the punishment for murder is much more severe than for burglary, for example, you can expect a burglar to think twice before deciding to murder the home owner during a break-in. If, on the other hand, you punish stealing with the same severe penalty as murder (say, death penalty for either crime) then you risk incentivizing the burglar to murder anyone who might be a witness to the burglary.
Ultimately, I think the soundness of the principle of punishment as a deterrent derives not from the assumption that everyone has the same values (we don’t) but from the differences in everyone’s values. This helps society produce an outcome that would not otherwise be achievable if we required 100% consensus on every individual value.
No, but I'd happily bring a bottle of beer along with me while I walk the dogs through a park.
I have my personal set of ethics/morals. Murder and theft are not allowed by those. The laws in Canada line up pretty close to these ethics, but not perfectly. The threat of punishment is what stops me from doing stuff in the "does no harm to anyone" category where the laws and my ethics disagree.
Most people probably wouldn't choose that just because the option would now be available. They might also fear the now legal extra-judicial punishment available to friends/families of victims.
I know a lot more people would park in handicap spaces if the fines were made optional. Speeding is another good example where people literally slow down when they see someone capable of punishing them.
If you need an engineering analogy, think of it as defence in depth. Punishment is part of a package of measures that seek to reduce criminality. Doesn’t stop everybody, and it’s not the only thing that stops anybody.
black and white is not usually an effective model for the world. I don't think I would become a "murderous, thieving, drug user", but I would probably take parking rules a lot less seriously. I might fly my drone places where it's not allowed. I'd probably get a really loud exhaust for my car too.
why not? it's fun. I'm not sure I would actually want to live with it on a daily driver, but it'd be great on a weekend car.
I'm mainly using it as an example of a behavior that's mildly antisocial but not bad enough to trigger serious enough guilt/embarrassment to stop people from doing it if they couldn't be punished.
>Punishment is a deterrent and has been proven so for millennia.
A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit? The crime and recidivism rates would seem to indicate the contrary; especially, in the states.
Essentially, we should - in theory - have no crime by now (given it's been over a millennium) as all rates should've diminished to zero, yeah?
At best, punishment as a deterrent is keeping the for-profit prison-industrial complex in business and that's about the extent of any benefit[s] (if it can even be called that) it might be providing to society.
This is absurd. Something can work in some cases for some people and yet not in all cases. It's not a matter of always working or never working.
There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread:
a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.
You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.
It's not an either-or kind of thing, where we can either put people in a hell-on-earth where they're traumatized or we can let them go free. It's possible to acknowledge that a person has done something terrible while also treating them with some basic human dignity. Lots of professions agree that you get from people what you expect, and when you expect people to act with dignity many of them do.
Prison doesn't have to be a place where punishment is meted out upon some imperfect soul for an eternity. It can just as easily be a place where the inmates are expected to make an effort to understand why they are there and how they can move on from that chapter of their life. And we can still lock up the unrepentant for a very long time.
Many of the Christians that I've talked to use the phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner." Maybe it's time we took that to heart and allow our prison population the dignity of being treated like human beings?
What reclassification? And how would you account for the fact that every other type of crime also increased? Assault, robbery, threats, gun homicides, detonated hand grenades?
The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime. Some people will not be deterred by a threat of punishment.
If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
> The reason we use "deterrent" instead of "prevention" is that we understand that punishment cannot prevent all the crime.
No, the reason is because of the four main theories of criminal punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation (also known as reformation), and incapacitation—that is, all but retribution—are all forms of prevention, and so “prevention” lacks specificity.
> If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
This assumes that the system not only has ideal deterrence, but entirely lacks both rehabilitation and incapacitation.
"Deterrence in relation to criminal offending is the idea or theory that the threat of punishment will deter people from committing crime and reduce the probability and/or level of offending in society." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)
So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.
I want to reply to wickedsickeune below, "Gravity is also a theory," but I think the thread's hit max-depth.
The word "theory" in the context of Deterrence_(penology) is not the same as the word "theory" in "theory of Gravity." The _Theory_ of Gravity refers to a model or explanation that follows from observed facts.
Deterrence, according to the Wikipedia page, doesn't fit that definition of the word.
> Despite numerous studies using a variety of data sources, sanctions, crime types, statistical methods and theoretical approaches, there remains little agreement in the scientific literature about whether, how, under what circumstances, to what extent, for which crimes, at what cost, for which individuals and, perhaps most importantly, in which direction do various aspects of contemporary criminal sanctions affect subsequent criminal behavior.
(Off-topic) It's sometimes (always?) possible to reply despite the missing "reply" button. Click the timestamp of the post to see it on its own page. That page seems to have a reply button even when the thread does not.
> Yes, because the word "theory" was used erroneously. Saying that its currently a hypothesis would have been better.
No, it was used correctly; “theory” has definitions other than those in the context of empirical science and the use of “hypothesis” would have been at least as wrong as the scientific sense of “theory”.
Gravity is also a theory. The word "theory" scientifically, does not mean "idea". It means a rigorously tested and researched collection of co-related ideas that reinforce each other. Do not use it to dismiss something's value.
> So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.
The use of “theory” in that sentence is not in the scientific sense; it is a philosophical rather than a predictive model. (There are predictive models of deterrence, some of which might be theories, or perhaps hypotheses, in the scientific sense, but that's not what the quote is discussing.)
magashna: Punishment is not a deterrent.
rbut: Punishment is a deterrent and has been proven ...
magashna:murder rates are consistently higher in states with the death penalty.
joshuamorton: I doubt this relationship is causal.
Magashna is clearly not arguing causality, but rather that the death penalty has failed to be a deterrent to murder.
This doesn't show that though. You have to examine the counterfactual: would the crime rate be even higher without the death penalty? If yes, it is a deterrent.
How can one examine a couterfactual in cases like this? Barring access to Marty McFly’s time machine unless you have two identical copies of a state to experiment on how would you go about this?
Edit: legitimately curious, not trying to be nitpicky
Generally the best ways to analyze the impact of similar social changes is to compare two similar locations, one that makes a change and one that doesn't, over the same time period, and hope that controls for broader social change.
A confounding factor in this statistic is that even if you were a rational actor, weighing the deterrence value of the death penalty, the actual application of the death penalty is far from certain, so you'd appropriately assign it low probability. The distance from the present in time, and absolute probability are likely key contributors to this not being a good stat. A good look at deterrence would be Singapore, where probability of swift punishment seems to materially reduce crime.
I don't know what the aggregate statistics are, so I don't know the data says about this at the societal level. But at the individual level, I think it is more accurate to say this varies and it may work with some people but not others.
There is a thing that officially gets called Oppositional Defiant Disorder where you have a kid whose wiring boils down to You can't make me! Neither of my sons has been given such a diagnosis, but that's perhaps in part because I recognized that trying to force issues as a routine thing or be dictatorial with them would be counterproductive.
As a parent, I didn't use a punishment model because I believed that would backfire with my kids. Maybe it kind of works with some kids, but I was sure that would be a case of "There will be hell to pay" in my home.
Studies typically show that every dollar invested in the health, welfare and education of preschoolers saves multiple dollars down the line on things like prison. Of course, we still need some means to address the issue when things go sideways, but it's problematic to focus overly much on addressing problems at that late stage.
We have jokes about "the third world country of America" because America does a relatively poor job of designing a society that generally works for most people and prevents issues as much as possible. Instead, we deal with problems after they develop at a point when they are much harder to address and when any optimal outcomes are no longer possible.
Even if it's not as effective as other alternatives, I think it is most likely at least something of a deterrent. For example, I hear of criminals purposely avoiding crimes with more serious punishments (e.g. mugging someone but avoiding hurting or killing them).
In addition, there's a saying that "locks don't keep criminals out, they just keep honest people honest". I think it's likely that punishment at least serves a similar role.
Granted, I think we would probably both agree that the US justice system (for example) is too focused on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation.
Deterrent is, I think traditionally at least, considered “negative reinforcement.” So, “I don’t want to end up like that person, so I won’t do what they did to end up in their situation.”
Just because it's the traditional view doesn't mean it's correct, or that it works. Crimes like drug use have shown great benefit from using rehabilitation over punishment, as proven in Portugal's long test of decriminalization and rehab. Rates of drug use and diseases like HIV have dropped significantly.
I agree drug use is better treated with addiction therapy than prison.
But the article in question is about a human trafficker. How does giving a human trafficker "education" (free college?) deter them from doing more trafficking?
I wouldn't assume that human traffickers are proud of what they do, or that they enjoy it. I guess the question is why does someone get into a hard criminal lifestyle like that in the first place. Maybe education and opportunity are the answers to that.
Not at all. You should look up the definition of negative reinforcement. It doesn’t operate as social demonstration, the way prison is supposed to work according to those who advance the deterrence myth. Now if the claim is about recidivism that may apply to negative reinforcement. But as others pointed out that’s not usually what’s meant by deterrent. We mean a deterrent even to those who have not been incarcerated.
There is a huge difference between having something applied to you, and having to determine the correct course of action (independently) to apply with someone else and then deal with the consequences/fallout.
In my experience, you have to pick something - and nothing is perfect or works all the time. It is usually worse not picking something (inaction) or being inconsistent in what you pick (wildly varying expectations/results).
How this applies to the current thread is up to the reader.
