The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 4: Deterrence
Page 8: Negligible Effect
NARRATOR
In sentencing a typical offender to, say, 5 years in prison, the general deterrence that results is basically ZERO. Because almost nobody will ever know about it.
The perception that drives GENERAL deterrence comes merely from one’s overall impression of how likely it is that, in this community, the guilty will be caught and then punished. This impression is more likely to come from TV, movies and urban legend than from any actual data.
Meanwhile, the SPECIFIC deterrence of giving John Doe those 5 years is also negligible. Those who ARE deterred are not affected by the length of the sentence, so much as the desire to avoid ANY sentence in the future.
Recidivists, meanwhile, choose to re-offend regardless of the sentence they received, often ratcheting up longer and longer sentences without any apparent effect.
However, actual outcomes can and do affect the perception created by popular culture and the media.
But only in people who weren’t going to offend to begin with.
I suspect later he’ll get into the death penalty, but here’s a hard truth: the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent.
It doesn’t work in nations that have _Televised_ Executions_.
I presume that by “works” you mean “prevents 100% of crime”? Because it works as a deterrent at least as well as a prison sentence, perhaps better (not that that’s hard). That’s not really the point though. Capital punishment is the state’s way of saying “What you have done is unforgivable” or “There’s no chance you’ll be rehabilitated”, and removing the person in question from society permanently. Some people refuse to understand this however, and focus on times it’s been applied too liberally. When it comes to addressing the concept in general, they make lame arguments like “it doesn’t work as a deterrent”.
There are actual empirical studies that concluded that capital punishment does deter murders. Which makes sense from an economic perspective. Economics invariably assumes that people respond to incentives and the severity of the punishment is just as much part of the incentive to not commit crime as the likelihood of punishment. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LawandEconomics.html