Deterrence

It's a wrong inference to endorse deterrence. Hello, beautiful humans. I'm time castle and I'm Benjamin me and you're listening to just a minute. Just a minute is an educational podcast where we break down justice topics in 30 minutes or less. Today's topic deterrence. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us and hello, Ben. Hey, hey, so we're going to talk about deterrence today. I wonder if it will deter anyone from listening to us anymore. I hope not. Yeah, me too. But before we start though, I want to give a shout out to another dedicated listener. So I had my family reunion this past weekend and my cousin James who I've mentioned before on the podcast. His wife Joy mentioned something to me from our recent episode. Particularly, I think it was from our get tough episode where I said like, oh, I'm cracking down in the classroom. So she was asking me how how that went. Oh, so she listens. Yeah. And then she said it's so funny because like, I feel like I don't even need to talk to you because I've kept up with you all year. But I haven't been able to tell you what I've been up to. So anyway, we called up. So anyway, Joy Baker, she's a high school science teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So Joy, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening, Joy. Yeah, we're going to send you some just a minute swag. So check your mailbox for some podcast teas coming up soon. We'll get that out. Yep. Now back to our regularly scheduled program. So Tommy and dear listeners, Tom, for another what would you do? Yes. So if you knew that you were going to get away with it, would you rob a liquor store? No, because I have enough money to buy liquor. So I wouldn't need to rob a liquor store. But another reason is because I do not approve of stealing. It's bad. Yeah. And also, you know, just think about the poor clerk working at the liquor store, who you're just coming in with a gun, robbing, you're causing them so much anxiety. And they're just, they're trying to get their like 11 dollars and whatever. The minimum wage is maybe 14, 15 dollars an hour. And now they're terrified because you're robbing the store. Agreed. Same thing. No need. Yeah. Um, I think it's wrong. And I wouldn't do that to somebody. Okay. For a person number two scenario. This might be a little bit, a little bit trickier. You can, you know, you're going to get away with it. Yeah. And you can steal someone's retirement account from J.M. You don't, you don't know who it is. So it's not like somebody close up 1.5 million dollars in their retirement account. They're getting ready to retire. You could take it. Yeah. Would you do it? No way. That is someone's hard earned money. Mm hmm. You know, my, I'm guided by my moral compass and because I am also working and putting money away in retirement, I kind of understand the gravity of stealing someone's life savings essentially that's supposed to help them in their sickest time. So, um, yeah, because of that, there's no way I would do that. Agreed. I wouldn't either. Um, what is interesting in your remarks is that you didn't mention, well, actually, I said you knew you wouldn't get calls so anyway. Nevermind. I know I wouldn't get caught. It doesn't matter. Mm hmm. I still wouldn't do it. Yeah, agreed. Um, but listeners, if you would do these things, if you would commit these crimes because you knew you wouldn't get caught, uh, first way to go a whole. Yes, because this is a clean class. We do not use those words. Yeah. But then deterrence might work for you. So if the only reason that you're not committing crimes because you're afraid of getting punished, then, uh, you know, deterrence might be at work. Right. But spoiler alert, not counting, you know, those crimes that we all do like speeding and j walking and shoplifting and pirating things online. But most people who are not involved in serious crime still wouldn't commit crime even if they could get away with it because other things besides the threat of punishment is what keeps us from stealing or killing. So the things like you mentioned need, uh, values, um, empathy. Yeah. I just think it's funny that you say, um, besides the crimes that we all commit, including shoplifting, like, I don't shoplifts. Well, that's true. I don't need it. But like, I don't think I'll pirate online media anymore. But yeah, I don't shoplifts. Well, I don't either. I'm sure like the things that we all do, like, no. Okay, maybe we'll back up and take that all off the list. So, uh, shoplifting is not something that we all do. I don't shoplifts either. Um, accidentally. I have found something in my car, but then I'm just take it back in because, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's interesting because in my two teen class, we talk about the difference between an accident and a crime. Right. So like a car crash can be an accident or a crime. Yes. Or taking something from the groceries store can be an accident for a crime. I'm going to fund attention here. But you don't have minzraya. So it's not a crime. You don't have intention. Right. So it's accident. It's not a crime. Important stuff. Well, okay, let's just, uh, let's, let's get going. Okay. Yep. Uh, back to deterrence, which we mentioned briefly in our get tough episode. So go back and listen to that one. Yes, please. Um, and of course deterrence was largely at the heart of those get tough policies. And it's the ideas that we make our crime laws and our punishments harsher so people won't commit crime. Right. So let's define deterrence again for listeners and give me some more details and our listeners about exactly what it is and where it came from. Sure. Uh, most broadly deterrence is the idea that the threat of criminal justice policy and punishment will cause people to refrain from committing crime because the cost will outweigh the punishment. And deterrence is a theory of punishment goes all the way back to the birth of criminology as a discipline. The baby is born. Yeah, a couple of 18th century legal philosophers, Cesar Bacaria and Jeremy Bentham, who were called in all of our textbooks, the fathers of criminology, outland the early notions of deterrence. Yes. So first of all, the criminological assumption of deterrence is that people are rational in that they rate that they weigh the rewards and benefits of a crime before doing one. So recall from our rehabilitation episode, criminological assumption, basically the idea or the belief of a particular theory about why people commit crime. So from rehabilitation, people commit crime because of like deficits or problems. So go back and see that episode. Got lots of episodes for you to review for this one. Absolutely. Referrals to other episodes. So like I just said, people commit crime from a deterrence perspective because they believe the benefits will outweigh the cost. So let me ask you, what are the benefits of crime? So what good things could you personally get from committing crime or why might you be tempted to commit a crime? Yeah, well, first there might be a material need that's a benefit, right? Because like having previously worked in retail in a former life, I can tell you that theft increased around the holidays, including like a dad who was stealing a gaming system for his child for a Christmas present. So there's that. But also maybe I just want to cut the tires of the person who pulled out in front of me and almost caused this mass and accident. Yeah, so instrumental crimes or economic crimes are kind of like goal achieving, particularly economic. Both of the scenarios we talked about at the beginning had to do with money, robbing a liquor store or stealing someone's retirement. So getting money or getting things that you want is a big benefit of crime. There's also kind of the expressive element of crime. You express emotion, anger, jealousy. Imagine slash someone's tires getting revenge. Yeah, so you can like be violent. You can hit someone to deal with your bad emotions about them or you can do vandalism, destroy their property or destroy something else in frustration. There's also like perhaps a social element of that. If you think about like in the high school, you know, like whoever is the biggest toughest meanest is kind of like the bad A. So you can get reputation or street cred from it. And then there may be some like personal benefits like esteem, you know, again, being tough makes others think you're cool, but also might make make yourself feel better. And then of course, you know, like robbing a liquor store or doing a crime can be like exciting or risk taking. Yeah, get get that adrenaline pumping. I've already said that obviously I wouldn't do that. But in my two team class, when I'm talking about this, I make the joke like, oh, take it for me. When you rob a liquor store, it does get your adrenaline. Oh, yeah, I always ask students if they would try heroin. If it was legal. Oh, that's the good thing. Because I wouldn't even know if it was legal. I would never, I would never take heroin. But there are some students who say they would. Hmm, interesting. So anyway, there are benefits like I guess heroin that would come to be the same thing. It could be like fun and exciting and you get a fun feeling from it. But anyway, on the opposite side of coin, the pains or the cost would primarily be legal punishments, but can also include other costs or consequences of crime. Things like, you know, social costs or shame or embarrassment or or losing a job. But deterrence theory assumes that the legal punishments like arrests, prison, executions are the most influential costs in the easiest way to stop people from committing crime. So if we ratchet up the cost, then that will outweigh the benefits and people won't commit crime. Right. And theoretically, there are three characteristics of punishment that are, you know, supposed to make it like a successful deterrent. Certainty, uh, salarity, which nobody uses that word anymore. But basically, swiftness is another is a sin in that. So certainty, swiftness and severity. Right. First of all, certainty is the lack of hood of experiencing a punishment, condition upon commission of the crime. So most broadly, it's about like the chances of getting caught. We're talking about the deterrent effect of a certain punishment. It's about the chances of actually getting that punishment if you commit. So if we're talking about the death penalty, for example, it's actually the turn effect. The death penalty certainty is about the chances of being executed conditioned upon committing murder. And again, we've already hinted at this, but the death penalty is not a strong deterrent for homicide. Research shows because overall, again, deterrence is not a super successful strategy. And even if it was, the way we practice the death penalty doesn't really conform to the way the theory says it should work. It'll elect the odds of getting executed if you commit a murder is very low. Well, let me just say that an article that I was reading this morning, let's put it here, although this is increasing. We've executed more people already this year than we have last year. So John Bloom, the director of the Cornell death penalty project, says the uptick and executions does not appear to be linked to a change in public support for the death penalty or an increase in death sentences. It's rather the function of the discretion of the state governors. Yeah, absolutely. It's arbitrary. It is disproportionate for sure. But in terms of the, first of all, there's only a very small proportion of murders that you're even, just like plain all run of the mill murder, you're not even eligible for the death penalty. There's to be aggravating factors. So even though executions are, I mean, there's like the gross thing that people are rushing to execute people in death row because the drugs are expiring. So we've got to, you know, we've got to kill ourselves. So anyway, you know, regardless of all that, even, you know, even a small proportion of murderers actually get executed. Yeah, I just thought that highlights also that certainty of punishment. As we've talked about before, it's really politics because it's the state governors who are just deciding to do it more. Yes, arbitrary. Arbitrary. A swiftness is about the amount of time between committing the crime and receiving the punishment and with the idea that the shorter period of time is assumed to be more deterrent. So it's almost kind of like the idea of like a condition. You punish the crime right after it happens and that's supposed to be more deterrent. And again, as an illustration, going back to the death penalty, the time between crime and execution is long. I think the average stays are probably like 15 plus years on death row. Yeah, the guy that was just executed last night in Florida, his fine, they said, asked him for his final words and he said, thank you for not letting me die in prison. But from his life sentence, that was all he had to say. Yikes. But I mean, that's interesting because that-- But he's been on death row since the 90s. Oh, wow. Yeah. But that kind of relates to the next point severity that the harcer of the punishment, the more painful, the more deterrent, and objectively speaking, the death penalty is definitely the most severe punishment. But then this guy sounds like he would prefer to die rather than to stay in prison, stay on death row for the rest of his life. So some people have made that argument that it's supposed to be the most severe punishment. But subjectively, some people may prefer that over a second. Yeah, spend 20 years in prison and then see how you feel about that. New thing? You know? That's why I don't commit the shub-lifts or robberies. Actually, it's not, but anyway. So at least in theory, to be successfully deterrent, a punishment should have all three of those characteristics. And given the nature and the reality of our legal system, though, it's not super easy to increase the certainty. We already said that's one element of the problem. There's that it's arbitrary, one to increase the certainty or to reduce the time the trial process takes. So if we're going to do deterrents, what's the easiest way to try to increase deterrents? Severity. Longer sentences and harcer punishments, i.e. get tough. Varities really the only way to practically increase deterrents, and definitely it's the simplest and most convenient. And like I've already said, there's not a lot of evidence from research that deterrents is effective and we'll talk about more about how that's the case in detail towards the end of the episode, but specifically looking at these three elements of deterrents, there's some research that indicates that certainty is the most important element. And most directly that the perceived likelihood of getting caught is the most important or maybe even the only element of successful deterrents. So in studies, people who think they're likely to get caught report low likelihoods of committing crime and like duh. Everybody who commits a crime thinks they're going to get away with it. You're not going to commit a crime if you think you're going to get caught. And practically that means the police have the most potential to be deterrent. That is like when someone's committing a crime, they're not contemplating like the long term consequences of a prison sentence or execution. They're primarily approximately concerned about like getting arrested or getting caught by the police. So things like police presence and visibility have been shown to reduce crime. Like hot spots policing is a successful strategy which concentrates patrol visibility in high crime areas and has lots of experimental evidence of effectiveness, but other more general police strategies like randomized patrol or rapid response though have been shown through research and again experimental research repeatedly not to be effectively deterrent. And of course there's not much evidence that severity or swiftness really impacts people's decision making. And we'll come back to that idea later that more severe and harsh upon existence actually might seem to have the opposite effect of what they're supposed to. Okay, so those are the elements of deterrents. So what about the different types of deterrents? You already mentioned this earlier with my little slip of the tongue, but there are two tops or forms of deterrent specific in general specific deterrents and general deterrents. So specific deterrents is the application of a punishment to an individual in order to deter them from repeating a crime. So specific deterrents are supposed to deter recidivism. You actually get the punishment. It's supposed to be bad. You know, it's like taste and feel how bad this punishment is. You don't want to ever experience it again. So don't commit crime again. Boot camps which were big in the 90s are an example of like a specific deterrents policies. And I think I have a whole episode planned on this later on. So stay tuned for that. But the basic idea is that these experiences boot camps are supposed to be highly unpleasant. You put teens and young offenders and make them do physical exercise and you know, clean little train with the toothbrush and it's supposed to be like really bad and you don't want to do this again and you learn discipline and you get back on the straight and narrow path. Yeah, given my teenage years that we've already talked about the age crime episode, if someone would have sent me to the camp, it probably would have made me more violent, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, there is like the the finance idea that like punishment and harsh punishment can like, you know, make you resent the system and not buy into society. And like there's virtually no evidence that specific deterrents work. We've talked a lot about high recidivism rates that two thirds of prisoners are re-rested within five years and about half go back. And you know, like we said, there's research that indicates that harsh punishment actually increase recidivism. And I think we might have talked about this before but like and we'll come back to it again towards the end of the episode, but harsh punishments tend to take away or reduce those things that keep people out of trouble. Right. Social bonds, stakes and conformity, I know we've mentioned that before, but like family relationships, jobs, education, opportunities and of course things like self control and impulsivity are highly correlated, you know, with crime and recidivism, which kind of goes to the opposite of this idea of like rational calculations. And also, harsh punishment exposes you to more anti-social peers. You go to prison. Good friends, present. You go to prison. You're a prison, pin pals. Yes. So specific deterrents, deterrents, recidivism doesn't really work. General deterrents is the application of a punishment to an individual in order to stop them from ever committing crime to begin with. So general deterrents is like setting an example of someone in its aimed at general crime prevention. So scared, straight, not being an example of this, but then also that kind of melds both forms because usually they're kind of like at-risk youth. Yes. But the idea is to take them to prison and show them how bad it is and say you don't ever want to come here so you better straighten up. So there's some elements of specific because they're already kind of like at-risk or might get in trouble, but also it's like general deterrents. Look at all these other prisoners in this bad check. You don't want to be there. And of course, I think we've mentioned this before that scared straight actually increases which makes kids worse. It's like glorifying prisoners like, oh, you're not tough enough. Oh yeah, let me show you that I am. And then the death penalties also supposed to be general deterrent. Looks what happens when you commit homicide. Yes. You'll get executed so don't commit homicide. And like I said before, there's some studies that show there might be some general deterrent effects specifically in terms of certainty, the higher likelihood of getting caught, but overall little evidence that people are kind of like calculating or anticipating the long term realities or consequences of legal punishment. Right. And just a quick note, I've obviously talked about deterrents in classes for decades, but I did brush up on recent research to make sure that nothing earth shattering has changed since the last time I did a prep for deterrent research. So most of the recent research findings I referenced came from a review of the current state of deterrent research. And that's in a 2024 article in the Journal of Criminal Justice by Daniel Mears in Stafford. Okay. So there's not a lot of research evidence about deterrents working. Why not? Why isn't it an effective crime control strategy? Well, I mean lots of reasons and many we've already kind of talked about or handed at. And some of them are kind of practical and empirical, but also many scholars kind of question the fundamental assumptions of deterrents. Obviously, I highlighted this earlier, we don't really do deterrents rot. We don't or we can't do what the theory says is necessary to commit crime. We can increase the severity of punishment, and we certainly have done that. Make punishments harsher, increase in its length exponentially so, and of course that's caused a lot of problems. And we went over those in the get tough episode. But we can't really do much about certainty. You know, it was before it's like also arbitrary prosecutorial discretion. We've mentioned before that only about half of crimes get reported to the police. So half of crimes don't get punished at all. So we don't have a great deal of certainty in our system. In the wheels of justice turn slowly. You've got trial links and delays and continuances. What it took like four years for the shopping cart killer to go to trial. So first of all, we don't really do deterrence as the theory says that we should. Number two, also kind of like focusing on punishment ignores the rewards of crime. So it's just the assumption that like punishment makes the cost outweigh the rewards. But that not that might not be the case, especially if we're talking about like less serious crimes, so like not murder or robbery or something, the punishment for a less serious crime actually might not outweigh the rewards. I also read something interesting about the cost of non-crime. So in some context, there might be costs for actually not committing crime. The example that I read of that is like gang member. So if you're in a gang, it actually could be costly to abstain from crime. There are bigger overall weaknesses of the theory is that it's like wholly dependent on people's perceptions of punishment. So there's a big difference between the objective conditions of punishment and the laws and what people know or what people believe about punishment. So like how many people know the exact legal consequences of the crime that they're about to commit? Yeah. The criminal code is very complicated. Especially in criminal law countries. We have so much case law. It's like impossible. And it varies by state. Yeah. Even if you look up the Virginia criminal code, it's like trying to read Latin. Yeah. I couldn't tell you what the punishment option for any given crime could be off the top of my head. And I'm a criminologist with a PhD. Yeah. I think for child porn on her face. Just stuff like that. Yeah. Well. Been looking at that one recently. So people generally don't know the law except in certain cases where you might have an incident come up where you would like research. Right. The law is related to a given crime. And there's also the problem of like estimating how likely you are to get caught or how likely you are to get a specific punishment. And of course people aren't very good at predicting the future. So overall lawmakers in the public assume that like objective legal increases in sanctions or punishment translate into increases in perception of punishment that isn't or may not necessarily be the case. Right. And then finally the assumption that people rationally weigh the costs and benefits of crime doesn't really reflect the reality of what people can do. Did I just weigh the costs and benefits of eating that piece of chocolate five minutes ago? No. I want it. I'm going to get it. Exactly. You don't sit out that sit down there and like make a pros and cons list. No. We don't do that with pretty much well. Some things we can guess but not that. I mean, come on. Yeah. Maybe big decisions like buying a house. Yeah. People act impulsively a lot of times. And certainly one of the strongest we've talked about this before strongest personality correlates to defending is low self control or impulsivity. Which by definition means you don't think about the consequences over your actions. You act without really thinking things through. You're not sitting again. You're not sitting around making a pros and cons list about this crime that I'm about to commit you do without thinking about the consequences. Right. And low self control and impulsivity is doesn't need to be a static trait. You can have high self control in some areas of your life and low self control in others. Example right here. Chocolate. Go ahead. Sorry. Gaming for me. Yes. And like we said in the beginning of the episode, the threat of punishment isn't really what's keeping most people from committing the crime. We talked about this before. I went in robber steal. You went in robber steal because it's wrong. Yes. It's one of the 10 commandments now shout not steal. Yes. And my mama taught me better. Yes. And the reality like strong family attachments, commitment to your job, commitment to education, you know what we call social bonds or stakes and conformity are more important for keeping people from committing crime. People abstain from crime because they think it's wrong to kill, to steal and hurt other people. And they don't want to experience public shame or disappoint their parents or flunk out of school or lose their job much more so than like being afraid of having to wear an ankle bracelet or go to prison. Thank you for that. Okay, well, you got anything else? Sure, I'll just close by kind of returning to one of the themes of our show. So media impacts on this perception is one of them and that's not what I'm talking about right now. Yeah. But another one that we've brought up a number of times is this notion that crime policy kind of often seems like intuitive. Yes. An emotional in science and research is, you know, not effective or silly or we don't need it or something like that. And of course, deterrence sounds intuitive. It sounds logical. It does. Harsh punishment should teach people a lesson and it should like, you don't want to do this so don't do this. Or if you make the punishment scary enough, people will be like too afraid to commit crime in the first place. I mean, that just kind of like has a degree of like logic or sense to it. But in reality, that isn't the case based on like decades of criminal logical research. Decades people. As weird as that might sound. And of course, we've already covered the problems that mass incarceration and get tough created and get tough was largely founded on this notion of deterrence. And we also have already covered that rehabilitation works and how it works. And there's much more scientific evidence that a rehabilitative preventive strategy is more effective at preventing crime and recidivism than deterrent strategies and unendingly harsh punishment. For sure. You know, one thing we've got to say that you can actually see one of the fathers of criminology. On display because he's been preserved. Yeah, mummified. I show that in my ethics class. He's got his body. Yeah. Jeremy Bentham. You can see him. Well, what's left of him? Actually, all of it is left of him. I thought some of it was deteriorating. Well, they still have his head. Yeah, they definitely have his head. In actually his real head, it was actually kind of like destroyed in the mummification process. So it looks like grotesque and scarred. So it's not like it's deteriorated over time. They tried to preserve it, but like the process just like destroyed his head. So they have a. Yeah, it's a bunch of stole it. Three times. It's going missing from University College London. Three different times. Yeah. So now they keep it securely locked away. That's just like fun fact trivia at the end of that episode. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess we'll wrap it up then with our minute to spin it where we give our take away from today's episode. Tommy and just a minute, what's your spin? When they installed those speed cameras on Route 33 Market Street and we're giving out $100 tickets like candy, people started creeping over that interchange. I mean, like I'd be behind somebody going 10 miles per hour. And there was a conversation between people like they're giving. The tickets are coming. People are getting tickets for somebody's speeding beside them. It was an effective deterrent. But overall punishment is not. But I mean, that goes back to something that we've talked about. It's not the $100 ticket. It's the cameras because there's a 100% certainty like they have a camera system set up. They have speed radar that checks every car going by. So there's a 100% certainty that if you speed through there, you're going to get detected. Yes. Yes. But punishment is right. It's not important to understand. What's more important is to understand a social science behind how decisions are made. So then what's your spin? It's a wrong inference to endorse deterrents. I'm probably not sure if it should be inference, but inference for wrong with deterrents. At least in terms of criminal punisher. Like I said in our get tough episode, the logic behind deterrent theory always says the thing to do is to increase punishment. So if crown and recidivism goes down deterrents is working, so keep up with the harsh punishment. Right. If you don't go down, then we need to get harsher. But there are other more evidence-based ways to prevent crime and reduce recidivism. Just say no to scared straight. We are a community driven podcast sponsored by the Gandhi Center, produced by Jamie Libraries. 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