-
Title
-
Deterrence
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Author
-
Apel, Robert
-
Nagin, Daniel S.
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Research Area
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Social Institutions
-
Topic
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Institutions of Social Control
-
Abstract
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This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment. Studies of changes in police presences, 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. Three 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 estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high deterrence policies.
-
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Heuristic Decision Making (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and Nicholas J. D'Amico
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Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V. Horwitz
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Reconciliation and Peace‐Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
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Identifier
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etrds0075
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extracted text
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Deterrence
ROBERT APEL and DANIEL S. NAGIN
Abstract
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment.
Studies of changes in police presences, 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. Three 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 estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high
deterrence policies.
INTRODUCTION
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting,
and punishing individuals who break the law. These activities may also prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms—incapacitation, specific deterrence,
and general deterrence. Convicted offenders are often punished with imprisonment. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by their physical isolation during the period of their incarceration. Specific deterrence and general
deterrence involve possible behavioral responses. Specific deterrence refers to
the reduction in reoffending that is presumed to follow from the experience
of being punished. There are many sound reasons for suspecting that the
experience of punishment might actually increase reoffending. The threat of
punishment might also discourage potential and actual criminals in the general public from committing crime. This effect is known as general deterrence
and is the subject of this essay.
The theory of deterrence is predicated on the idea that if state-imposed
sanction costs are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at
least for some. Thus, one of the key concepts of deterrence is the severity of
punishment. Our review of severity effects focuses on research findings concerning imprisonment. Severity alone, however, cannot deter. Another key
concept in deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. In this regard
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the most important set of actors are the police—absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. For this reason
we discuss what is known about the deterrent effect of police.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF IMPRISONMENT
Nagin (forthcoming) discusses six studies that report convincing evidence
on whether and to what extent there is a deterrent effect of incarceration.
They also nicely illustrate large differences in the deterrence response to
the threat of imprisonment. Weisburd, Einat, and Kowalski (2008) and
Hawken and Kleiman (2009) study the use of imprisonment to enforce fine
payment and conditions of probation, respectively, and find substantial
deterrent effects. Helland and Tabarrok (2007) analyze the deterrent effect
of California’s third-strike provision and find a moderate deterrent effect.
Raphael and Ludwig (2003) examine the deterrent effect of prison sentence
enhancements for gun crimes and find no effect. Lee and McCrary (2009)
and Hjalmarsson (2009) examine the heightened threat of imprisonment
that attends aging into the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court at the age
of majority and find no deterrent effect.
The six exemplar studies suggest several important sources for the large
differences in the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One concerns the length
of the sentence itself. Figure 1 depicts two alternative forms of the response
function relating crime rate to sentence length. Both are downward sloping,
which captures the idea that increases in sentence severity deter crime. At
the status quo sentence length, S1 , the crime rate, C1 , is the same for both
curves. The curves are drawn so that they predict the same crime rate for
a zero sanction level. Thus, the “absolute” deterrent impact of the status
Crime
rate
C0
A
B
C1
S1
Figure 1
S2
Sentence length
Marginal versus absolute deterrent effects.
Deterrence
3
quo sanction level is the same for both curves. But because the two curves
have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental
increase in sentence level to S2 . The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a
response function in which there is a material deterrent effect accompanying
the increase to S2, whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is meant to depict a small
crime reduction response, owing to the diminishing deterrent returns to
increasing sentence length.
Our reading of the evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length is that
it implies that the relationship between the crime rate and sentence length
more closely conforms to curve B than to curve A. For example, Raphael
and Ludwig (2003) find no evidence that gun crime enhancements deter, Lee
and McCrary (2009) and Hjalmarsson (2009) find no evidence that the more
severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deters, and Helland and Tabarrok (2007) find only a small deterrent effect
of California’s third strike provision. As a consequence, the deterrent return
to increasing already long sentences is small, possibly zero.
The fine payment and Project Hope experiments also suggest that that
curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles what, in medical jargon,
would be described as the dose–response relationship between crime and
sentence length. While neither of these studies is directed at the deterrence
of criminal behavior, both suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences,
incremental enhancements to short sentences do have a material deterrent
effect on crime-prone populations.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF POLICE
Research on the marginal deterrent effect of police has evolved in two distinct
literatures. One has focused on the deterrent effect of police presence and
crime, while the other has focused on the crime prevention effectiveness of
different strategies for deploying police.
POLICE PRESENCE AND CRIME
Some of the most convincing evidence on the effect of police presences on
crime comes from before-and-after studies in circumstances in which an
abrupt change in police presence is clearly attributable to an event unrelated to the crime rate. For example, in September 1944, German soldiers
occupying Denmark arrested the entire Danish police force. According
to an account by Andenaes (1974), crime rates rose immediately but not
uniformly. The frequency of street crimes such as robbery, whose control
depends heavily on visible police presence, rose sharply. By contrast, crimes
such as fraud were less affected. Contemporary tests of the police–crime
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
relationship based on abrupt decreases in police presence investigate the
impact of reductions in police presence and productivity as a result of large
budget cuts or lawsuits following racial-profiling scandals. These studies
consistently find that large reductions in police presence are followed by
increases in crime.
The ongoing threat of terrorism has also provided a number of unique
opportunities to study the impact of police resource allocation in cities
around the world. For example, Klick and Tabarrok (2005) examine the effect
on crime in the National Mall area of Washington, DC, of the color-coded
alert system implemented in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attack. The purpose of the alerts was to signal federal, state, and
local law enforcement agencies to occasions when it might be prudent to
divert resources to sensitive locations, such as the National Mall. During
high alerts, police presence increased by 50%. Such increases were associated
with about a 15% reduction in crime.
POLICE DEPLOYMENT AND CRIME
Much research has examined the crime prevention effectiveness of alternative strategies for deploying police resources. One way to increase apprehension risk is to mobilize police in a manner that increases the probability that
an offender is arrested after committing a crime. Strong evidence of a deterrent as opposed to an incapacitation effect resulting from the apprehension
of criminals is limited. For example, studies of the effect of rapid response to
calls for service find no evidence of a crime prevention effect, but this may
be because most calls for service occur well after the crime event, with the
result that the perpetrator has fled the scene. Thus, it is doubtful that rapid
response materially affects apprehension risk.
The second source of deterrence from police activities involves averting
crime in the first place. In this circumstance, there is no apprehension because
there was no offense. In our view, this is the primary source of deterrence
from the presence of police. Nagin (forthcoming) describes this as the sentinel role of policing. If an occupied police car is parked outside a liquor store,
for example, a would-be robber of the store will likely be deterred because
apprehension is all but certain.
One example of a police deployment strategy that has been shown to be
effective in averting crime from occurring in the first place is “hot spots”
policing. Weisburd and Eck (2004) propose a two-dimensional taxonomy
of policing strategies. One dimension is “level of focus” and the other is
“diversity of focus.” Level of focus represents the degree to which police
activities are targeted. Targeting can occur in variety of ways, but Weisburd
and Eck give special attention to policing strategies that target police
Deterrence
5
resources in small geographic areas (e.g., blocks or specific addresses) that
have very high levels of criminal activity—the so-called crime hot spots.
Just like in the liquor store example, the rationale for concentrating police
in crime hot spots is to create a prohibitively high risk of apprehension
and thereby to deter crime at the hot spot by completely eliminating the
opportunity to offend in the first place.
Braga (2008) informative review of hot spots policing summarizes the
findings from nine experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations. All but
two of the studies found evidence of significant reductions in crime. Further,
no evidence was found of material crime displacement to immediately
surrounding locations. On the contrary, some studies found evidence of
crime reductions, not increases, in the surrounding locations—a “diffusion
of crime-control benefits” to nontargeted locales.
The second dimension of the Weisburd and Eck taxonomy is diversity
of approaches. This dimension concerns the variety of approaches that
police use to impact public safety. Low diversity is associated with reliance
on time-honored law enforcement strategies for affecting the threat of
apprehension, for example, by dramatically increasing police presence.
High diversity involves expanding beyond conventional practice to prevent
crime. One example of a high diversity approach is problem-oriented
policing. Problem-oriented policy comes in so many different forms that it
is regrettably hard to define.
One of the most visible examples of problem-oriented policing is Boston’s
Operation Cease Fire (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl, & Waring, 2001). The objective
of the collaborative operation was to prevent intergang gun violence using
two deterrence-based strategies. One was to target enforcement against
weapons traffickers who were supplying weapons to Boston’s violent youth
gangs. The second involved a more innovative use of “focused deterrence.”
The youth gangs themselves were assembled (and reassembled) to send
the message that the response to any instance of serious violence would be
“pulling every lever” legally available to punish gang members collectively.
This included a salient severity-related dimension—vigorous prosecution
for unrelated, nonviolent crime such as drug dealing. Thus, the aim of
Operation Cease Fire was to deter violent crime by increasing the certainty
and severity of punishment but only in targeted circumstances, namely if
the gang members were perpetrators of a violent crime. Just as important,
Operation Cease Fire illustrates the potential for combining elements of
both certainty and severity enhancement to generate a targeted deterrent
effect.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THREE TOPICS FOR FUTURE DETERRENCE RESEARCH
AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF THE EFFECTS OF THE THREAT AND EXPERIENCE OF PUNISHMENT
At the outset of this review, we distinguished between what criminologists
call specific deterrence and general deterrence. The former is the response
to the experience of punishment, whereas the latter is the response to the
threat of punishment. There is no logical contradiction between the conclusions that the experience of punishment actually increases the propensity for
offending, even as the threat of punishment deters it. Indeed, a review by
Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009) of the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism concluded that the great majority of studies point to a
criminogenic effect of the prison experience on subsequent offending.
The logic of specific deterrence is grounded in the idea that if the experience
of imprisonment is sufficiently distasteful, some of those who are punished
may conclude that it is an experience not to be repeated. The experience of
punishment may also affect the likelihood of future crime by decreasing the
attractiveness of crime itself, or by expanding alternatives to crime through
participation in rehabilitation programs. There are, however, a number of reasons for theorizing that the experience of punishment might increase an individual’s future proclivity for crime. Prisons might be the so-called schools for
crime in which inmates learn new crime skills even as their noncrime human
capital depreciates. Associating with other, more experienced inmates could
lead new inmates to adopt the older inmate’s deviant value systems. Being
punished may also elevate an offender’s feelings of resentment against society. The experience of imprisonment may also increase future criminality by
stigmatizing the individual socially and economically.
We see two major tasks related to developing an integrated model of the
response to both the threat and experience of legal sanctions. One involves
extending deterrence theory to account for how the proclivity for crime is
affected by the experience of punishment. This will require, at a minimum,
consideration of the effect of the experience of punishment on sanction risk
perceptions, as well as the limiting of legal alternatives to criminal behavior
owing to factors such as stigma and human capital erosion.
Because by construction this model will require a dynamic framework, consideration of the degree to which potential offenders anticipate and discount
future consequences of crime and noncrime will be necessary. There is a vast
literature that documents the present orientation of criminals. This raises difficult issues of how best to model this present orientation in the context of
criminal decision making.
Deterrence
7
MEASURING PERCEPTIONS OF SANCTION REGIMES
A sanction regime defines the sanctions that are legally available for the punishment of various types of crime, in addition to the way that legal authority
is actually administered. A major theoretical and empirical gap involves how
active criminals and people on the margin of criminality perceive the sanction
regime. As (general) deterrence is the behavioral response to perceptions of
sanction threats, establishing the linkage between risk perceptions and actual
sanction regimes is imperative. Unless perceptions adjust, however crudely,
to changes in the prevailing sanction regime, the desired deterrent effect will
not be achieved.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF SHORTER PRISON SENTENCES AND IDENTIFICATION OF
HIGH-DETERRENCE POLICIES
Crime prevention by incapacitation necessarily requires higher imprisonment rates and the attendant social costs. By contrast, if crime can be
deterred from occurring in the first place, there is no perpetrator to punish.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011a) express skepticism that there are large numbers
of policies involving increases in sentence length that produce substantial
deterrent effects. The one exception may involve short prison sentences.
Sentence lengths in Western European countries tend to be far shorter than
in the United States (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011b). Research based on European
data of the deterrent effect of shorter sentence lengths should be a priority.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011) also express optimism that viable policedeployment strategies hold promise for having large deterrent effects.
Specifically, they speculate that strategies that result in large and visible
shifts in apprehension risk are the most likely to have deterrent effects
that are large enough to reduce imprisonment as well. Hot spots policing
might have this characteristic. More generally, the types of problem-oriented
policing strategies described and championed by Kennedy (2009) have the
common feature of targeting enforcement resources on selected high-crime
people or places. In addition, the multimodal approach to preventing crime
among high-risk groups that combines deterrent and reintegration tactics
described by Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan (2007) is a creative example of
a carrot-and-stick approach to crime prevention. Although the effectiveness
of these strategies for focusing police and other criminal justice resources has
yet to be reliably demonstrated, priority attention should be given to their
continued evaluation, particularly as they relate to the carrot component of
the intervention. Indeed, the effectiveness of positive incentives as a crime
preventive is an understudied topic.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
REFERENCES
Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Braga, A. A. (2008). Office of Community Oriented Policing (Ed.), Police enforcement
strategies to prevent crime in hot spot areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011a). Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced?
Criminology and Public Police, 10, 9–54.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011b). The deterrent effect of imprisonment. In P. J.
Cook, J. Ludwig & J. McCrary (Eds.), Controlling crime; strategies and tradeoffs (pp.
43–94). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hawken, A., & Kleiman, M. (2009). Managing drug-involved probationers with swift and
certain sanctions: Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE. Washington, DC: National Institute of
Justice.
Helland, E., & Tabarrok, A. (2007). Does three strikes deter? A nonparametric estimation. Journal of Human Resources, 42(2), 309–330.
Hjalmarsson, R. (2009). Crime and expected punishment: Changes in perceptions at
the age of criminal majority. American Law and Economics Review, 7, 209–248.
Kennedy, D. M., Braga, A. A., Piehl, A. M., & Waring, E. J. (2001). Reducing gun
violence: The Boston gun project’s operation ceasefire. Washington, DC: U.S. National
Institute of Justice.
Kennedy, D. M. (2009). Deterrence and crime prevention reconsidering the prospect of sanction. New York, NY: Routledge.
Klick, J., & Tabarrok, A. (2005). Using terror alert levels to estimate the effect of police
on crime. Journal of Law and Economics, 46, 267–279.
Lee, D. S., & McCrary, J. (2009). The deterrent effect of prison: Dynamic theory and evidence. Industrial Relations Section: Princeton University, NJ.
Nagin, D. S. (forthcoming). Deterrence. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual
review of research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Nagin, D. S., Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2009). Imprisonment and reoffending. In
Crime and justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T. L., & Fagan, J. (2007). Attention felons: Evaluating
project safe neighborhoods in Chicago. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies no., 4,
223–272.
Raphael, S., & Ludwig, J. (2003). Prison sentence enhancements: The case of project
exile. In J. Ludwig & P. J. Cook (Eds.), Evaluating gun policy: Effects on crime and
violence. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Weisburd, D., & Eck, J. (2004). What can police do to reduce crime, disorder, and fear?
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 593, 42–65.
Weisburd, D., Einat, T., & Kowalski, M. (2008). The miracle of the cells: An experimental study of interventions to increase payment of court-ordered financial obligations. Criminology and Public Policy, 7, 9–36.
Deterrence
9
ROBERT APEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Apel is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice,
Rutgers University. He earned his PhD in 2004 from the University of
Maryland. He has three primary research interests. The first encompasses
the labor market, crime, and criminal justice. This includes the impact of
employment on delinquent behavior during the transition to adulthood, the
impact of incarceration on long-term employment prospects, and the impact
of employment-based reentry programs on recidivism. His second research
specialty entails violent victimization, including the role of relational distance in the determination of assault outcomes (namely, completion and
injury), with a special focus on gendered patterns. The third concerns the
formation, accuracy, and deterrent impact of individual perceptions about
criminal sanctions.
DANIEL S. NAGIN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics in the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. He
is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science and is the 2006 recipient of the
American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H Sutherland Award. His research
focuses on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors over the life
course, the deterrent effect of criminal and noncriminal penalties on illegal
behaviors, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as the American
Economic Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Journal of Sociology, Archives of General Psychiatry,
Criminology, Child Development, Demography, Psychological Methodology, Law
and Society Review, Crime and Justice Annual Review, Operations Research, and
Stanford Law Review. He is also the author of Group-Based Modeling of Development (Harvard University Press, 2005).
RELATED ESSAYS
Politics of Criminal Justice (Sociology), Vanessa Barker
Heuristic Decision Making (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and
Nicholas J. D’Amico
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Capital Punishment (Sociology), Mona Lynch
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Heuristics: Tools for an Uncertain World (Psychology), Hansjörg Neth and
Gerd Gigerenzer
Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop (Sociology), Richard Rosenfeld
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James F. Short, Jr. and Lorine A. Hughes
Crime and the Life Course (Sociology), Mark Warr and Carmen Gutierrez
Incarceration and Health (Sociology), Christopher Wildeman
-
Deterrence
ROBERT APEL and DANIEL S. NAGIN
Abstract
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment.
Studies of changes in police presences, 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. Three 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 estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high
deterrence policies.
INTRODUCTION
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting,
and punishing individuals who break the law. These activities may also prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms—incapacitation, specific deterrence,
and general deterrence. Convicted offenders are often punished with imprisonment. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by their physical isolation during the period of their incarceration. Specific deterrence and general
deterrence involve possible behavioral responses. Specific deterrence refers to
the reduction in reoffending that is presumed to follow from the experience
of being punished. There are many sound reasons for suspecting that the
experience of punishment might actually increase reoffending. The threat of
punishment might also discourage potential and actual criminals in the general public from committing crime. This effect is known as general deterrence
and is the subject of this essay.
The theory of deterrence is predicated on the idea that if state-imposed
sanction costs are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at
least for some. Thus, one of the key concepts of deterrence is the severity of
punishment. Our review of severity effects focuses on research findings concerning imprisonment. Severity alone, however, cannot deter. Another key
concept in deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. In this regard
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the most important set of actors are the police—absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. For this reason
we discuss what is known about the deterrent effect of police.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF IMPRISONMENT
Nagin (forthcoming) discusses six studies that report convincing evidence
on whether and to what extent there is a deterrent effect of incarceration.
They also nicely illustrate large differences in the deterrence response to
the threat of imprisonment. Weisburd, Einat, and Kowalski (2008) and
Hawken and Kleiman (2009) study the use of imprisonment to enforce fine
payment and conditions of probation, respectively, and find substantial
deterrent effects. Helland and Tabarrok (2007) analyze the deterrent effect
of California’s third-strike provision and find a moderate deterrent effect.
Raphael and Ludwig (2003) examine the deterrent effect of prison sentence
enhancements for gun crimes and find no effect. Lee and McCrary (2009)
and Hjalmarsson (2009) examine the heightened threat of imprisonment
that attends aging into the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court at the age
of majority and find no deterrent effect.
The six exemplar studies suggest several important sources for the large
differences in the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One concerns the length
of the sentence itself. Figure 1 depicts two alternative forms of the response
function relating crime rate to sentence length. Both are downward sloping,
which captures the idea that increases in sentence severity deter crime. At
the status quo sentence length, S1 , the crime rate, C1 , is the same for both
curves. The curves are drawn so that they predict the same crime rate for
a zero sanction level. Thus, the “absolute” deterrent impact of the status
Crime
rate
C0
A
B
C1
S1
Figure 1
S2
Sentence length
Marginal versus absolute deterrent effects.
Deterrence
3
quo sanction level is the same for both curves. But because the two curves
have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental
increase in sentence level to S2 . The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a
response function in which there is a material deterrent effect accompanying
the increase to S2, whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is meant to depict a small
crime reduction response, owing to the diminishing deterrent returns to
increasing sentence length.
Our reading of the evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length is that
it implies that the relationship between the crime rate and sentence length
more closely conforms to curve B than to curve A. For example, Raphael
and Ludwig (2003) find no evidence that gun crime enhancements deter, Lee
and McCrary (2009) and Hjalmarsson (2009) find no evidence that the more
severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deters, and Helland and Tabarrok (2007) find only a small deterrent effect
of California’s third strike provision. As a consequence, the deterrent return
to increasing already long sentences is small, possibly zero.
The fine payment and Project Hope experiments also suggest that that
curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles what, in medical jargon,
would be described as the dose–response relationship between crime and
sentence length. While neither of these studies is directed at the deterrence
of criminal behavior, both suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences,
incremental enhancements to short sentences do have a material deterrent
effect on crime-prone populations.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF POLICE
Research on the marginal deterrent effect of police has evolved in two distinct
literatures. One has focused on the deterrent effect of police presence and
crime, while the other has focused on the crime prevention effectiveness of
different strategies for deploying police.
POLICE PRESENCE AND CRIME
Some of the most convincing evidence on the effect of police presences on
crime comes from before-and-after studies in circumstances in which an
abrupt change in police presence is clearly attributable to an event unrelated to the crime rate. For example, in September 1944, German soldiers
occupying Denmark arrested the entire Danish police force. According
to an account by Andenaes (1974), crime rates rose immediately but not
uniformly. The frequency of street crimes such as robbery, whose control
depends heavily on visible police presence, rose sharply. By contrast, crimes
such as fraud were less affected. Contemporary tests of the police–crime
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
relationship based on abrupt decreases in police presence investigate the
impact of reductions in police presence and productivity as a result of large
budget cuts or lawsuits following racial-profiling scandals. These studies
consistently find that large reductions in police presence are followed by
increases in crime.
The ongoing threat of terrorism has also provided a number of unique
opportunities to study the impact of police resource allocation in cities
around the world. For example, Klick and Tabarrok (2005) examine the effect
on crime in the National Mall area of Washington, DC, of the color-coded
alert system implemented in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attack. The purpose of the alerts was to signal federal, state, and
local law enforcement agencies to occasions when it might be prudent to
divert resources to sensitive locations, such as the National Mall. During
high alerts, police presence increased by 50%. Such increases were associated
with about a 15% reduction in crime.
POLICE DEPLOYMENT AND CRIME
Much research has examined the crime prevention effectiveness of alternative strategies for deploying police resources. One way to increase apprehension risk is to mobilize police in a manner that increases the probability that
an offender is arrested after committing a crime. Strong evidence of a deterrent as opposed to an incapacitation effect resulting from the apprehension
of criminals is limited. For example, studies of the effect of rapid response to
calls for service find no evidence of a crime prevention effect, but this may
be because most calls for service occur well after the crime event, with the
result that the perpetrator has fled the scene. Thus, it is doubtful that rapid
response materially affects apprehension risk.
The second source of deterrence from police activities involves averting
crime in the first place. In this circumstance, there is no apprehension because
there was no offense. In our view, this is the primary source of deterrence
from the presence of police. Nagin (forthcoming) describes this as the sentinel role of policing. If an occupied police car is parked outside a liquor store,
for example, a would-be robber of the store will likely be deterred because
apprehension is all but certain.
One example of a police deployment strategy that has been shown to be
effective in averting crime from occurring in the first place is “hot spots”
policing. Weisburd and Eck (2004) propose a two-dimensional taxonomy
of policing strategies. One dimension is “level of focus” and the other is
“diversity of focus.” Level of focus represents the degree to which police
activities are targeted. Targeting can occur in variety of ways, but Weisburd
and Eck give special attention to policing strategies that target police
Deterrence
5
resources in small geographic areas (e.g., blocks or specific addresses) that
have very high levels of criminal activity—the so-called crime hot spots.
Just like in the liquor store example, the rationale for concentrating police
in crime hot spots is to create a prohibitively high risk of apprehension
and thereby to deter crime at the hot spot by completely eliminating the
opportunity to offend in the first place.
Braga (2008) informative review of hot spots policing summarizes the
findings from nine experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations. All but
two of the studies found evidence of significant reductions in crime. Further,
no evidence was found of material crime displacement to immediately
surrounding locations. On the contrary, some studies found evidence of
crime reductions, not increases, in the surrounding locations—a “diffusion
of crime-control benefits” to nontargeted locales.
The second dimension of the Weisburd and Eck taxonomy is diversity
of approaches. This dimension concerns the variety of approaches that
police use to impact public safety. Low diversity is associated with reliance
on time-honored law enforcement strategies for affecting the threat of
apprehension, for example, by dramatically increasing police presence.
High diversity involves expanding beyond conventional practice to prevent
crime. One example of a high diversity approach is problem-oriented
policing. Problem-oriented policy comes in so many different forms that it
is regrettably hard to define.
One of the most visible examples of problem-oriented policing is Boston’s
Operation Cease Fire (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl, & Waring, 2001). The objective
of the collaborative operation was to prevent intergang gun violence using
two deterrence-based strategies. One was to target enforcement against
weapons traffickers who were supplying weapons to Boston’s violent youth
gangs. The second involved a more innovative use of “focused deterrence.”
The youth gangs themselves were assembled (and reassembled) to send
the message that the response to any instance of serious violence would be
“pulling every lever” legally available to punish gang members collectively.
This included a salient severity-related dimension—vigorous prosecution
for unrelated, nonviolent crime such as drug dealing. Thus, the aim of
Operation Cease Fire was to deter violent crime by increasing the certainty
and severity of punishment but only in targeted circumstances, namely if
the gang members were perpetrators of a violent crime. Just as important,
Operation Cease Fire illustrates the potential for combining elements of
both certainty and severity enhancement to generate a targeted deterrent
effect.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THREE TOPICS FOR FUTURE DETERRENCE RESEARCH
AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF THE EFFECTS OF THE THREAT AND EXPERIENCE OF PUNISHMENT
At the outset of this review, we distinguished between what criminologists
call specific deterrence and general deterrence. The former is the response
to the experience of punishment, whereas the latter is the response to the
threat of punishment. There is no logical contradiction between the conclusions that the experience of punishment actually increases the propensity for
offending, even as the threat of punishment deters it. Indeed, a review by
Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009) of the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism concluded that the great majority of studies point to a
criminogenic effect of the prison experience on subsequent offending.
The logic of specific deterrence is grounded in the idea that if the experience
of imprisonment is sufficiently distasteful, some of those who are punished
may conclude that it is an experience not to be repeated. The experience of
punishment may also affect the likelihood of future crime by decreasing the
attractiveness of crime itself, or by expanding alternatives to crime through
participation in rehabilitation programs. There are, however, a number of reasons for theorizing that the experience of punishment might increase an individual’s future proclivity for crime. Prisons might be the so-called schools for
crime in which inmates learn new crime skills even as their noncrime human
capital depreciates. Associating with other, more experienced inmates could
lead new inmates to adopt the older inmate’s deviant value systems. Being
punished may also elevate an offender’s feelings of resentment against society. The experience of imprisonment may also increase future criminality by
stigmatizing the individual socially and economically.
We see two major tasks related to developing an integrated model of the
response to both the threat and experience of legal sanctions. One involves
extending deterrence theory to account for how the proclivity for crime is
affected by the experience of punishment. This will require, at a minimum,
consideration of the effect of the experience of punishment on sanction risk
perceptions, as well as the limiting of legal alternatives to criminal behavior
owing to factors such as stigma and human capital erosion.
Because by construction this model will require a dynamic framework, consideration of the degree to which potential offenders anticipate and discount
future consequences of crime and noncrime will be necessary. There is a vast
literature that documents the present orientation of criminals. This raises difficult issues of how best to model this present orientation in the context of
criminal decision making.
Deterrence
7
MEASURING PERCEPTIONS OF SANCTION REGIMES
A sanction regime defines the sanctions that are legally available for the punishment of various types of crime, in addition to the way that legal authority
is actually administered. A major theoretical and empirical gap involves how
active criminals and people on the margin of criminality perceive the sanction
regime. As (general) deterrence is the behavioral response to perceptions of
sanction threats, establishing the linkage between risk perceptions and actual
sanction regimes is imperative. Unless perceptions adjust, however crudely,
to changes in the prevailing sanction regime, the desired deterrent effect will
not be achieved.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF SHORTER PRISON SENTENCES AND IDENTIFICATION OF
HIGH-DETERRENCE POLICIES
Crime prevention by incapacitation necessarily requires higher imprisonment rates and the attendant social costs. By contrast, if crime can be
deterred from occurring in the first place, there is no perpetrator to punish.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011a) express skepticism that there are large numbers
of policies involving increases in sentence length that produce substantial
deterrent effects. The one exception may involve short prison sentences.
Sentence lengths in Western European countries tend to be far shorter than
in the United States (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011b). Research based on European
data of the deterrent effect of shorter sentence lengths should be a priority.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011) also express optimism that viable policedeployment strategies hold promise for having large deterrent effects.
Specifically, they speculate that strategies that result in large and visible
shifts in apprehension risk are the most likely to have deterrent effects
that are large enough to reduce imprisonment as well. Hot spots policing
might have this characteristic. More generally, the types of problem-oriented
policing strategies described and championed by Kennedy (2009) have the
common feature of targeting enforcement resources on selected high-crime
people or places. In addition, the multimodal approach to preventing crime
among high-risk groups that combines deterrent and reintegration tactics
described by Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan (2007) is a creative example of
a carrot-and-stick approach to crime prevention. Although the effectiveness
of these strategies for focusing police and other criminal justice resources has
yet to be reliably demonstrated, priority attention should be given to their
continued evaluation, particularly as they relate to the carrot component of
the intervention. Indeed, the effectiveness of positive incentives as a crime
preventive is an understudied topic.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
REFERENCES
Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Braga, A. A. (2008). Office of Community Oriented Policing (Ed.), Police enforcement
strategies to prevent crime in hot spot areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011a). Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced?
Criminology and Public Police, 10, 9–54.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011b). The deterrent effect of imprisonment. In P. J.
Cook, J. Ludwig & J. McCrary (Eds.), Controlling crime; strategies and tradeoffs (pp.
43–94). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hawken, A., & Kleiman, M. (2009). Managing drug-involved probationers with swift and
certain sanctions: Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE. Washington, DC: National Institute of
Justice.
Helland, E., & Tabarrok, A. (2007). Does three strikes deter? A nonparametric estimation. Journal of Human Resources, 42(2), 309–330.
Hjalmarsson, R. (2009). Crime and expected punishment: Changes in perceptions at
the age of criminal majority. American Law and Economics Review, 7, 209–248.
Kennedy, D. M., Braga, A. A., Piehl, A. M., & Waring, E. J. (2001). Reducing gun
violence: The Boston gun project’s operation ceasefire. Washington, DC: U.S. National
Institute of Justice.
Kennedy, D. M. (2009). Deterrence and crime prevention reconsidering the prospect of sanction. New York, NY: Routledge.
Klick, J., & Tabarrok, A. (2005). Using terror alert levels to estimate the effect of police
on crime. Journal of Law and Economics, 46, 267–279.
Lee, D. S., & McCrary, J. (2009). The deterrent effect of prison: Dynamic theory and evidence. Industrial Relations Section: Princeton University, NJ.
Nagin, D. S. (forthcoming). Deterrence. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual
review of research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Nagin, D. S., Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2009). Imprisonment and reoffending. In
Crime and justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T. L., & Fagan, J. (2007). Attention felons: Evaluating
project safe neighborhoods in Chicago. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies no., 4,
223–272.
Raphael, S., & Ludwig, J. (2003). Prison sentence enhancements: The case of project
exile. In J. Ludwig & P. J. Cook (Eds.), Evaluating gun policy: Effects on crime and
violence. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Weisburd, D., & Eck, J. (2004). What can police do to reduce crime, disorder, and fear?
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 593, 42–65.
Weisburd, D., Einat, T., & Kowalski, M. (2008). The miracle of the cells: An experimental study of interventions to increase payment of court-ordered financial obligations. Criminology and Public Policy, 7, 9–36.
Deterrence
9
ROBERT APEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Apel is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice,
Rutgers University. He earned his PhD in 2004 from the University of
Maryland. He has three primary research interests. The first encompasses
the labor market, crime, and criminal justice. This includes the impact of
employment on delinquent behavior during the transition to adulthood, the
impact of incarceration on long-term employment prospects, and the impact
of employment-based reentry programs on recidivism. His second research
specialty entails violent victimization, including the role of relational distance in the determination of assault outcomes (namely, completion and
injury), with a special focus on gendered patterns. The third concerns the
formation, accuracy, and deterrent impact of individual perceptions about
criminal sanctions.
DANIEL S. NAGIN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics in the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. He
is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science and is the 2006 recipient of the
American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H Sutherland Award. His research
focuses on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors over the life
course, the deterrent effect of criminal and noncriminal penalties on illegal
behaviors, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as the American
Economic Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Journal of Sociology, Archives of General Psychiatry,
Criminology, Child Development, Demography, Psychological Methodology, Law
and Society Review, Crime and Justice Annual Review, Operations Research, and
Stanford Law Review. He is also the author of Group-Based Modeling of Development (Harvard University Press, 2005).
RELATED ESSAYS
Politics of Criminal Justice (Sociology), Vanessa Barker
Heuristic Decision Making (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and
Nicholas J. D’Amico
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Capital Punishment (Sociology), Mona Lynch
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Heuristics: Tools for an Uncertain World (Psychology), Hansjörg Neth and
Gerd Gigerenzer
Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop (Sociology), Richard Rosenfeld
Bringing the Study of Street Gangs Back into the Mainstream (Sociology),
James F. Short, Jr. and Lorine A. Hughes
Crime and the Life Course (Sociology), Mark Warr and Carmen Gutierrez
Incarceration and Health (Sociology), Christopher Wildeman
Deterrence
ROBERT APEL and DANIEL S. NAGIN
Abstract
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment.
Studies of changes in police presences, 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. Three 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 estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high
deterrence policies.
INTRODUCTION
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting,
and punishing individuals who break the law. These activities may also prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms—incapacitation, specific deterrence,
and general deterrence. Convicted offenders are often punished with imprisonment. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by their physical isolation during the period of their incarceration. Specific deterrence and general
deterrence involve possible behavioral responses. Specific deterrence refers to
the reduction in reoffending that is presumed to follow from the experience
of being punished. There are many sound reasons for suspecting that the
experience of punishment might actually increase reoffending. The threat of
punishment might also discourage potential and actual criminals in the general public from committing crime. This effect is known as general deterrence
and is the subject of this essay.
The theory of deterrence is predicated on the idea that if state-imposed
sanction costs are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at
least for some. Thus, one of the key concepts of deterrence is the severity of
punishment. Our review of severity effects focuses on research findings concerning imprisonment. Severity alone, however, cannot deter. Another key
concept in deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. In this regard
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the most important set of actors are the police—absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. For this reason
we discuss what is known about the deterrent effect of police.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF IMPRISONMENT
Nagin (forthcoming) discusses six studies that report convincing evidence
on whether and to what extent there is a deterrent effect of incarceration.
They also nicely illustrate large differences in the deterrence response to
the threat of imprisonment. Weisburd, Einat, and Kowalski (2008) and
Hawken and Kleiman (2009) study the use of imprisonment to enforce fine
payment and conditions of probation, respectively, and find substantial
deterrent effects. Helland and Tabarrok (2007) analyze the deterrent effect
of California’s third-strike provision and find a moderate deterrent effect.
Raphael and Ludwig (2003) examine the deterrent effect of prison sentence
enhancements for gun crimes and find no effect. Lee and McCrary (2009)
and Hjalmarsson (2009) examine the heightened threat of imprisonment
that attends aging into the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court at the age
of majority and find no deterrent effect.
The six exemplar studies suggest several important sources for the large
differences in the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One concerns the length
of the sentence itself. Figure 1 depicts two alternative forms of the response
function relating crime rate to sentence length. Both are downward sloping,
which captures the idea that increases in sentence severity deter crime. At
the status quo sentence length, S1 , the crime rate, C1 , is the same for both
curves. The curves are drawn so that they predict the same crime rate for
a zero sanction level. Thus, the “absolute” deterrent impact of the status
Crime
rate
C0
A
B
C1
S1
Figure 1
S2
Sentence length
Marginal versus absolute deterrent effects.
Deterrence
3
quo sanction level is the same for both curves. But because the two curves
have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental
increase in sentence level to S2 . The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a
response function in which there is a material deterrent effect accompanying
the increase to S2, whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is meant to depict a small
crime reduction response, owing to the diminishing deterrent returns to
increasing sentence length.
Our reading of the evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length is that
it implies that the relationship between the crime rate and sentence length
more closely conforms to curve B than to curve A. For example, Raphael
and Ludwig (2003) find no evidence that gun crime enhancements deter, Lee
and McCrary (2009) and Hjalmarsson (2009) find no evidence that the more
severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deters, and Helland and Tabarrok (2007) find only a small deterrent effect
of California’s third strike provision. As a consequence, the deterrent return
to increasing already long sentences is small, possibly zero.
The fine payment and Project Hope experiments also suggest that that
curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles what, in medical jargon,
would be described as the dose–response relationship between crime and
sentence length. While neither of these studies is directed at the deterrence
of criminal behavior, both suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences,
incremental enhancements to short sentences do have a material deterrent
effect on crime-prone populations.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF POLICE
Research on the marginal deterrent effect of police has evolved in two distinct
literatures. One has focused on the deterrent effect of police presence and
crime, while the other has focused on the crime prevention effectiveness of
different strategies for deploying police.
POLICE PRESENCE AND CRIME
Some of the most convincing evidence on the effect of police presences on
crime comes from before-and-after studies in circumstances in which an
abrupt change in police presence is clearly attributable to an event unrelated to the crime rate. For example, in September 1944, German soldiers
occupying Denmark arrested the entire Danish police force. According
to an account by Andenaes (1974), crime rates rose immediately but not
uniformly. The frequency of street crimes such as robbery, whose control
depends heavily on visible police presence, rose sharply. By contrast, crimes
such as fraud were less affected. Contemporary tests of the police–crime
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
relationship based on abrupt decreases in police presence investigate the
impact of reductions in police presence and productivity as a result of large
budget cuts or lawsuits following racial-profiling scandals. These studies
consistently find that large reductions in police presence are followed by
increases in crime.
The ongoing threat of terrorism has also provided a number of unique
opportunities to study the impact of police resource allocation in cities
around the world. For example, Klick and Tabarrok (2005) examine the effect
on crime in the National Mall area of Washington, DC, of the color-coded
alert system implemented in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attack. The purpose of the alerts was to signal federal, state, and
local law enforcement agencies to occasions when it might be prudent to
divert resources to sensitive locations, such as the National Mall. During
high alerts, police presence increased by 50%. Such increases were associated
with about a 15% reduction in crime.
POLICE DEPLOYMENT AND CRIME
Much research has examined the crime prevention effectiveness of alternative strategies for deploying police resources. One way to increase apprehension risk is to mobilize police in a manner that increases the probability that
an offender is arrested after committing a crime. Strong evidence of a deterrent as opposed to an incapacitation effect resulting from the apprehension
of criminals is limited. For example, studies of the effect of rapid response to
calls for service find no evidence of a crime prevention effect, but this may
be because most calls for service occur well after the crime event, with the
result that the perpetrator has fled the scene. Thus, it is doubtful that rapid
response materially affects apprehension risk.
The second source of deterrence from police activities involves averting
crime in the first place. In this circumstance, there is no apprehension because
there was no offense. In our view, this is the primary source of deterrence
from the presence of police. Nagin (forthcoming) describes this as the sentinel role of policing. If an occupied police car is parked outside a liquor store,
for example, a would-be robber of the store will likely be deterred because
apprehension is all but certain.
One example of a police deployment strategy that has been shown to be
effective in averting crime from occurring in the first place is “hot spots”
policing. Weisburd and Eck (2004) propose a two-dimensional taxonomy
of policing strategies. One dimension is “level of focus” and the other is
“diversity of focus.” Level of focus represents the degree to which police
activities are targeted. Targeting can occur in variety of ways, but Weisburd
and Eck give special attention to policing strategies that target police
Deterrence
5
resources in small geographic areas (e.g., blocks or specific addresses) that
have very high levels of criminal activity—the so-called crime hot spots.
Just like in the liquor store example, the rationale for concentrating police
in crime hot spots is to create a prohibitively high risk of apprehension
and thereby to deter crime at the hot spot by completely eliminating the
opportunity to offend in the first place.
Braga (2008) informative review of hot spots policing summarizes the
findings from nine experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations. All but
two of the studies found evidence of significant reductions in crime. Further,
no evidence was found of material crime displacement to immediately
surrounding locations. On the contrary, some studies found evidence of
crime reductions, not increases, in the surrounding locations—a “diffusion
of crime-control benefits” to nontargeted locales.
The second dimension of the Weisburd and Eck taxonomy is diversity
of approaches. This dimension concerns the variety of approaches that
police use to impact public safety. Low diversity is associated with reliance
on time-honored law enforcement strategies for affecting the threat of
apprehension, for example, by dramatically increasing police presence.
High diversity involves expanding beyond conventional practice to prevent
crime. One example of a high diversity approach is problem-oriented
policing. Problem-oriented policy comes in so many different forms that it
is regrettably hard to define.
One of the most visible examples of problem-oriented policing is Boston’s
Operation Cease Fire (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl, & Waring, 2001). The objective
of the collaborative operation was to prevent intergang gun violence using
two deterrence-based strategies. One was to target enforcement against
weapons traffickers who were supplying weapons to Boston’s violent youth
gangs. The second involved a more innovative use of “focused deterrence.”
The youth gangs themselves were assembled (and reassembled) to send
the message that the response to any instance of serious violence would be
“pulling every lever” legally available to punish gang members collectively.
This included a salient severity-related dimension—vigorous prosecution
for unrelated, nonviolent crime such as drug dealing. Thus, the aim of
Operation Cease Fire was to deter violent crime by increasing the certainty
and severity of punishment but only in targeted circumstances, namely if
the gang members were perpetrators of a violent crime. Just as important,
Operation Cease Fire illustrates the potential for combining elements of
both certainty and severity enhancement to generate a targeted deterrent
effect.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THREE TOPICS FOR FUTURE DETERRENCE RESEARCH
AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF THE EFFECTS OF THE THREAT AND EXPERIENCE OF PUNISHMENT
At the outset of this review, we distinguished between what criminologists
call specific deterrence and general deterrence. The former is the response
to the experience of punishment, whereas the latter is the response to the
threat of punishment. There is no logical contradiction between the conclusions that the experience of punishment actually increases the propensity for
offending, even as the threat of punishment deters it. Indeed, a review by
Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009) of the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism concluded that the great majority of studies point to a
criminogenic effect of the prison experience on subsequent offending.
The logic of specific deterrence is grounded in the idea that if the experience
of imprisonment is sufficiently distasteful, some of those who are punished
may conclude that it is an experience not to be repeated. The experience of
punishment may also affect the likelihood of future crime by decreasing the
attractiveness of crime itself, or by expanding alternatives to crime through
participation in rehabilitation programs. There are, however, a number of reasons for theorizing that the experience of punishment might increase an individual’s future proclivity for crime. Prisons might be the so-called schools for
crime in which inmates learn new crime skills even as their noncrime human
capital depreciates. Associating with other, more experienced inmates could
lead new inmates to adopt the older inmate’s deviant value systems. Being
punished may also elevate an offender’s feelings of resentment against society. The experience of imprisonment may also increase future criminality by
stigmatizing the individual socially and economically.
We see two major tasks related to developing an integrated model of the
response to both the threat and experience of legal sanctions. One involves
extending deterrence theory to account for how the proclivity for crime is
affected by the experience of punishment. This will require, at a minimum,
consideration of the effect of the experience of punishment on sanction risk
perceptions, as well as the limiting of legal alternatives to criminal behavior
owing to factors such as stigma and human capital erosion.
Because by construction this model will require a dynamic framework, consideration of the degree to which potential offenders anticipate and discount
future consequences of crime and noncrime will be necessary. There is a vast
literature that documents the present orientation of criminals. This raises difficult issues of how best to model this present orientation in the context of
criminal decision making.
Deterrence
7
MEASURING PERCEPTIONS OF SANCTION REGIMES
A sanction regime defines the sanctions that are legally available for the punishment of various types of crime, in addition to the way that legal authority
is actually administered. A major theoretical and empirical gap involves how
active criminals and people on the margin of criminality perceive the sanction
regime. As (general) deterrence is the behavioral response to perceptions of
sanction threats, establishing the linkage between risk perceptions and actual
sanction regimes is imperative. Unless perceptions adjust, however crudely,
to changes in the prevailing sanction regime, the desired deterrent effect will
not be achieved.
THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF SHORTER PRISON SENTENCES AND IDENTIFICATION OF
HIGH-DETERRENCE POLICIES
Crime prevention by incapacitation necessarily requires higher imprisonment rates and the attendant social costs. By contrast, if crime can be
deterred from occurring in the first place, there is no perpetrator to punish.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011a) express skepticism that there are large numbers
of policies involving increases in sentence length that produce substantial
deterrent effects. The one exception may involve short prison sentences.
Sentence lengths in Western European countries tend to be far shorter than
in the United States (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011b). Research based on European
data of the deterrent effect of shorter sentence lengths should be a priority.
Durlauf and Nagin (2011) also express optimism that viable policedeployment strategies hold promise for having large deterrent effects.
Specifically, they speculate that strategies that result in large and visible
shifts in apprehension risk are the most likely to have deterrent effects
that are large enough to reduce imprisonment as well. Hot spots policing
might have this characteristic. More generally, the types of problem-oriented
policing strategies described and championed by Kennedy (2009) have the
common feature of targeting enforcement resources on selected high-crime
people or places. In addition, the multimodal approach to preventing crime
among high-risk groups that combines deterrent and reintegration tactics
described by Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan (2007) is a creative example of
a carrot-and-stick approach to crime prevention. Although the effectiveness
of these strategies for focusing police and other criminal justice resources has
yet to be reliably demonstrated, priority attention should be given to their
continued evaluation, particularly as they relate to the carrot component of
the intervention. Indeed, the effectiveness of positive incentives as a crime
preventive is an understudied topic.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
REFERENCES
Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Braga, A. A. (2008). Office of Community Oriented Policing (Ed.), Police enforcement
strategies to prevent crime in hot spot areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011a). Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced?
Criminology and Public Police, 10, 9–54.
Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011b). The deterrent effect of imprisonment. In P. J.
Cook, J. Ludwig & J. McCrary (Eds.), Controlling crime; strategies and tradeoffs (pp.
43–94). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hawken, A., & Kleiman, M. (2009). Managing drug-involved probationers with swift and
certain sanctions: Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE. Washington, DC: National Institute of
Justice.
Helland, E., & Tabarrok, A. (2007). Does three strikes deter? A nonparametric estimation. Journal of Human Resources, 42(2), 309–330.
Hjalmarsson, R. (2009). Crime and expected punishment: Changes in perceptions at
the age of criminal majority. American Law and Economics Review, 7, 209–248.
Kennedy, D. M., Braga, A. A., Piehl, A. M., & Waring, E. J. (2001). Reducing gun
violence: The Boston gun project’s operation ceasefire. Washington, DC: U.S. National
Institute of Justice.
Kennedy, D. M. (2009). Deterrence and crime prevention reconsidering the prospect of sanction. New York, NY: Routledge.
Klick, J., & Tabarrok, A. (2005). Using terror alert levels to estimate the effect of police
on crime. Journal of Law and Economics, 46, 267–279.
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ROBERT APEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Apel is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice,
Rutgers University. He earned his PhD in 2004 from the University of
Maryland. He has three primary research interests. The first encompasses
the labor market, crime, and criminal justice. This includes the impact of
employment on delinquent behavior during the transition to adulthood, the
impact of incarceration on long-term employment prospects, and the impact
of employment-based reentry programs on recidivism. His second research
specialty entails violent victimization, including the role of relational distance in the determination of assault outcomes (namely, completion and
injury), with a special focus on gendered patterns. The third concerns the
formation, accuracy, and deterrent impact of individual perceptions about
criminal sanctions.
DANIEL S. NAGIN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics in the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. He
is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science and is the 2006 recipient of the
American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H Sutherland Award. His research
focuses on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors over the life
course, the deterrent effect of criminal and noncriminal penalties on illegal
behaviors, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as the American
Economic Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Journal of Sociology, Archives of General Psychiatry,
Criminology, Child Development, Demography, Psychological Methodology, Law
and Society Review, Crime and Justice Annual Review, Operations Research, and
Stanford Law Review. He is also the author of Group-Based Modeling of Development (Harvard University Press, 2005).
RELATED ESSAYS
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Heuristic Decision Making (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and
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Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
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Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Capital Punishment (Sociology), Mona Lynch
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
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James F. Short, Jr. and Lorine A. Hughes
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Deterrence