Does prison deter?

In decrying the moral panic about knife crime, Sunny writes:

There is more than a whiff of idiocy to all this…The Sun has clearly descended into farce, demanding "more arrests, stiffer sentences and more jails", because this has clearly solved the problem in the past.

Here’s a nice piece of research (pdf) supporting Sunny.
When boys reach the age of 18 they are treated as adults for legal purposes and so face much tougher sentences. So, if punishment deters youngsters, you’d expect those who are just past their 18th birthday to commit fewer crimes than those who are just short of it. Justin McCrary decided to test this, by looking at arrest rates in the state of Florida. And he found that although those just past their 18th birthday were slightly less likely to get arrested than those coming up to it, the difference was no more than mere random fluctuation.
The claim that tougher sentences deter young criminals, then, doesn’t leap out of the data.
Why might this be? It’s not because 18-year-olds commit crime in the hope of meeting Calleigh Duquesne. Instead, it’s because young criminals are short-sighted – they discount future penalties very heavily – and over-confident; they don’t think they’ll get caught.
Of course, prison reduces crime by taking criminals off the street. But it’s not clear that there’s a pure deterrent effect.
Which raises a nasty thought. I’ve said before that “incentives” can be just a disguise for giving hand-outs to people you like. Could a similar thing be true of disincentives? We want them not because they work, but as a way of hurting people who are not like us?

Comments

[Andrew Zalotocky]

The key point is that prison takes criminals off the streets and thus deprives them of the opportunity to commit further crimes for a period of time. It is poor at rehabilitation and deterrence, but containment is all we can realistically hope for with many offenders.

Rehabilitation is intensely difficult because it means persuading someone to change their patterns of thought and behaviour so thoroughly that they won't revert to their old habits once they are back in the environment, and amongst the acquaintances, in which they originally turned to crime.

Deterrence will be equally ineffective if many habitual offenders are, as the paper you linked to suggests, "extremely impatient, myopic, or both". This also suggests that the potential utility of the death penalty is not that it deters, but that it eliminates those violent offenders who are incapable of responding to disincentives.

As for why people might want disincentives, I suspect that it's partly a matter of over-estimating how strongly other people will respond to them and partly a desire to signal moral disapproval of certain actions.

[Zorro]

Andrew nails it. Prison does work simply by stopping the thieving/stabbing little bastards from being able to get up to no good while they are inside.

Who fucking cares if they do it again when they come out as long as they get immediately re-arrested and stuck back in there for a bloody long time?

[Zorro]

"hurting people who are not like us?"

If by "not like us" you mean little bastards who go round stabbing and shooting people then fuck yes I want to punish/hurt people "not like us"...

[Mr Art]

I can't find a cite but Tim Harford reckons the opposite: that when the juvenile justice system is more lenient than the adult system, you can see the difference in the crime stats...

Quoting:

"You look state by state in the US at the crimes that teenagers commit, and in the States where the adult and the juvenile systems are not very different, teenagers pass into adulthood and their behaviour doesn't change."

"In the States where the adult punishment system is much harsher than the juvenile punishment system, as teenagers reach the age of majority, they suddenly shape up, they suddenly start behaving."

[John Scott]

This research (and others like it) is the reason that the real focus of government policy should be on increasing detection and conviction rates, not the maximum sentence handed out. When offenders are convicted and then ask for dozens of other offences to be taken into consideration at the sentencing stage, you realise quite how poor the detection and conviction rate is.

There is plenty of other research out there that eye-catching initiatives increasing sentences have not reduced criminal activity. However, the potential stigma of being caught, and especially of having one's criminality revealed to non-criminal associates such as family members, has been shown to have a deterrent effect. Hence the idea of publicising the criminality of particular individuals. The flaw, of course, is that a criminal is only deterred if they suspect they will be caught. That is not the case.

Only a small proportion of offences are detected, a smaller proportion make it to trial and an even smaller proportion are convicted. The government did once focus on completion rates, but imposed targets which did not discriminate between crimes or types of completion, which led to the situation where cautions became preferable to arrest and prosecution. The idea, however, was a good one. Sadly, the backlash due to inept implementation will probably take it off the political agenda for years. There are still some good signs - specialist rape units in the police and CPS are aimed at increasing detection and conviction rates, as are the specialist fraud units. The ideas and techniques of those units should be universal, rather than (what they will hopefully become) examples of best practice.

Of course detection and improved prosecutorial practice (which the CPS have admitted is/was necessary) is difficult for central government to control, harder to explain in a pithy soundbite and imposes higher immediate costs. Imprisonment is far more expensive in the long-run, but what government worries about five (even three) years ahead, rather than the next budget?

[Peter]

Your point may butress the argument against prison as a deterrent, but it fatally undermines the argument against prison as an incapacitator of criminals. Someone with a history of violence who is also "short-sighted – they discount future penalties very heavily – and over-confident; they don’t think they’ll get caught" is about as good a definition as one can possibly get of someone who is a danger to the public. If Sunny can come up with a rehabilitation method that demonstrably protects the public from such people better than prison, I'm happy to go with that. Until then, the answer is obvious.

[passer by]

We are signaling to people that murder is not such a big deal. life is cheap, abortion on demand, the devaluation of fatherhood more importantly the nuclear family, this decline of the moral base is the signaling process.

More importantly the lack of natural justice within the law turns law abiding people into cynics and corrodes the whole system. Add to that the states aversion to using its legitimate monopoly of violence, and you have decay.

Immanuel Kant put it like this 250 years ago. "A society that does not sentence a murderer to death turns into an accomplice of this crime."

[ad]

Lets experiment: eliminate any punishment for non-payment of taxes, including car tax and the licence fee, and see what happens.

If evasion does not increase, that will suggest that punishment has little effect.

[marksany]

No mention of it here, but what about the causes of crime?

The current generation of poor youth are pretty justified in believing that there is no future for them in this society. Youth unemployment is so high; they have no expectation of a mainstream job. Starter jobs in manufacturing industry have all gone to China, in building and catering to Poles and in office and admin to computers and Bangalore. If they do get a minimum wage job, after benefits withdrawal, they earn 70p an hour.

Stuck in a system that does not provide stimulation or earning potential, is it a surprise they turn to drugs & crime.?

The welfare state pays their mothers to stay single and grants fathers no role in contributing to a household. So they grow up with no positive role models, other than the gang leaders at the top of the drug dealing and pimping pile.

So yeah, bang em up; that'll do it! But: there is another cohort ready to step in growing up right behind this one.

[passer by]

well marksany there is a lot I agree with in your post BUT can it ever be moral to justify a immoral act (stabbing ect) thru pure materialistic (economic)terms ?

Are we at our core moral creatures or economic creatures? are we free to choose our moral judgments or are we just drowning in the economic currents?

personally I would rather starve to death than arbitrarily take the life of another human being, I could not and would not live with that (material) fact. My life would be devalued by it.

To be human is to be more than just another species in the animal kingdom? even if in the material sense that is what we are, are we not duty bound to be more than we are?

[Planeshift]

"The welfare state pays their mothers to stay single"

Yes, thats exactly what it does. It monitors the women who claim benefits and penalises them every time they go on a date, whilst rewarding them every time they ditch a boyfriend. There is even a form for it, with extra benefits awarded to those who dump their boyfriends with originality.

[john b]

@ passerby - not sure about 'justify', but certainly it's morally *required* to *explain* immoral acts in economic terms, otherwise we're less likely to prevent them in future.

@ Mr Art - I always thought Harford was a research-light hack; his unsourced and untrue claims above would seem to confirm that.

@ AD - you're missing the point completely. When you're filling out a tax return, you're acting broadly rationally and hence fear the consequences of being caught. It's empirically clear from this and other studies that serial violent offenders do not act broadly rationally. Prison deters you, but it doesn't deter them.

[cjcjc]

Chris's move to Rutland having nothing to do with relative crime rates of course!

If young criminals are over-confident (don't think they'll get caught) then surely demanding more arrests is not farcical.
It is precsiely what is required?