Crime Rates, Sanction Levels, and Constraints on Prison Population

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In recent years there has been an accumulation of analyses showing a negative association between crime rates and various measures of criminal sanctions, which have been widely interpreted as evidence of the deterrent effect of sanctions (see Tullock, 1974; Tittle, 1973; van den Haag, 1975). In this paper, results are presented that are in conflict with such an interpretation. For the sanction of imprisonment (time served in prison and the risk of imprisonment given commission of a crime), the analysis indicates that the negative association is more readily interpreted as a negative effect of crime rates on sanction levels rather than its reverse—a deterrent effect.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: