Let's have some numbers

[andrewducker]

Is there any evidence that raising the sentence for a particular crime lowers its incidence?

We change sentencing recommendations often enough (around the world, anyway) that it must be possible to tell whether doubling the sentence for a particular crime actually has any effect on the number of people carrying it out.

Anyone know of any studies?


My personal intuition is that 99% of people who carry out crimes don't think about how big the sentence is at all. But I'm very happy to be proven wrong with actual numbers.

Comments

[nickys.livejournal.com]

It can work, in the same way that an emergency psychiatric intervention of locking somebody up can work.

Trouble is there isn't the funding to do constructive things with people while they're in prison as often as there should be.
Saughton Prison, though, has cut re-offending rates with a pioneering library programme, so it is possible for good to come of it.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Emergency psychiatric intervention by locking someone up "works" in the sense that it gets them to stop doing whatever-it-was that was causing a problem (for instance if they are assaulting people).

It can also "work" in that it is sometimes possible to drug people into compliance (or at least into passivity) with whatever rules you have decided they should abide by. Personally I think that drugging people because they have done something you don't like is utterly disgusting, and a gross breach of their rights (personally I believe that the right to refuse interventions is pretty fundamental, indeed more fundamental than the right to liberty - I'm happy to take away the liberty of people who pose a danger to others, I'm not happy to force them to accept treatment they do not wish to accept).

It should go without saying that treatment requested by people is a good thing, and they should get it.