Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists

By Dan Nagin. 2013

361 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police, imprisonment, and capital punishment and additionally summarizes knowledge of sanction risk perceptions. Studies of changes in police presence, 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. Studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment provide no useful information on the topic. Four 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 testing a theory of criminal opportunities, and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences and identifying high-deterrence policies.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab80638024bc63e47f64632646d6ebac4e3fdb43

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Testing the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline (2017, background): “…crime prior to the 2000s resulted in a number of papers that found either null or positive effects of police on crime rates, and a later literature that carefully addressed these empirical issues has consistently found that the presence of more police officers reduces overall crime (Nagin, 2013).”
The Deterrence Spectrum: Explaining Why Police Body-Worn Cameras ‘Work’ or ‘Backfire’ in Aggressive Police–Public Encounters (2018, background): “…is heavily influenced by the perceived risk of apprehension (Zimring et al. 1973; Becker, 1974; Williams and Hawkins, 1986, Klepper and Nagin, 1989; Nagin, 1998, 2013a; Loughran et al., 2012), Awareness to this risk was found to be highly malleable to proximal influences which include objective…”