Theory and practice retard growth of criminological wisdom

May 10, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,

Though criminologists largely dismissed the ideas of the classical school early in the century, neither legislators nor police administrators seem to have lost faith in the classical deterrence doctrine. This schism of theory and practice retarded the growth of criminological wisdom.

Little effort was made to blend the classical notions of deterrence with dominant sociological variables to see if they could explain more crime together than they did separately. Contributing further to the theoretical schism, deterrence models are the obverse of social reaction (particularly labelling) perspectives.

The central thesis of deterrence maintains that punishment diminishes crime, while the labelling theory asserts that punishment increases crime. According to the deterrence theory, a person’s criminal activity will decline as a result of being caught and punished. Labelling theory suggests that the person will be driven by punishments into further crime. Ideological bias left issues of deterrence ignored for decades. As Jack Gibbs has noted, “With humanitarians supplying moral ammunition, scientists performing as merchants of facts (virtually all pertaining to the death penalty), and social engineers (e.g., psychiatrists, social workers) offering alternatives to traditional punishments, the deterrence doctrine fell into disrepute.

Ideological predispositions led to empirically unfounded conclusions, some suggesting that deterrence works and some that it does not. At the turn of the century, Enrico Ferri asserted that, “we have but to look about us…to see that the criminal code is far from being a remedy against crime, that it remedies nothing.”

At mid-century, Harry Barnes and Negley Teeters, in their influential criminology text, drew the same untested conclusion, asserting that, “the claim for deterrence is belied by both history and logic”. In the late 1960s, a leading criminology text continued to offer a similar unsubstantiated assertion to the effect that deterrence “does not prevent crime in others or prevent relapse into crime.”

Both exponents and opponents of deterrence theory maintain that their viewpoints are congruent with common sense. Deterrence advocates, cite as proof of deterrence the marked reduction in the speed of traffic when vehicles approach a visible patrol car. Deterrence opponents, on the other hand, point to the large number of persons in prison for the second or third time as proof that deterrence does not work.

The problem, however, is that common sense is often nonsense (Hagan, 1982). It is not sound to infer from the decelerating vehicles that, in general, “deterrence work,” and certainly, the fact that some persons repeatedly violate the law do not repudiate deterrence doctrine. Discussions of deterrence commonly rely on these unwarranted inferences, a fact that is further illustrated by the following examples.

The first example concerns what has been called the tiger prevention fallacy (Zimring & Hawkins, 1973:28):

A man is running about the streets of mid- Manhattan, snapping his fingers and moaning loudly, when he is intercepted by a police officer. This conversation follows:

P. O. What are you doing?

Man: Keeping tigers away.

P. O. Why, that’s crazy, there isn’t a wild tiger within 5,000 miles of New York City!

Man: Well then, I must have a pretty effective technique!

The issue highlighted by the tiger prevention tale, as Gibbs (1975) stressed, is that deterrence is an inherently unobservable phenomenon. We cannot see that which is prevented, yet absence of the prevented occurrence does not establish deterrence exponents.

Conclusions that low levels of deviance can be credited to threats of sanction reflect the tiger prevention fallacy. The only satisfactory way to resolve the issue is to manipulate sanctions in order to observe how the covary with deviance deterrence advocates often are reluctant to do this precisely because they believe a priori that deterrence works.

If deterrence does work, lessening sanctions would result in more crime, a troublesome prospect.

Robert Gates

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Theory and practice retard growth of criminological wisdom

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