Integration of Certainty,Severity, and Celerity Information in Judged Deterrence Value: urther Evidence and Methodological Equivalence1

The purposes of these studies were (a) to establish on a general basis whether 3 time-honored manipulable components of punishment combine additively, or multi-plicatively in determining the judged deterrence value of a sanction, and (b) to explore the equivalence in principle of two mutually exclusive experimental designs. Study 1 used a repeated measures design whereas main and interactive effects of certainty and severity were substantial and appeared to follow a multiplying rule, celerity effects were very small and local. Studies 2a and 3 used independent groups and established that the results of Study 1 were not merely an arbitrary product of the method. The discussion addresses the minimal effects of celerity, the interaction between certainty and severity, and the theoretical implications of choice of method.     

About the authors

Due to limitations inherent in official statistics and surveys the authors conducted a partial test of the deterrence doctrine within the carefully controlled environment of a laboratory experiment. Participants in the experiment were male volunteers enrolled in college classes. The primary variables studied were certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment, and the situations of general deterrence (threatened punishment) and specific deterrence (actual punishment).

It was found that certainty and severity of punishment had substantial effects in situations of actual punishment, but that celerity did not. For general deterrence, only certainty of punishment was effective. In addition, specific deterrence was not significantly more effective than general deterrence.     

A qualitative study of young drivers and deterrence based road policing

Deterrence theory is the predominant theory used to underpin road policing initiatives. However, survey research indicates that this approach may not be as effective for young drivers. This study uses focus groups, conducted in both metropolitan and regional locations in two Australian states (Queensland and Victoria), to explore three components of classical deterrence theory: certainty, severity & swiftness. The results suggest that geographical context affected perceptions of certainty with individuals from regional locations less likely to indicate that they would be caught by police for committing a traffic offence. Additionally, the use of cameras to detect road offences increased perceptions of certainty for young drivers. The results of this study suggest that police agencies should focus on undertaking actions to increase the perceptions of certainty swiftness and severity of punishment, particularly in regional areas, for young drivers who engage in illegal behaviour on the road. Where appropriate, these actions should take into account the geographical context. There may also be value in considering augmenting deterrence theory with other theoretical perspectives for this group.     

Severity effect on compensation and imprisonment recommendations: Deterrence as a mediator in Singapore

Severe, compared to mild, harm results in harsher punishment. According to the model of people as intuitive prosecutors, the severity effect is a deterrence message. The authors tested this hypothesis in two studies in Singapore. In Study 1, participants learnt about the severity of harm arising from an accidental or intentional act, and expressed anger, made attributions, assigned blame, recommended compensation by and imprisonment of the offender, and indicated the degree to which they were guided by the punishment goals of deterrence and retribution. As hypothesized, the prosecutorial mindset was multidimensional, and the deterrence goal mediated the severity effect on punishment. In Study 2, the severity effect held when the punishment goal was unspecified but not when it was experimentally specified as deterrence.     

Deterrence of drug driving: The impact of the ACT drug driving legislation and detection techniques

Drug driving is a significant road safety concern rendering the implementation of roadside drug testing in all Australian jurisdictions. The current research sought to examine the impact of recently introduced roadside oral fluid screening in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Specifically, the study sought to examine drivers’ awareness, perceptions and perceived deterrent impact of these operations and the degree to which they influence likelihood of future drug driving. A total of 801 male and female motorists aged 17–88 years of age completed a phone interview assessing demographics (e.g., driving and drug taking history), awareness and perceived effectiveness of roadside drug testing, and constructs central to both Classical Deterrence Theory (i.e., certainty, severity, swiftness) and reconceptualised deterrence theory (direct and vicarious experiences of both punishment and punishment avoidance) frameworks. Overall, despite an apparent decline in drug driving behaviour since the introduction of roadside testing, a large proportion of driver’s possessed a poor awareness of these operations and did not perceive a high certainty of apprehension. Age, punishment avoidance and vicarious punishment avoidance were found to predict future likelihood of drug driving, whilst Classical Deterrence Theory variables did not. Contrary to expectations and previous studies, few significant differences were found with regards to gender. Findings are interpreted in light of the recency of roadside drug testing in the ACT and the need for future studies to examine the impact of such operations. Further recommendations for augmenting the deterrence of drug driving are discussed.     

Dimensional Structure of Judgments of Crimes1

This research explored the correlates and dimensionality of judgments of crimes varying widely in seriousness, and the structure of their mental representation. In Experiment 1, 27 crimes were judged independently along 12 scales. A principal-factors analysis of interscale correlations yielded a major factor of evaluation, best defined by scales of seriousness, moral wrongfulness, and severity of deserved punishment. Judgments concerning perceptions of probability of conviction, punishment given, likelihood of physical harm, offender dangerousness, and degree of understanding also loaded on the evaluation factor. The second factor was Frequency of Occurrence. The results were generally stable at the local levels of person crimes and nonperson crimes. In Experiment 2 crime stimuli were subjected to pairwise similarity judgments that were analyzed using the Kruskal-Shepard MDSCAL and Sattath-Tversky ADDTREE procedures. MDSCAL yielded an interpretable two-dimensional representation and permitted approximate recovery of the seriousness ordering of crimes. The ADDTREE solution yielded two major partitionings, of person versus nonperson crimes, and several psychologically significant nested subsets clustered within each partition. The two psychometric outcomes were congruent. The overall results confirm a primary dimension of evaluation/seriousness. Implications for research in criminology and the comparative merits of similarity judgments versus single-scale seriousness ratings of crimes are discussed.     

The Combined Effect of the Severity and the Certainty of Threatened Penalties: Additive or Interactive?

Research carried out to date has yielded inconsistent results regarding the manner in which the severity and certainty of threatened penalties combine to affect deterrence. While some studies presented evidence showing an interactive combination, others yielded an additive pattern. The present study tested and supported the proposition that the process whereby the two variables combine depends on the type of penalty with which a person is threatened. In the case of penalties the severity of which can be psychologically weighed in interval values, the combined effect is multiplicative or interactive. On the other hand, when the severity of a penalty can be expressed only ordinally, the combined effect is largely additive.     

Reporting and Nonreporting of Observed Crimes: Moral Judgments of the Act and Actor1

In two studies, subjects judged the morality of reporting and failing to report serious and nonserious crimes. Subjects also judged the general moral level and the likability of reporters and nonreporters. In accordance with predictions, the seriousness of the crime and whether it was reported differentially affected the judgments. Reporting a crime was seen as a more morally right action than fading to report it, and this difference increased with the severity of the crime. Reporters of nonserious crimes were perceived as the most moral, while non-reporters of serious crimes were seen as the least moral individuals relative to the other conditions. There were indications in the data that for certain nonserious crimes reporters were less liked than nonreporters. The results are discussed in terms of attribution theory and the effects of perceived standards for reporting crimes and other rule infractions as these standards vary with the seriousness of the act.     

workplace deviance in japan: applying an extended model of deterrence

We test an extended deterrence model in a Japanese workplace setting. In addition to formal punishments imposed by managerial authorities, employees contemplating rule violation are assumed to take into account the certainty and severity of two other types of punishment - socially-imposed embarrassment and self-imposed shame. All three threats are proposed to be deterrents to employee noncompliance with organizational rules. Previous studies using this theory, all of which have been conducted in the United States, find that shame is a stronger deterrent to deviance than is embarrassment. Drawing on previous discussions of cultural differences between Japan and the United States, we develop a rationale for predicting that the effect of embarrassment will be stronger in a sample of Japanese than in previous samples of Americans. In fact, the results from the Japanese sample concerning the relative importance of shame and embarrassments as inhibitors of deviance are remarkably similar to previous results from American samples. Implications of this finding are considered for the debate concerning whether deviance results primarily from factors internal or external to the individual.     

Sentencing,severity, and social norms: A rank-based model of contextual influence on judgments of crimes and punishments

Context effects have been shown to bias lay people's evaluations of the severity of crimes and punishments. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind these effects, we develop and apply a rank-based social norms approach to judgments of perceived crime seriousness and sentence appropriateness. In Study 1, we find that (a) people believe on average that 84% of people illegally download software more than they do themselves and (b) their judged severity of, and concern about, their own illegal software downloading is predicted not by its amount but by how this amount is believed (typically inaccurately) to rank within a social comparison distribution. Studies 2 and 3 find that the judged appropriateness of a given sentence length is highly dependent on the length of other sentences available in the decision-making context: The same objective sentence was judged as approximately four times stricter when it was the second longest sentence being considered than when it was the fifth longest. It is concluded that the same mechanisms that are used to judge the magnitude of psychophysical stimuli bias judgments about legal matters.     

HUMAN RESPONDING ON RANDOM‐INTERVAL SCHEDULES OF RESPONSE‐COST PUNISHMENT: THE ROLE OF REDUCED REINFORCEMENT DENSITY

An experiment with adult humans investigated the effects of response‐contingent money loss (response‐cost punishment) on monetary‐reinforced responding. A yoked‐control procedure was used to separate the effects on responding of the response‐cost contingency from the effects of reduced reinforcement density. Eight adults pressed buttons for money on a three‐component multiple reinforcement schedule. During baseline, responding in all components produced money gains according to a random‐interval 20‐s schedule. During punishment conditions, responding during the punishment component conjointly produced money losses according to a random‐interval schedule. The value of the response‐cost schedule was manipulated across conditions to systematically evaluate the effects on responding of response‐cost frequency. Participants were assigned to one of two yoked‐control conditions. For participants in the Yoked Punishment group, during punishment conditions money losses were delivered in the yoked component response independently at the same intervals that money losses were produced in the punishment component. For participants in the Yoked Reinforcement group, responding in the yoked component produced the same net earnings as produced in the punishment component. In 6 of 8 participants, contingent response cost selectively decreased response rates in the punishment component and the magnitude of the decrease was directly related to the punishment schedule value. Under punishment conditions, for participants in the Yoked Punishment group response rates in the yoked component also decreased, but the decrease was less than that observed in the punishment component, whereas for participants in the Yoked Reinforcement group response rates in the yoked component remained similar to rates in the no‐punishment component. These results provide further evidence that contingent response cost functions similarly to noxious punishers in that it appears to suppress responding apart from its effects on reinforcement density.     

Causal attribution and punishment for crime

This paper analyzes survey respondent's perceptions of the causes and prescribed punishment for crimes described in 25 vignettes. Respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics, chiefly race, affect the perceived cause, whether personal or environmental. Perceived cause in turn affects severity of punishment, with heavier punishment for crimes attributed to personal traits.     

慢性应激事件对第三方惩罚的影响及其个体差异

本研究以法学和非法学学生为被试,重大考试为慢性应激源,考察意图和结果不同的法律情境下,慢性应激对第三方惩罚的影响。结果发现：(1) 意图清晰度和结果严重程度显著预测惩罚强度;(2) 法学被试中,慢性应激增加惩罚倾向,当案件意图模糊结果轻时,负性情绪在应激和惩罚强度间起中介作用;(3) 应激对第三方惩罚的影响受他人视角下的个体公正敏感性的调节。本研究有助于更好理解应激对社会决策的影响,也为司法实践提供了参考。     

Rescuing Fair-Play as a Justification for Punishment

The debate over whether ‘fair-play’ can serve as a justification for legal punishment has recently resumed with an exchange between Richard Dagger and Antony Duff. According to the fair-play theorist, criminals deserve punishment for breaking the law because in so doing the criminal upsets a fair distribution of benefits and burdens, and punishment rectifies this unfairness. Critics frequently level two charges against this idea. The first is that it often gives the wrong explanation of what makes crime deserving of punishment, since the wrongfulness of murder is not primarily about unfairness. The second is that it implies that all crimes deserve the same degree of punishment, because all crimes create the same degree of unfairness. These objections are viewed as revealing fatal flaws in the theory. Although Dagger attempts to meet these objections by drawing on political theory, Duff responds that this still draws upon the wrong kind of resources for meeting these objections. This paper argues that these two objections rest on a crucial mistake that has been overlooked by both the defenders and critics of fair-play. This mistake results from failing to distinguish between what justifies punishment as a response to crime (which requires a common element to all crime) and what justifies attaching particular penalties to crimes (which requires making distinctions in the severity of crime). The arguments presented will give reasons to consider fair-play as a viable justification for legal punishment.     

Tackling Crime by Other Means

If crime is a social problem, then ways of preventing it must be sought. Punishment has been the traditional approach to preventing crime, either as a deterrent, or as a means of reforming the offender. Neither of these approaches is wholly acceptable. Even if deterrence punishment, as grounded in utilitarianism, effectively prevents crime, there may be other methods which produce better results. Reform fails to justify any form of punishment since not only does punishment not reform, but it interferes with the reformative process. Reform is limited in scope to those people who commit crimes and are caught. If crime is to be prevented, then it is necessary to go beyond the crime and the criminal and consider the social contexts in which people act, and the ways in which they learn to react to them. By shaping both the environment and people's responses to it, society can solve the problem of preventing crime, without the need for punishment.     

对医疗事故罪法定刑的理性思考

医疗事故罪的法定刑为“三年以下有期徒刑或者拘役”,而其他业务过失犯罪的法定最高刑可达十五年。较之后者,医疗事故罪的法定刑明显偏低。显然,现行刑法对医疗事故罪采取了减轻处罚的刑事政策。减轻处罚的立法政策,在理论上缺乏充分的立法依据,在实践中难收刑罚一般预防和特殊预防的功能。     

The Effects of Physical Attractiveness,Race, Socioeconomic Status,and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-Analysis1

A meta-analysis of experimental research on mock juror judgments was conducted to assess the effects of physical attractiveness, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender of both defendants and victims to test the theory that jurors use characteristics that are correlated with criminal behavior as cues to infer guilt and to recommend punishment. In general, it was advantageous for defendants to be physically attractive, female, and of high SES, although these advantages were nil for some crimes. There were no overall effects of race on mock jurors' judgments, but the effect of defendant race on punishment was strongly moderated by type of crime. Effects of victim characteristics on jurors' judgments were generally inconsequential, although defendants were at a disadvantage when the victim was female.     

Some Surprising Implications of Negative Retributivism

Negative retributivism is the view that though the primary justifying aim of legal punishment is the reduction of crime, the state's efforts to do so are subject to side‐constraints that forbid punishment of the innocent and disproportionate punishment of the guilty. I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to what the side‐constraints commit us to in constructing a theory of legal punishment, even one primarily oriented toward reducing crime. Specifically, I argue that the side‐constraints limit the kinds of actions that are appropriately criminalised, the kinds of beings who are appropriately liable to legal punishment, and the absolute and comparative severity of sanctions. I also argue that a third retributive constraint is needed, one which I term a ‘non‐degradation constraint’. According to this third constraint, in our efforts to reduce crime, we must avoid treating offenders as non‐moral beings and ensure that punishment does not atrophy or erode the complex capacity for moral responsibility. When this third constraint is combined with the persuasive instrumental case for promoting the moral responsiveness of offenders, the result is an approach to crime reduction that is quite different from ones which emphasise general deterrence and incapacitation. In the closing section, I broach the question whether negative retributivism has been appropriately characterised in the literature on legal punishment.