Transcript for:
Understanding Crime Theories and Deterrence

okay so this is the launching point for talking about theories of crime so why some people commit crime and others don't why some parts of a city might be more crime prone than others and all that other fun stuff and our starting point is sort of revisiting something I talked about in the overview of criminology and that's this classical school of crime and it's important because there's a whole set of theories that are what are called neoclassical or modern classical theories of crime sort of re a rebirth period that happened in the U.S in the 1970s and and sort of still carries on today and so uh uh this should be a little bit of review but prior to the emergence of the classical school of crime uh the the prevailing view was sort of this view of humans as cursed and depraved and that whatever happened was essentially God's will and if that's true there's not really you can do to sort of fix people or change people uh or or a lot you can do to prevent crime and so both the criminal justice system and the punishments that were handed it down kind of reflected that orientation so um you think of something like for example a trial by combat the idea that the the somebody accused of a crime can choose to fight to the death and if they win their innocent so the theory behind that is right if everything's God's will then it was God's will that that person won and therefore they were innocent of the crime uh and so the the justice system would not be something we recognize today we would see it as sort of irrational um I'm probably a little bit barbaric that that the punishments were not nearly as as connected to the severity of crime as they are now uh one example I can think of is that in colonial America from time to time they might round up uh pickpockets in a town and do summary executions sort of a mass hanging of pickpockets Thieves uh so uh you had this sort of irrational uh often over the top barbaric criminal justice system and that's important because the the classical school of crime is essentially response to that old system the linchpin for this is a sort of um revision of humans that instead of being kind of Puppets of God that human beings that get out and got endowed human beings with a certain amount of free will and so once you sort of think about humans as having Free Will and making choices and decisions then you can say well what could we do to modify alter uh persuade people to choose differently uh and so that's the idea and so that Bakery isn't benthams and the other folks were essentially philosophers and thinkers that uh we're more reformers than people trying to create theories of crime and so the theory of crime is here's just pretty simple if you're crime is people commit crime because it's often the easiest way to get what they want that humans are hedonistic we pursue pleasure and avoid pain and we do so in a relatively thoughtful way that we choose some actions over others and so why do people commit crime because it's an easy way to get what we want and if that's the case then the idea is it becomes possible to control human beings with the use of Criminal Justice systems and punishment that if you have a rational system that uh sort of punishes just enough so that the pain of punishment always outweighs the pleasure of a particular crime than in rational humans should stop committing crime uh and it's key that all that these are folks that by and large were against the death penalty they believe that there should be sort of more consistent but less severe punishment um that you only needed enough severity to um outweigh the gain from the criminal Behavior so uh in its day in the 1800s uh sort of led to a new way of thinking the American Criminal Justice System the post after the French Revolution their Criminal Justice System were based on this sort of new classical school so our system today is based on that that idea uh sort of having a rational Humane system where you couldn't torture people uh or the punishment uh sort of fits the particular crime as severity of crime goes up the severity of the punishment goes up so uh that you you know that the laws have to be published and that you know people can understand what's legal and illegal before they face a judge all the things we kind of take for granted and in the day these philosophers actually argued that once you created that system that you might be able to nearly eradicate crime obviously that that didn't happen um and and so even though it had an enduring effect on our system as kind of a theory of crime it starts to fade from the view in the 1900s um and all the positivist theories the theories that are sort of based on on science and causes versus this idea of Free Will and choice they dominate discussion of crime until the 1970s um why did the classical school fade well um from what we can tell crime actually didn't go down and it may have increased after uh reforming the criminal justice system the second thing is these These are folks that didn't really have any data they didn't bring any science to it they were sort of philosophers and so people as social sciences emerged try to start the question um you know the validity of a what's a pretty simple Theory um but mostly this sort of vision of humans that emerges in the 1900s is is one that's determined that there's causes to our Behavior rather than uh just being amount of Free Will and choice so for the most of the early 1900s people kind of abandoned studies and research on deterrence and and sort of addressing whether whether the the philosophers of the 1700s were right um in the United States that all starts to change in the 1970s um so the 60s are sort of Norm known for this sort of ideological and cultural battle um and that also bled into the study of crime and the response to crime uh there's a couple good examples of what's going on in the 1970s one is what used to be a pretty famous report called the Martinson report uh Robert Martinson was a sociologist who did a sort of literature review of all the rehabilitation programs that had been done in the 1900s and basically concluded that we didn't really know what we were doing and that not much if anything worked to reduce crime in in his report he kind of concludes with this this sort of this thought that you know we were so wrapped up in this belief in Rehabilitation and curing and fixing people that we never even really studied whether this sort of old idea of deterrence works you know it it might be possible that those old philosophers were right and that uh the new sociologists of the 1900s were not right uh in a similar vein a very famous book in the 1970s by a political scientist named James G Wilson comes out and and he basically makes the argument that look Rehabilitation is probably never going to work first because um there are in his view there are no real root causes of crime and it's back to this view of people as sort of calculators uh and that the the sort of best reaction and the one that's most sort of sober and feasible is if the government is going to respond to Crime it's probably through punishment and prisons and this sort of forceful reaction that that we need to send a message that crime doesn't pay and so in the 70s there's this sort of Rebirth of thinking about deterrence Theory and certainly there's a whole movement to kind of get tough on crime uh that happens for a variety of reasons so this sort of backlash I suppose I should back up and say um the important part of kind of attacking Rehabilitation is that that Rehabilitation is based on a belief that there's something wrong to fix right that that crime is caused by something within people that you can change and if you're a deterrence theorist a classical thinker that's not how you think about humans and you know you're thinking about humans as as calculators as making rational choices and you're trying to influence their behavior that way so to attack Rehabilitation is to essentially attack all those theories that are positivistic that underlie rehabilitation so in in the 70s in into the 80s and 90s we had this sort of movement to get tough on crime and a smart point out that that wasn't all based on deterrence Theory and classical school Theory um in part it was in part it was this sort of like well we never really tried deterrence theory in a sort of full-throated manner but the other part of getting tough which we'll talk about at the end of this lecture is what's called incapacitation yeah that became the idea that if we simply locked up enough people there wouldn't be as many people committing crime on the streets because they'd all be in prison uh the other reason for sort of getting mean and getting tough is simply a sort of desire for social Revenge so the idea that somebody committed a wrong that we need to sort of even those scales to balance the scales of Justice they deserve a certain amount of punishment so the important part is these bottom two ones are not really based on any theory of crime right if you put an act of offender in prison it really doesn't matter what caused them to commit crime as long as they're in prison they can't really do any damage to the outside so that that is going to work or not work regardless of what causes crime similarly this isn't really designed to do anything it's just it's not going to increase crime it's not going to decrease crime it's just designed to sort of morally balance the scales of Justice so deterrence theory is really out of all the sort of get tough uh justifications it's the only one that you can sort of test as a theory of crime all right so the theory itself hasn't changed much from the late 1700s until now the base assumptions are that human beings are sort of rational thoughtful creatures and that we consider the consequences of our action and because of that essentially the fear of formal punishment will control crime formula is underlined in these slides because um it goes back to the classical school of crime and this belief that the government and the criminal justice system and and manipulating it is the key to reducing crime so informal punishment might be something like right like why do I not commit crime well I'm worried what my parents would think of me I'm worried about what my friends would think of me so in a way you're worried about getting punished or sanctioned but not by the police by the prison system by jails and so deterrence theory is really sort of lasered in on formal punishments and the use of police and prisons and courts as a way to control crime all right so there's a few different things a couple different flavors of deterrence Theory uh the big one is General versus specific and this is the one that students are always they tend to get confused and they're like well General is for a lot of people and specific is for only some people which is actually partially true the key here is understanding who's being deterred General deterrence is the idea uh that when you punish a criminal everybody else in society sees that and says well I don't want to get punished so I'm not going to do that behavior so punishing criminals sends a message to a wider audience specific deterrence is the idea that when you punish a criminal that specific criminal should be less likely to commit more crime in the future so specific deterrence is targeted at the specific offender that's being punished so if you send somebody to prison presumably they become less likely to commit crime so that's General versus specific deterrence Theory can operate at macro or micro levels so most theories kind of operate only one way deterrence can do both so for example um you can look at the certainty of punishment in a city or an area of the city and see whether that affects that area's crime rates uh at the micro level usually what you're talking about is individual people's perceptions of risk right so if we survey people and we say tell me how likely it is that you think you'd get caught and punished if you broke into five cars in a night right and the idea is people who have this perception uh that they're going to get caught should be less likely to commit crime so uh the other thing to keep in mind is this third point about absolute versus marginal an absolute test of deterrence would be a yes or no deterrence test like does the having having a prison system and having police um yeah reduce crime and you know there's very few people that would say oh it doesn't matter at all right and so most of these tests are not well in fact all of these tests are not tests of whether or not a criminal justice system works they are does increasing some element the swiftness the certainty the severity of punishment reduce crime even further it kind of as close as we can get to a test of absolute deterrence uh there's a couple cities I think they're both in Canada Montreal maybe where the police went on strike for days at a time and so the idea is there's no police doing any Patrol it's essentially as close as we can get to like no criminal justice system no deterrence and as you might suspect some crime went up but not all crime and the crimes that went up kind of gives you a little insight deterrence the area things like robberies and speeding and the sort of those sort of crimes things that did not go up were like homicide which I mean the reason people don't kill each other isn't necessarily because they're afraid of getting caught like there's a lot of other reasons why people don't kill each other so that's an interesting case study but for most of these tests it is like what happens if we you know increase the percent of people going to prison by 30 percent or increase the effectiveness of how we solve cases by 20 does that does that reduce crime all right so in general deterrence again so General deterrence is the use of punishments on criminals to send a message to the broader Society to a broader audience um and in terms of the elements of deterrence Theory swiftness certainty severity uh the T that get tested most often are the certainty of punishment and the severity of punishment so in terms of severity the the gist is the the research question would be do more severe punishments lead to less crime in the future so and you can measure it a variety of ways uh we seem to be sort of preoccupied with the studies of the death penalty America is one of the few industrialized Advanced countries that still uh use the death penalty with any frequency uh and the death penalty research is I mean there's literally hundreds of studies and the vast majority of them find that the death penalty does not matter at all uh states that have the death penalty don't have fewer homicides than states that lack the death penalty uh there is kind of a handful of studies that find some sort of return effect but there's also a handful of studies that find what they call a brutalization effect that the use of the death penalty might increase some future uh forms of homicide uh I give you one example so a guy used to work for it Cincinnati has done uh kind of Mitch chamblin did uh a lot of research on the death penalty and he did some studies of these sort of before after studies so in the 90s after uh a decades line moratorium on the death penalty some states kind of ramped the death Machinery back up uh California Oklahoma there's three or four states that in the 90s in the context of kind of getting tough on crime started the death penalty again and so he capitalized on that by looking at weekly homicides before the first big execution uh and then after the execution and one of his sort of more notable research articles found that and I can't remember if it was either California or Oklahoma that subsequent to the first public execution in decades that uh most homicides went down and the key was they they distinguished between two sorts of homicides one are called felony uh felony murders uh and felony murders are when you murder somebody in the context of a different felony so you think like robbing a gas station and you kill the clerk that would be felony murder uh those are more likely to get the death penalty because um you know you you there's premeditation you took a gun into a gas station with with bullets in it knowing you could kill somebody um and so that's felony murder versus sort of the other realm of murders which tend to be based in arguments often sort of drug and alcohol induced arguments where somebody eventually shoots and kills somebody else what he found was that amongst felony murders there was a small deterrent effect after the first public execution so that's great that would mean it worked the executions had a deterrent effect the problem is uh most homicides are not felony murders and amongst those homicides the sort of argument-oriented homicides there is actually an increase after the death penalty after the first public execution so uh like I guess I would I think about it this way and there's a uh I can't remember the title of the article like basically the gist of the last big review of death penalty research said if there was any kind of sizable deterrent effect like we'd know about it it's kind of kind of a hard thing to research because homicides are a rare event and death penalty even more rare even in the U.S but if there was a big deterrent effect we would we would know uh and so again most of the studies find nothing and most of the studies uh things like sentence length or time served in prison right like how much time does somebody in Minnesota serve versus Wisconsin and does that affect the crime rates in Minnesota Wisconsin almost all that research finds absolutely nothing that just it doesn't matter so the severity of punishment doesn't seem to matter much uh certainty a lot of the certainty research is similarly kind of negative but at least with certainty there's sort of glimmers of of Hope that if you think of the sort of studies on on what the UCR the FBI data used to call it clearance rate so clearance rate again is the number of crimes in a year divided by the number of arrests in a year times 100 so it tells you roughly what percent of cases get sort of cleared by arrest and so it gives you a measure of the how certain it is that you're going to get caught for a crime right like if if only 10 percent of people get caught for burglary that means your odds of getting caught as a burglar are pretty low uh so people did studies of clearance rates comparing states to each other uh comparing cities to each other and and most of it found that the clearance rates generally are pretty low you know most crimes are property crimes most property crimes are really hard to solve they don't get solved and that variations in clearance rate really didn't predict crime uh there was in the 90s uh two very interesting studies that looked at cities within a state it was Pennsylvania and Florida were the two states and what they found was this what they call the Tipping Point that uh clearance rate really didn't matter unless it got like high enough and high enough in their research was like 30 percent in one state and 40 percent in the other state and what they found was that in smaller cities with high clearance rate you actually did start to see a reduction in crime and from a theory standpoint that makes some sense right because General deterrence is sort of a word of mouth concept the idea is that people kind of have a sense of their odds of getting caught and if you're in a small City and the clearance rate is really high there's a lot of people getting arrested for some crime it's more likely you know that and sort of adjust your behavior and so it's this first inkling that certainty might matter but you have to get the odds of getting caught high enough that that people notice some of our interesting studies of certainty and this sort of feeds into the last point I just made were studies of police patrol and so uh the most famous is what was called the Kansas City preventative Patrol experiment and that was done in the 1970s and pretty simple but pretty cool uh research design that is they took every police beat in Kansas City and they randomly assigned it to one of three conditions double Patrol regular Patrol and what they call reactive only beats where the police only went in the beat to respond to 9-1-1 calls but they didn't actually Patrol the area otherwise and the idea is if you double patrols right people should notice that and you know their odds of getting caught have gone up and so they should not commit crime there what they found was that it didn't matter at all the big sort of takeaway from the Kansas City experiment was doubling police patrol really didn't produce any benefits and so uh Sam Walker who's like the king of metaphor and criminal justice uh called call this the mayonnaise theory of police that you just need enough police to cover an area and that's going to have some impact but that doubling the police is like adding extra mayo on the sandwich it's just gonna make the bread soggy it's not not going to get much benefit out of it uh and that was kind of like that was sort of the State of Affairs what everybody kind of knew to be true for for decades until uh the late 80s early 90s when there was a new round of research and instead of doubling the police patrol they did these what was called directed patrols or saturation patrols where they had five times eight times ten times the number of police vehicles in one particular police beat so that is what happens if you flood a police beat with cop cars do people notice and do people commit less crime and I actually had when I was living in Huntsville Texas I actually was in a research project at asking that question where I was doing ride-alongs with the police um and they were literally told you know we want you driving around we don't want you you know we want you pulling people over flashing your lights projecting this big presence but the the extra officers that were doing the saturation patrols were told that they didn't really want you to arrest people because if you arrest somebody and you take them to jail to get booked then you're sort of out of your out of that area that you're not you're not projecting a big presence uh so uh the takeaway from that research was more positive uh that you know in Houston one of the things that was happening was they had armed robberies of these little convenience stores that were in the more sketchy parts of town and that led to homicides that led to the clerk shooting robbers and robbers shooting clerks uh and what they found is that that saturation Patrol is actually uh reduced serious violent crime in the Beats where they did it so in that sense it sort of worked and moreover it didn't just sort of bleed out or get displaced into other other fleets right people just didn't like start robbing next door that it had a real impact a real prevention of crime uh what you say so and Moss would be my wife and if you make her a sandwich like I put the amount of mayonnaise I think I should put on a sandwich and then I double it and then I double it again and then she's like why don't you put any Mayo on she likes the extra mayo so uh the takeaway from the saturation patrols was that in order to work you really had to lay it on thick and again that that makes sense right because the the point is that people notice something is different and they adjust their behavior uh so that was the upside again in terms of testing deterrence there you start to get a little pattern of consistency that certainty can matter but it has to be sort of Stark enough that people sit up and take notice um the downside of saturation patrols we'll talk about the broken windows and the order maintenance stuff at the end of the semester but but basically those are these sort of police models that crack down on on less serious crime uh my take on the evidence is that's pretty clear it can work to suppress crime even serious crime and violent crime the downside is it's really expensive in Houston the police police call this program driving for dollars because they were getting paid overtime to do these patrols so it wasn't really sustainable in the long run the the probably the bigger downside is you're only in Houston they were flooding what they called high crime areas which tended to be areas that were predominantly Black Or Hispanic and areas that uh have really high rates of poverty and so uh you you end up having police you know when you tell them that you want their lights on and but you don't want them to arrest folks they end up writing tickets and you know for for very small small minor traffic offenses for loitering for public intoxication and so you have police sort of occupying areas and citizens perceive it as like harassing folks for no good reason and that deteriorates the relationship between police and the citizens in those areas the other thing and this is this is sort of a relevant issue today is that when you tell police to to pull people over for minor offenses and they do that hundreds and hundreds of times and then thousands of times in a month and tens of thousands of times in years some of those incidents are going to go bad some people uh that get pulled over are going to throw down like a lot of the uh lethal Police use of force incidents we've had lately have started with relatively minor offenses um and so you're putting police in that sort of spot uh and later people would be like well it was only this why were they even harassing them for this minor thing well that was kind of the model that's what they were told to do uh and so that's that's the big sort of downside of that sort of model and that gets us to this guy uh sociologist Jesus looking fellow um a guy named David Kennedy and this is the uh for one of the uh assignments is based on this this model um very interesting guy in that he wasn't a trained criminologist he was sort of a journalist that uh came around sideways to the study of crime anyhow uh he wrote a book so the book is deterrence and crime prevention uh and he's most famous for this operation ceasefire which was a gang Intervention Program in Boston uh his second big one was done in Cincinnati but since then he's done these all over the place and a lot of them have been pretty successful at reducing crime uh so one of his big points in his book about deterrence theory was that you know two um too often that they just uh changed something in the criminal justice system and then they hope that people will notice right so you double Patrol and cross your fingers that people will notice and Kennedy's big Insight was like why would why would you do it that way like why not just tell them something's different and so a big part of his program was explicitly threatening people with the criminal justice system that this is gonna happen if you keep doing this so in the gang study it was uh the idea was to to use evidence to figure out like what's causing the homicides in Boston and they're like man a lot of them are caused by youth gang members sort of tit-for-tat beefs back and forth shooting each other and so he basically just found representatives from every uh gang in the youth gang in the Boston area called them into an auditorium and said look this is you know there's a new sheriff in town here's what's going to happen uh if you shoot at people uh the police are going to come down on you and basically tear your gang apart the Al Capone references this idea that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion versus all the homicides that he was responsible for uh so if you're a gang member and your gang uh puts a body on the ground the idea was we're going to go after everybody in that gang does whatever charges we have drug charges old charges uh sting operations we're going to do everything we can to just rip that gang apart and so that's at pulling levers approach we're going to pull whatever lever we can to follow through uh and so so number one is make that threat really explicit that you bring him in and you tell him in his other studies the open-air drug markets like the the drug markets where people pull over in a car and somebody runs out and throws crack in their window um they would literally get surveillance video of the people involved in drug trade and then bring them in and say look we have you on camera we could arrest you whenever we want stop stop slinging drugs uh on the outside in this neighborhood or we're gonna arrest you so that's that sort of direct threat uh the other part of this I think that is key is that the threat is so narrow that you can follow through right like they didn't tell gang members hey stop being gang members stop committing crime stop hanging out in the street what they said is stop shooting other people right and even and amongst youth gangs the number of times that they kill another person or shoot another person is small enough that you can respond to every single one and so it's not just the threat right these are people that have been threatened their whole lives it's the idea that it's a threat that you follow through on very clearly so that the quote word in the streets gets out that this is the thing um and that if your gang does this everybody in that gang is going to be punished so I highly highly recommend listening to the Kennedy interview he hasn't kind of like really understated monotone voice but some of the stuff they talk about is really cool and really interesting if uh if you want to understand how these things work and and how neighborhoods that are um really distressed and crime prone how they see the police and how the police see them so really interesting stuff but that's a that's a theory um and again uh there's some pretty persuasive evidence that this type of program works uh I can't remember if I have it on canvas anymore but a few years back there is a meta-analysis a study of all the research that had been done in this area and most of the studies of these kennedy-esque sorts of programs were pretty pretty impressive so they can work the up the upside of these is that they tend to build community support right so then rather than sort of saturating a neighborhood with like a military presence of police um the sort of occupying area this is more like a surgical strike this is right like you're picking people out of neighborhoods that the neighborhood views as problematic and that you're not harassing the people that the neighborhood sees as sort of ordinary law-abiding citizens uh so that's one upside uh the downside is that these can be hard to maintain right like if you I guess what I haven't mentioned yet is it's sort of also a carrot and stick approach the big stick is the punishment the deterrence that if you put a body on the ground we are coming after your gang um but they also bring into these call-ins like Social Services ex-gang members preachers mothers of kids who have been shot to be like hey you know we don't hate you personally we hate what you're doing and we want to help you stop and so there's this also effort to kind of reach out but but doing that having police work with preachers and moms and ex-gang members and trying to sustain that can be hard to do and again anything based off a threat right when it first happens you get this shock and effect of like oh this is different but there's always the reality that you have to figure out how to keep that threat kind of active and real and so some of these programs most notably Boston kind of fell apart for a while and homicides went back up but that's that's kind of I mean that can be true of any program right that programs like that can be hard to sustain all right so uh that's that's that Focus deterrence model and and again you try to look for triangulation and theories and and this sort of triangulates with the rest that a big part of what this is is really ramping up certainty that gang members or people uh slinging drugs on the streets recognize that their risk for getting punished went way up and they adjust their behavior uh here's a great example of a program that has never worked and probably will never work uh and that is this this concept of uh Scared Straight types programs where you bring in uh young kids into an adult prison and the inmates threaten them and yell at them and tell them how they're going to get raped and all that other stuff uh the connection to deterrence theory is pretty clear right what you're trying to convince kids is that prison is worse than they thought it was going to be uh and if you think about like what element of deterrence theory that is unfortunately that's severity which most of the research is pretty negative on right like uh people's view of severity or the severity punishment has never had much effect on crime and there have been several random controlled trial studies of scared straight type inmate confrontation programs and none of them have showed a reduction in crime and in fact some of them have shown it a pretty substantial increase in crime and that's especially true of the ones that are most confrontational where you have inmates right up in the face of kids so we might Circle back to that that's one of my kind of pet peeves when we talk about corrections all right so General deterrence what do we know if we look at all the research what's my sense what's the weight of the evidence does the swiftness certainty and severity of punishment reduce the crime for people who witness that and I should point out even this the David Kennedy stuff this is not this is not specific deterrence this is General deterrence um and you can tell the difference you think about like who is this message for right so in the gang intervention they tore apart gangs that put body on the ground what was the point of doing that was the point that once you sort of went after this gang that those gang members you went after would learn their lesson not really it was about demonstrating to all the other ganks it was broadcasting a message to other gangs this is what's going to happen to you if you put a body on the ground so that's that's what makes it General deterrence and not specific to turns uh all right so what do we know uh well we know one thing for certain no pun intended that uh certainty is seems to be the key ingredient and ironically like the benthams and decorias of the 1800s made that hypothesis they suspected that was true even with other data and it makes sense logically right if you don't think you're going to get caught and punished it really doesn't matter what the punishment is so certainty matters more than severity the other thing is that you need relatively high levels of certainty that sort of just incrementally increasing people's perceptions or the actual odds that they're going to get caught doesn't seem to work it has to be something sort of substantial that people sit up and take notice of third from the Kennedy stuff uh it seems clear That explicit messages work better than letting the public sort of catch on on their own and third this is just sort of generally especially in the U.S there's been a shift from um the belief that Corrections is the key cog all right that and that's that's linked to severity because that's what Corrections is prison uh to police and this concerned about actually getting caught and arrested in the first place that seems to be um most effective in the research all right so that's General deterrence again punishing an offender to send a message to somebody else what about specific deterrence where we punish offenders so that they learn their lesson and stop committing crime uh the ideal study here would be to sort of randomly uh sentence some offenders to prison another not right like some people get prison and some people don't get any punishment and see if that matters but you can't actually can't actually do that research judges would kind of frown on that and so it's hard to say like what effect prison has but any any just cursory look at how people perform when they get released from prison would tell you that prison probably isn't working very well the recidivism rates are very high for people who have done time in prison uh something like 65 to 75 percent get rearrested and a good chunk of them end up back in prison when they get released uh so that kind of flies in the face of this idea that severe punishment will sort of teach people lessons and they will stop committing crime uh nevertheless like if you want to do the science you end up sort of with lesser punishments so something like a Corrections boot camp uh in contrast to prison you can do studies where randomly some people get the boot camp and some people get a less serious alternative and most of those studies are kind of just as pessimistic in terms of the findings um so we did a bunch of boot camps in the 80s and 90s as part of the get tuck get mean uh mostly juveniles uh and deterrence Theory the idea is so if certain severe punishment should reduce crime boot camps were designed to be uh Swift serious uh punishment so people woke up at five o'clock in the morning did physical drill uh punishment was like push-ups I got yelled and screamed at called maggots some of them shaved the heads off people um what did it all do uh we've had dozens of experiments and most of them found nothing most of them found that boot camps had no impact and when it's compared to some comparison group there was a handful I think it was like seven where there is a reduction in crime and a to the 35 where there was actually an increase in crime so some of them seem to make people more criminal a few of them seem to work and so anytime you get evidence like that the fair question the good question is like what what the hell's going on like why are most of them not working why are some of them working and as best as we can figure out the ones that worked the ones that increased crime tended to have really strong standard Rehabilitation components so it wasn't just the yelling and screaming and the push-ups they had like drug uh drug treatment streamed into the boot camp they also tended to have good Aftercare so once you got discharged from the boot camp what kind of services did you get uh critics of boot camp basically look at that evidence and go uh do you really need the Boot Camp or can you just do the rehabilitation and the aftercare uh so most boot camps have disappeared they were kind of a flash in the pan in the 80s we still have one in Minnesota called The Challenge incarceration program it's in Moose Lake uh largely we have it because the community community loves it they were trying to get rid of it just a year and a half ago and the community kind of rallied and pressured people into keeping it there the Minnesota one would fit this model here very strong Aftercare a lot of Rehabilitation streamed into the program so uh but in terms of deterrence Theory not very persuasive evidence uh as were these uh what was called intensive supervision probation basically this was an attempt to make probation meaner uh backups probation so probation is something you get instead of going to jail or prison so you would go to court and they would find you guilty of I don't know burglary and the judge would say I sentenced you to two years in state prison I'm gonna suspend that sentence I'm going to put you on probation in the community you're on the community you have to follow all these conditions report to your probation officer submit to drug test you might have a curfew so that's what probation is in the in the 70s and 80s we tried to make probation in the spirit of the larger context like meaner to make it sort of more punishment oriented and so the idea was uh instead of having you know 50 75 people on a caseload you'd only have like 10 or 15 and the probation officers would drug test the bejesus out of you and impose a curfew and check you at work and check you at home and sort of make your life miserable uh and we had this really great I mean great experiment uh Rand is a um sort of a think tank that does a lot of Criminal Justice research and they had a grant funded through the National Institute Justice where they had sites all across the country adopt this model and they they did random assignments so um you would literally call Rand and be like I have a candidate for for the Intensive program and they'd be like nope this is standard probation or yes this goes in So Random assignment a great study what they found is ISP made no difference in arrest for new crimes that people in the ISP group were just as likely to commit crimes as the people in the regular probation group moreover the ISP groups had folks were more likely to end up in jail because of technical violations which makes sense right because if you drug test the Jesus out of people they're gonna fail some tests if you make them show up for the probation officer three times a week they're going to miss some appointments um which I mean it wouldn't be a bad thing right like if you said well we sort of got them before they could go bad but the problem is it had no overall impact on new crime right like if if getting people for technical violations actually worked it should have reduced crime which it didn't so um like like boot camps isps can be made to work uh there's a great study done by one of my colleagues in in Ohio and they looked at all these ISP programs in Ohio and what they found was I can't remember if I have the slide here or not I don't um the ISP programs that adopted a sort of uh treatment or Human Service model like we're going to help you find jobs we're going to counsel you all that sort of Human Service work if they had high integrity they actually reduced crime by 15 to 20 percent in contrast the models in Ohio that were like we're gonna kick your ass and we're going to do this sort of uh high intensity punishment even at their best had no impact on crime so uh again in terms of like specific deterrence the idea that certain and severe punishment will change offenders themselves not a lot of great evidence the one glimmer of evidence we had actually came uh germinated in Minnesota it was a study by a guy named Larry Sherman and he did a random study and I think I talked about this in the overview of crime but really Innovative study where they had police officers showing up to domestic violence calls head cards they would pull out that said arrest counselors separate so arrest is arrest if there was signs of physical violence they arrested the perpetrator counsel was they tried to mediate the dispute and left and separate was they told one of the people usually the male hit go take a walk if you come back here within eight hours we're gonna arrest you uh and then they look to see what would happen and the findings were that after three months those that were arrested had only a 10 percent rearrest rate whereas the other two had double the arrest rates uh so this led a lot of states to enact laws that require police officers to arrest perpetrators so-called mandatory arrest laws and unfortunately like the science that followed the replications of the Minneapolis experiment were not nearly as supportive and so throughout the 80s and 90s what we kind of figured out is that where these arrest programs tend to work is in sort of working class neighborhoods where getting arrested is still sort of stigmatizing that they don't work well in really distressed neighborhoods where the police are kind of always there anyways um so some support I guess for specific deterrence if you think of a rest as the deterrent but sort of replication wasn't nearly as positive I don't know if this guy's got any social cache anymore for for a while he was like a rock star um he got famous again because um in like the 2015 era uh he started using the Sheriff's Office to go after illegal immigrants ended up getting like sanctioned by the Department of Justice and pardoned by President Trump uh he got famous for uh creating a tent jail right so they needed a bigger jail um and started building a jail he just used these army surplus tents out in the desert put a fence around it called it good and got famous for that and then he just kept riffing off of it so he made male inmates wear pink underwear and pink shirts and old-time stripy chain gang stuff on the roads and uh he had like only cold bologna sandwiches for meals and the idea is very specific deterrent like he wanted his jails to be so tough and so unpleasant that nobody would ever want to come back uh and he was so confident it would work he actually paid for a study from the University of Arizona and what they did is they compared Sheriff Joe's inmates to uh the track record of people who had been in the regular jail before Sheriff Joe right if if his pink underwear stuff worked his inmates should fare better in the community than the prior Sheriff's inmates and what they found was it didn't matter uh that the inmates of Sheriff Joe performed the same as the inmates pre-sheriff Joe in the regular jail which unless criminologists like myself would be like the uh you know the the bad part about jail is that you can't leave the jail right the fact that you have to wear pink underwear or eat bologna sandwiches probably isn't that big of a deal uh compared to the whole not leaving jail and not being able to protect yourself while you're in jail all right so I feel like I've been Debbie Downer on on specific deterrence uh I'm just trying to sort of give you a sense of the evidence so here's one program and it's part of a larger movement that seemed to gain some traction uh it's called hope great metaphor uh or acronym Hawaii opportunity probation with enforcement this is a judge in Hawaii that was kind of riffing off uh David Kennedy stuff so he had a case load of drug offenders and like ceasefire and David Kennedy he started them out with an explicit warning like look things are different in this new program any failed drug test or going to jail the first time it's one day second time it's a weekend third time it's a week um we're not going to mandate any drug treatment if you can just stop using drugs because you don't want to get jailed have at it if you repeatedly fail or if you request treatment we will give it to you so there was treatment but it wasn't mandatory at least to start with and the a great sort of random assignment trial of Hope was really promising cut drug use rates in half cut arrest rates way down like it really worked well and so like other things this led every other jurisdiction to be like well we want a hope program unfortunately uh nobody in the mainland has been able to sort of replicate the results that the judge in Hawaii got and nobody really knows why there was a five or six year follow-up of that hope program and it still had enduring effects which is great I mean they sort of diminished instead of like you know 100 percent you know 60 70 reductions it was like well there's still 20 reductions but after six years that's impressive uh but there's several replications in the past four or five years that had really good research that just didn't work um and the bigger issue is how to expand something like that Beyond drug and alcohol offenders like the linchpin for this program is these drug tests right and so you can drug test people and anytime they fail you get sanction them so you can be really certain with your punishment but what do you do if somebody's just a burglar right like there's no pee test for burglary or or a crime like that and so um expanding it Beyond drug offenders would be would be difficult to do but it's sort of the Leading Edge of this approach uh and so the the change here is from Swift certain severe to Swift certain fare and these are programs like hope that tend to emphasize certainty over severity uh and so that's still kind of out there there's still programs that are trying to emulate hope um all right so what do we know about deterrence uh this is data now it's almost 10 years old but it was sort of uh the National Institute of Justice commissioning all the marketing mucks to say like what do we know what is all this research sort of led us to and hopefully you've gotten this message in this hour but uh the the sort of number one takeaway is that if there's a key ingredient in deterrence Theory it's it's certainty that the certainty of getting caught is much more important than how severe the punishment is uh second sending somebody to prison isn't really a good way to deter crime like increasing prison rates don't really send enough of a message to the general public and prison doesn't seem to work well as a specific deterrent third point is about police and I've pointed this out before that um most of the really Innovative research has been with cops and and using them in more preventative innovative ways the David Kennedy stuff and those sorts of things um have been most promising uh the other two points I've kind of already covered so uh so the research on deterrence aside from some certainty support isn't that great and people always are like why it seems so common sensical like why doesn't it work as well as I would think uh what is this assumption about how rational humans are there's a lot of great research on how our brains work and we have a lot of blind spots and biases and cognitive limitations such that we're not wholly rational folks and so if we're not calculating in rational and thinking ahead this is not a theory that's going to work uh so if you think about crimes that are sort of Heat of the Moment irrational uh drug and alcohol fuel that a threat of punishment isn't going to be effective uh second you got to recognize that you know there's limits to what we can do for punishment in a Democratic Society so you know if if we let police officers execute anybody who possessed heroin would heroin use go down probably uh do we want to live in that Society probably not uh and so critics will say look it's not that deterrence is wrong it's that you can only still go so far with the turrets theory in a Democratic Society and finally as I said you know keep in mind we're not talking about like deterrence versus no deterrence it's you know just amping up police presence does amping up certainty um reduce crime even further so for every Theory uh there's a policy implication right like cognitive theories have a policy implication sociological theories have policy implications this one's a little weird because the policy implication is kind of baked right into the theory but uh every policy implication asks this question if the theory is right what reduces crime subdeterrence theory is right what's going to reduce crime what isn't and deterrence theorists will say that treatment or Rehabilitation unless it's painful won't work and it could actually make things worse because you end up giving people things rewarding people sending the wrong message about crime in contrast they argue that if this theory is right that what you need to do to respond to crime is increase the certainty or swiftness or severity of criminal penalties at the fallback position for deterrence theorists has always been well if you some people can't be deterred if they're not rational enough to be deterred that the only thing we can do is incapacitation and so even though this isn't really a theory of crime it's worth talking about here uh this is not my saying it's a Washington or not Washington Wall Street Journal columnist got famous for saying that like people get this a thug in prison can't shoot your sister um and that's the appealing part about incapacitation that if we put people in prison they can't harm us on the outside so it's easy to do we have the technology to do it it's just really expensive to build a bunch of prisons and do it and in the United States we embarked on this great experiment great in terms of like how big it was uh we built hundreds and hundreds of Prisons we went from having a couple hundred thousand inmates in the early 80s to having over 2 million um in the 2010s so I think we peaked at like 2.4 million in prison and so I think the U.S has roughly five percent of the world's population and about 25 percent of the world's inmates uh and so yeah common sense says if you lock up enough High rate criminal offenders you're probably going to save some crime that they would have committed had they been on the streets the issue is like you know what crime and how much how well does it work and there's a lot of ways you can approach this most of this research was done you know as we were building all these prisons in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s and so you could look at you know a great example is right in our backyard here that Minnesota was one of the states that sort of resisted this we didn't build a bunch of Prisons we still have one of the lowest prison populations in the country in contrast our friendly neighbors to the East and Wisconsin did build more prisons and did lock up a lot more people and it really are the crime rates across our two states aren't that much different um so uh it's one sort of very simple anecdotal uh example of how you might approach this uh I think Wisconsin has like 26 000 inmates and we have roughly 10 000 or 9 9 500 something like that uh and only because the political decisions to sort of Change Change laws and build more prisons um you can also one of the Innovative things we did is we asked people coming into jail so as they're entering from jails and then eventually into prisons we basically like did a calendar how much crime they committed in the last year so if I commit like 10 burglaries in the past year then the projection would be by locking me up for a year you would save 10 burglaries or two robberies or whatever the crime was so the best estimates from these studies one of the ones I remember is this is like actual data from the 80s that when we doubled the prison population from 400 000 inmates to 800 000 inmates we reduce the crime of robbery by roughly 18 so over 10 years 1.8 percent per year led us to an 18 reduction in robbery now 80 ain't bad that's I mean that's and robbery is a pretty serious crime so all that's good the problem is to achieve that we had to lock up 400 000 human beings for for a year um and so it works best for what we call High rate offenses like robbery right so robbery or burglary or theft an active offender might do three robberies in a day or you know 20 in a month uh in contrast right like an active offender is unlikely to ever commit a homicide uh and so locking them up for a year isn't necessarily going to have an impact on a crime like homicide uh so does it work absolutely to some extent uh it's just that it tends to work best for the crimes uh that we care about the least uh probably the better way to word it is it it's it's least effective for the crimes that most scare the hell out of people which is things like rape and homicide which are very rare crimes it's also uh really expensive and the probably bigger problem is in an America experience this as you keep doubling your prison population the effects are going to go down uh and that's because you're working on the margins right like every time you lock up more people presumably lock up the most serious High rate folks you can find and so they're already in prison the next time you go to do it but by definition you get sort of less and less serious people that you're absorbing into the prison system so um it can work to some extent but um not as well as folks had thought not for the kinds of crimes that scare us the most and over the long run it can create a lot of problems right if nothing good is happening in prison you're also sort of releasing people worse off than they were when you brought them into prison and so that research can get pretty complicated as well but that's what we know about uh incapacitation and so uh I think that's a pretty good place to end this