What Constitutes Appropriate Deterrence To Crime?
Prisons exist for any combination of four reasons: revenge, removal, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Only the latter three–removal, deterrence, and rehabilitation–have implications for security.
Throughout history, rulers have thrown people in jail to remove them from society or take them out of politics.
Long prison terms for child molesters have been justified because they keep the irremediably guilty off the streets so they can’t repeat their crimes.
The ancient Greeks invented the concept of ostracism, where people would be banished from Athens for a period of ten years. Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of treason by King James I and imprisoned in very elegant quarters within the London Tower for thirteen years. Both Stalin and Mao jailed and killed, millions to shut them up.
More recently, the Burmese government kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for years in an attempt to silence her and cripple her political party, and the erstwhile apartheid government in South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela for over twenty years.
Deterrence is how security systems prevent future attacks. It’s a myth society prevents crime. It doesn’t. It can’t. If someone wanted to kill you, he would just kill you. Assuming the culprits are identified and brought to justice, the entire process acts as a preventive countermeasure to deter future crimes. Deterrence works. The more unpleasant the punishment, the better the deterrent.
However, deterrence is far less effective against emotional attackers, which is one of the reasons the death penalty doesn’t seem to affect the murder rate. The vast majority of murders are emotional crimes.
Nonappeasement is another form of deterrence, but it is easier to understand than to put into practice. It is a good policy to refuse to negotiate with kidnappers or blackmailers on social media.
If you give them the ransom money in exchange for the person who’s been kidnapped or to protect your image in the case of social media, then you are just creating an environment where the hoodlums know they can make money. Refusing to pay the ransom is smarter provided you can afford to be cold-hearted and tolerate some victim loss. Well, that is a hard decision though.
Rehabilitation is a form of education, one designed to take criminals and turn them into law-abiding citizens. Prison without rehabilitation is much less effective because it prevents crime only as long as the criminals are in jail.
Deterrence doesn’t work unless it goes hand in hand with moral and ethical education. In general, deterrence works less well if you don’t tell people what they are supposed to do instead. Conversely, education without deterrence works only on those of us who are naturally moral and ethical.