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Full-Text Articles in Law
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
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There is a 250 year old presumption in the criminology and law enforcement literature that people are deterred more by increases in the certainty rather than increases in the severity of legal sanctions. We call this presumption the Certainty Aversion Presumption (CAP). Simple criminal decision making models suggest that criminals must be risk-seeking if they behave consistently with CAP. This implication leads to disturbing interpretations, such as criminals being categorically different than law abiding people, who often display risk-averse behavior while making financial decisions. Moreover, policy discussions that incorrectly rely on criminals’ risk attitudes implied by CAP are ill-informed, and …
The Disutility Of Injustice, Paul H. Robinson, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, Michael Reisig
The Disutility Of Injustice, Paul H. Robinson, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, Michael Reisig
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For more than half a century, the retributivists and the crime-control instrumentalists have seen themselves as being in an irresolvable conflict. Social science increasingly suggests, however, that this need not be so. Doing justice may be the most effective means of controlling crime. Perhaps partially in recognition of these developments, the American Law Institute's recent amendment to the Model Penal Code's "purposes" provision – the only amendment to the Model Code in the 47 years since its promulgation – adopts desert as the primary distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment. That shift to desert has prompted concerns by two …
Engaging Capital Emotions, Douglas A. Berman, Stephanos Bibas
Engaging Capital Emotions, Douglas A. Berman, Stephanos Bibas
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The Supreme Court, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, is about to decide whether the Eighth Amendment forbids capital punishment for child rape. Commentators are aghast, viewing this as a vengeful recrudescence of emotion clouding sober, rational criminal justice policy. To their minds, emotion is distracting. To ours, however, emotion is central to understand the death penalty. Descriptively, emotions help to explain many features of our death-penalty jurisprudence. Normatively, emotions are central to why we punish, and denying or squelching them risks prompting vigilantism and other unhealthy outlets for this normal human reaction. The emotional case for the death penalty for child …
Does Criminal Law Deter? A Behavioral Science Investigation, Paul H. Robinson
Does Criminal Law Deter? A Behavioral Science Investigation, Paul H. Robinson
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Having a criminal justice system that imposes sanctions no doubt does deter criminal conduct. But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. Potential offenders often do not know of the legal rules. Even if they do, they frequently are unable to bring this knowledge to bear in guiding their conduct, due to a variety of situational, social, or chemical factors. Even if they can, a rational analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal …
The Role Of Deterrence In The Formulation Of Criminal Law Rules: At Its Worst When Doing Its Best, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley
The Role Of Deterrence In The Formulation Of Criminal Law Rules: At Its Worst When Doing Its Best, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley
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For the past several decades, the deterrence of crime has been a centerpiece of criminal law reform. Law-givers have sought to optimize the control of crime by devising a penalty-setting system that assigns criminal punishments of a magnitude sufficient to deter a thinking individual from committing a crime. Although this seems initially an intuitively compelling strategy, we are going to suggest that is a poor one; poor for two reasons. First, its effectiveness rests on a set of assumptions that on examination cannot be sustained. Second, the attempt to employ the strategy generates a good many crimogenic costs that are …