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Full-Text Articles in Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance
Tasers Help Police Avoid Fatal Mistakes, Paul H. Robinson
Tasers Help Police Avoid Fatal Mistakes, Paul H. Robinson
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This op-ed piece argues that police will inevitably be placed in impossible situations in which they reasonably believe they must shoot to defend themselves but where the shooting in fact turns out to be unnecessary. What can save the police, and the community, from these regular tragedies is a more concerted shift to police use of nonlethal weapons. Taser technology, for example, continues to become increasingly more effective and reliable. While we will always have reasonable mistakes by police in the use of force, it need not be the case that each ends in death or permanent injury. Such a …
Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
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It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.