Increasing sentences to reduce violent crime rate, will harsher punishments make a better society?
Social crime is a complex phenomenon that we can execute from person to person, but that is unlikely to prevent the emergence of crime in the future.
Facing violent crimes, we often encounter opinions that punishment should be harsher to increase deterrence, thereby reducing the crime rate. More extreme, some groups argue that it is because of the current peaceful society that causes cases of violence to increase, and they propose to restore barbaric punishment combined with public humiliation to ensure social stability.
For example, a group of drug addicts, rapists, murderers should get the punishment of burning alive or execution by dissection while nude to increase the level of humiliation, or a nanny slapping children should be slapped by those same slaps openly by the public.
We all knew that in the law, one of the many purposes of punishment is deterrence, and in some areas other than violence, aggravation of punishment is associated with increased deterrence; In this article, we only cover the issue of violent crime to find out whether aggravating penalties lead to a reduction in the rate of violent crime, and will those punishments lead to a more stable society or not.
1. What history said.
In general, if the more brutal punishments do lead to the less violent the crime, inevitably it should be applied in all situations related to violence, such as school bullying, violence in education, domestic, and workplace, as long as the cruel punishment serves the purpose of preventing violence. In other words, this view paints the scene of a society where violence dominates.
Such a society once existed, it is called the medieval age. In medieval times, robbers could be mutilated and publicly humiliated; arsonists can be executed, usually by hanging; theft can range from castration to death, usually by tying up and feed to hunting dogs; and murder is always a death penalty [1].
Because the assessment of the crimes of each period is different (for example rape today is a serious crime but in medieval times it was quite mild or not even considered a crime, rapists just need to marry his victim, the case is settled). So here we evaluate the level of social stability according to the most equally recognized crime of all time: murder.
In 1981, Ted Robert Gurr combined old and new British case files from 1200 to 2000 to chart the number of murders in British history from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. The chart shows that per 100 thousand people a year, in the fourteenth century, Oxford city had 110 homicides, 60 in London, while in twentieth-century London had only 0.8 homicides. Steven Pinker concludes, based on Gurr’s chart, that over eight centuries Britain had a 95% reduction in homicides [2].
After the announcement of Gurr, many other criminologists also entered, including Manuel Eisner. Eisner used a much larger data set to not only re-plot the UK, but also many other European countries, such as Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Eisner chart shows that per 100,000 people a year, from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, Great Britain decreased from 40 homicides to 2, Italy from 90 to 3, the Netherlands from 70 to 2, Germany and Switzerland from 60 to 2, while Scandinavia only had data from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries showed a decrease from 70 to 2 [3].
As historian Barbara Tuchman observed, “It is very easy to see the behavior of medieval men full of childishness, in the lack of self-control.” Indeed, the strong human stereotype of someone who can hold back anger in the face of adversity has been the product of the last few hundred years, for Europe at least. The sociologist Norbert Elias argues that the decline in violence in Europe is rooted in cognitive change. During the period from the 11th to the 18th centuries, people began to know how to control the impulse. Society moves from a culture of honor, where people are willing to take revenge or participate in duels to death, to a culture of dignity, where people focus on inner perfection, and restraint their anger becomes important [4].
Thus, it can be said that the idea of brutal punishment or even a barbaric society has appeared in human history. History itself shows that it is an unstable and outdated social model, as well as that society today is a time of less violence than ever, in all areas such as law, education, entertainment [5].
Besides, the idea that violence lessens, leading to social peace, stemming from people better restraining themselves (not because of more brutal punishment) is an interesting idea and should be taken seriously from a scientific perspective.
2. What science said.
Until now, after a lot of research, the scientific community has not shown the effect of aggravating punishment on the decline of violent crime. These two are inherently related and extremely lacking in basis to say that they have a causal relationship with each other. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the other studies.
In the late 1980s, two researchers Richard Wright and Dietrich Smith interviewed 105 thieves and 86 armed robbers who had reformed in order to understand the criminal’s thoughts during the crime. Will they, before committing a violent crime, stop to consider the risks and benefits of their actions? The answer that comes from the work of Wright and Smith is no.
Criminals often use drugs just before doing crime, plus the urgent need for money to maintain daily life (which is difficult for this group because they are often unemployed) and to gain faces with friends (meaning they are influenced by people present regularly in their lives), ultimately making robbery the solution to the problem. Like everyone acting impulsively, they don’t think too much and think far. They just thought briefly that robbery would solve the problem and that this was illegal. However, according to Wright, their short-term thinking, while making future penalties not much influence on their decision to take action, makes them flinch if the clear situation shows that they are susceptible to arrest, such as if the joint is crowded, highly protected place [6].
Daniel Nagin’s 2013 study supports Wright’s judgments, arguing that to reduce crime, what needs to step up is the certainty of arrest, not the severity of the punishment [7]. Research published in 2006 by Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd was conducted by randomly placing police at 55 out of 110 crime hotspots in Minneapolis, and observing for 7542 hours. The areas that received the intervention, reportedly, reduced crime-reporting calls by 6% to 13%. The team concluded that increasing police visibility could slightly reduce crime in places where crime rates are inherently high [8].
Knowing that the measures for individual self-restraint are varied and complex, for example, in medieval times, robbery was a crime that accounted for 74% of all recorded crimes, and the main causes are famine, poverty, and war [9]. This shows that reducing crime is an overlapping issue of economics, politics, culture, and solving it is a very complicated task, not simply just brutal punishment and public humiliation of the criminals.
Imposing penalties of course immediately resolve specific individuals or criminal organizations (such as imprisonment or capital punishment will immediately isolate criminals from society), but will it prevent future crime is another complex question. Social crime is a complex phenomenon that we can execute from person to person, but that is unlikely to prevent the emergence of crime in the future. In some cases, such as drug crime, the escalation of the law even leads to an escalation of the crime’s danger level and causes the drug market to heat up, become more attractive, and criminal organizations will have an arms race in tandem with the police force.
Legislation is never so simple, as some have called for increasing the severity of punishment to reduce violence.
3. To death or not to death?
It would be a major shortcoming around this topic without mentioning the death penalty and the issue of keeping or abolishing it in the legal system. In short, they still didn’t find any crime-preventing effect on this form of punishment.
First, some statistics. 56 countries still hold the death penalty; 106 countries repealed it; 28 countries have practically abolished the death penalty (i.e. on paper it still exists but limited implementation); 8 countries abolish the death penalty for common crimes (i.e. still apply the death penalty for special crimes, such as war crimes) [11]. Among the countries that abolish the death penalty are Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Austria, Portugal, New Zealand, Iceland, the Czech Republic, these are also 8 countries in the top 10 most peaceful countries in the world, as ranked by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) [12].
Then, some researches. In 1935, Robert Dann published the analysis of murder cases in Philadelphia 60 days before and 60 days after five publicly declared executions. Dann argued that if the executions had a deterrent effect, the murder rate would be lower in the post-execution period. The results showed that, in contrast, the rate of increase was higher than usual [13]. About 20 years later, Leonard Savitz did a similar study, Savitz found no clear difference in murder rates before and after death sentences were declared in public trials [14].
However, in general, keeping or abolishing the death penalty has little to do with the crime rate, for example, in Canada in 1976 there were 3 homicides, and in 2003 when the death penalty was removed, the murder dropped to 1.85. Meanwhile in Great Britain, the number of homicides increased after the death penalty was abolished [15]. According to research by the United Nations, current data only leads to the conclusion that the existence of the death penalty is not related to a reduction in the rate of violent crime [16]. Some countries choose the death penalty sometimes to solve economic problems, because maintaining the prison system is a complex issue, not merely focusing on the deterrence of the law.
In short, resentment at a crime is understandable and sympathetic, the use of a tit-for-tat strategy is the shortest and simplest way for an individual who has broken the law. But, know that not everything instinctive is good for modern society. Because as we said, today’s society is too complex and the crime reduction links to too many other problems.
These problems are not solved by simply barbarizing things, especially sometimes the reason for a certain group of people to support barbarism may not really stem from the wish for a better society, but just to satisfy the wild instinct, which had been contained in a peaceful society.
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References:
[1] Medieval Crime and Punishment — Foxford History. “Medieval Crime and Punishment — Foxford History.” Google.com, 2019, http://sites.google.com/.../medieval-crime-and-punishment.
[2] [3] [4] Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined. New York, New York, Penguin Books, 2012.
[5] Gareth Cook. “History and the Decline of Human Violence.” Scientific American, 4 Oct. 2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/.../history-and-the.../.
[6] Koerth-Baker, Maggie. “The Threat of Punishment Does Little to Reduce Crime.” Undark Magazine, 16 May 2016, http://undark.org/.../deterrence-punishments-dont-reduce.../.
[7] Nagin, D. “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century: A Review of the Evidence.” Semantic Scholar, 2013, http://www.semanticscholar.org/.../b0544487e89badd87900bf.... Accessed 31 Mar. 2021.
[8] Sherman, Lawrence W., and David Weisburd. “General Deterrent Effects of Police Patrol in Crime ‘Hot Spots’: A Randomized, Controlled Trial.” Justice Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, Dec. 1995, pp. 625–648, 10.1080/07418829500096221.
[9] https://www.southamcollege.com/.../Crime_across_all_time...
[10] https://www.amnesty.org/.../Docu.../ACT5066652017ENGLISH.pdf
[11] Ledsom, Alex. “The 10 Safest Countries in the World to Visit.” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/.../the-10-safest-countries-in.../.... Accessed 31 Mar. 2021.
[12], [13] Thorsten Sellin. The Death Penalty : A Report for the Model Penal Code Project of the American Law Institute. Philadelphia, Executive Office, American Law Institute, 1959.
[14] https://math.dartmouth.edu/.../my%20DP%20paper,%20current...
[15] United Nations. Department Of Economic And Social Affairs. Capital Punishment. Part I: Report, 1960. Part II: Developments, 1961–1965. New York, 1968.
