“The death penalty deters murder.” A classic right-wing idea. So classic, in fact, that it’s tempting to think that the idea of deterrence itself is right-wing.
Yet on reflection, that’s absurd.
The left strongly believes in deterrence for discrimination. If you said, “Let’s cap discrimination damages at $1000,” they would predict a massive increase in discrimination.
The left strongly believes in deterrence for pollution. If you said, “We should let first-time pollution lawbreakers off with a warning,” they would predict a large increase in pollution.
The left strongly believes in deterrence for tax evasion. If you said, “Let’s end jail time for tax offenses,” they would predict a large reduction in tax collection.
What’s the common thread? The straightforward answer is: “Everyone strongly believes in deterrence for behavior they abhor.” The right abhors violent crime, so they think that “lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key” will sharply reduce violent crime. The left abhors discrimination, pollution, and tax evasion, so they think that harsh penalties – including jailtime – will sharply reduce discrimination, pollution, and tax evasion. The left will almost surely never embrace rehabilitation for billionaire tax cheats.
On further thought, however, this straightforward answer is incomplete. How so? Because people are also quick to assume that behavior that they support is highly responsive to deterrence! Consider:
The right strongly believes that high taxes deter work.
The left strongly believes that anti-abortion lawsuits deter abortion providers.
The right strongly believes that twitter mobs deter right-wing speech.
The left strongly believes that holding unions liable for strike-related property damage will discourage unionization.
Once again, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Previously, though, the motivated reasoning said, “Deterrence will sharply reduce whatever I abhor.” Now. in contrast, the motivated reasoning says, “Deterrence will sharply reduce whatever I adore.” Apparently the only thing that doesn’t respond to deterrence is whatever leaves you unmoved. If you put “How you feel about X” on the x-axis, and “How much do you think X responds to deterrence” on the y-axis, you get a U-shaped curve that reaches its minimum around X=0.
Lunacy? Definitely. But there is a method to this madness: People seek to minimize the punishment of what they like, and maximize the punishment of what they dislike. If they like it, they fret, “Even the slightest punishment puts it in mortal danger.” If they dislike it, they gloat, “With vigorous punishment, we can wipe this off the face of the Earth.”
A strange implication: The big ideological disagreements about the efficacy of deterrence rarely arise when both left and right strongly care about X. Both sides agree that laws against abortion will sharply reduce abortion; they just disagree about whether sharply reducing abortions is really good or really bad.
Instead, the big ideological disagreements about the efficacy of deterrence arise primarily when one side cares about the problem and the other is apathetic. Take violent crime. The right cares about it a lot; the left doesn’t. Hence, the right claims that deterrence sharply reduces violent crime, while the left is skeptical. Or take discrimination. The left cares a lot; the right doesn’t. Hence, the left claims that deterrence sharply reduces discrimination, while the right is skeptical.
If ideology is objectively useless for estimating the efficacy of deterrence, what’s the alternative? Ideally, of course, we would defer to high-quality social science. Yet for most deterrence-related issues, alas, high-quality social science barely exists. If we almost never use Voluntary Human Experimentation to measure the efficacy of masks, we’re probably not going to use Voluntary Human Experimentation to measure the efficacy of $1000 fines for failure to wear masks.
So what’s left? Almost all of what we really know about deterrence simply comes from introspection – and listening to the introspection of others. Not on the politically-charged question of, “How much does deterrence change society,” but on the common-sense question of, “How much does deterrence change you?” Introspection is far from perfect, but compared to motivated ideological reasoning, it’s rocket science.
READER COMMENTS
Shawn C Buell
Dec 2 2021 at 11:36am
As a conservative I find the assertion that we believe the death penalty deters crime to be laughable and a straw man. We don’t employ the death penalty with anything like the frequency or speed necessary to make a connection between the crime and consequence which might make prospective murderers aware that it is a potential consequence.
Ditto the bit about violent crime. The point of harsh sentences for it is not to deter but to punish and more importantly: to remove a violent person from society so that they cannot continue to victimize other people.
At least attempt to steel man the arguments you’re deploying as ideological sock puppets.
John hare
Dec 2 2021 at 3:16pm
Agree on capital punishment that decade plus time from conviction to execution doesn’t send a deterrent message. Neither does having single digit numbers of it per decade
Matthias
Dec 2 2021 at 7:21pm
What is punishment good for? Or is it an end in itself?
Jon Murphy
Dec 3 2021 at 8:35am
Here’s Heritage arguing for the death penalty both as a “general” and “specific” deterrence.
Jason S.
Dec 2 2021 at 11:38am
Not sure I buy this framework. What about drugs? Drug legalizers tend to say that prohibition doesn’t reduce consumption very much – deterrence doesn’t work. They say this even though drug legalizers seem to be roughly as pro-drug use as pro-choicers are pro-abortion use. Drugs seem more like abortion than like violent crime, in other words.
By the way, the idea that abortion laws sharply reduce abortion actually cuts against a high-salience pro-choice viewpoint, because it implies that the demand for abortion is cost-elastic and therefore the consumer surplus is low. You might still be pro-choice, but then you should think of it as a low-salience issue.
Francisco Garrido
Dec 2 2021 at 11:57am
It’s not only introspection that we are left with. All economic theory and most empirics tell us that an increase in the cost of doing X will induce people to do less of it.
I’d say that this is a very strong argument in favor of the position that deterrence works across the board. For the quantitative effects, of course, we have no recourse but wait for the high quality social science to come along.
Matthias
Dec 2 2021 at 7:27pm
Details depend on elasticity of demand and supply.
Alex
Dec 2 2021 at 12:29pm
There is undoubtedly some truth to this in that we are all prisoners of our biases, but I think there’s a conflation here of people’s affective biases and their policy beliefs.
For instance, I don’t think it’s true at all that the left doesn’t care about violent crime; exposure to violent crime is suffering disproportionately borne by the marginalized and working class, the historic base of the left. The orthodox leftist position situates violent crime in a broader structural context where aggregate deprivations undermine trust, respect, and push people into insidious bands of survival/brutality like gangs or paramilitaries or whatever. I’ve never met a leftist who didn’t see this as an urgent and serious. The critique of deterrence here isn’t based, I think, on some naïve blindness to evil when committed by the favored marginal subject (even where this blindness does exist, and sometime it does). Instead, its based on the quite reasonable recognition that deterrence, understood as a way of solving the problem is only going to culminate in mass violence or mass incarceration if it isn’t fixed with reform. I think the most dramatic example of the flaw in this logic in or times are the horrors that attended Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’. As a form of deterrence unaccompanied by actual redistribution and reform, it became a brutal war on the poor.
By the same token, I’m not sure ‘the left’ as you define them are actually that fixated on deterrence and punishment as a solution to issues like tax evasion and environmental damage. While it might be extremely cathartic for some to see an oil baron or a greedy banker hauled away to prison, I’m not sure many serious leftists would see this as an actual, durable solution to climate change or financial crisis. As with violent crime, I think the solution would be framed in terms of structural reforms and altered production incentives such as carbon taxes or progressive monetary policy or forming credit unions or whatever… nothing to do with deterrence.
I think what you are correctly hitting on is more in the realm of emotion than policy and ‘deterrence’ as a concept is funny because it creeps into both realms. For instance, I have only ever lived as a tenant and have suffered under many terrible landlords, as did my mother. Therefore, affectively, I will admit that I am always going to sympathise with the worst tenant even over the best landlord. It’s absolutely visceral, and so stories of even probably quite justified evictions get my blood pressure rising while any story at all of a landlord losing in court or otherwise suffering misfortune will give me extreme catharsis. Of course this isn’t rational, and it would be absurd to extrapolate this not very virtuous sentiment into policy, my preference for which is based more on anodyne things like public housing quotas and land value tax. Yet, if you heard me talk about my landlord you might incorrectly assume I was a Maoist, obsessed with deterrence of a very violent sort.
Similarly, if I was being fair to some of my friends on the right who express obvious catharsis (one that makes me feel viscerally uncomfortable) when they see ‘thugs’, ‘looters’, and ‘scum’ being brutalized by police officers I am likely making the false assumption that the see said brutalization as the solution to the problem – perhaps they don’t (in fact I know they don’t, because when it comes to policy they often express social democratic policy preferences), it’s just their different worldview means they see different spectacles of punishment and deterrence more satisfying than I do.
In short, is it not important to make a distinction between what deterrence we simply find satisfying and what deterrence we think actually works?
Mark Z
Dec 2 2021 at 4:41pm
All of those ‘structural changes’ are enforced by threat of punishment. Any argument that the state can and should intervene in some way to fix something rests on the premise that punishment works; IOW, have everything to do with deterrence. (e.g., what happens if you don’t pay the carbon tax?)
And while I’m not sure what constitutes a serious person, if politicians count, not long ago there was an interesting demonstration of Bryan’s point: a law was proposed (and ultimately passed) that made conspiring to lynch someone (even if never carried out) a federal crime ( previously just a state crime; successfully lynching someone was, I believe, already a federal crime) and made it so that people convicted of this in federal court could get the death sentence. The vast majority members of congress who purport to be anti-death penalty supported the bill, and many pilloried a congressmen who opposed it because he opposes the death penalty (Justin Amash) for, in essence, being consistent. So most politicians at least do seem to exhibit this wild fluctuation in the value of deterrence.
KevinDC
Dec 2 2021 at 12:34pm
I’m a bit under-coffeed to say too much, but one dimension your model seems to be missing is how people feel about the means of deterrence, whereas you seem to be focused entirely on the thing being deterred.
Take the death penalty. I think it’s far more plausible that people on the left are more likely to dismiss the deterrence of the death penalty because they instinctively dislike the death penalty. And, like Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, people are prone to start with their moral gut reactions and then reason from there. If left wing people are more likely than right wing people to have a gut reaction that capital punishment is just wrong (which seems plausible to me), that would bias their reasoning against the idea of capital punishment being an effective deterrent. Saying “It’s wrong to execute murderers, even if doing so would save more innocent people from being murdered” is rhetorically shooting yourself in the foot, and also just an uncomfortable thought to hold. Much easier to think (and even believe!) “Capital punishment is wrong, and it doesn’t even prevent murder anyway.” This explanation also fits the facts, and I think it’s far more charitable than the assumption that left of center people are just blasé about violent crime.
This also explains a good deal of the variance for the other cases you mention. The left is generally more comfortable with big government and technocratic intervention, and because they are more friendly to those means, they are more likely to believe they effectively deter bad things like pollution and discrimination. The right is less favorably disposed to technocratic intervention, and are also less likely to believe that such intervention successfully deters bad things. However, the right is more likely to believe that very same kind of intervention, which they see as bad, successfully deters good things, like hard work. This, too, I find more charitable than the assumption that people on the right just don’t care about discrimination.
So that’s the alternate model that comes to mind for me. If you’re favorably disposed towards the means, you’re also disposed to believing those means successfully deter bad things but don’t deter good things. If you’re unfavorably disposed towards the means, then you’ll find it easier to believe those means deter good things but not bad things.
Or so it seems to me at the moment. Time for more coffee.
Andrew_FL
Dec 2 2021 at 1:06pm
I’ve never encountered the argument that the death penalty deters crime in the wild. I’ve only ever encountered the argument that for some crimes, it is a fitting and just punishment.
Jon Murphy
Dec 3 2021 at 8:36am
See my comment above to Shawn. The “death penalty deters” is extremely common in conservative circles.
Billy Kaubashine
Dec 2 2021 at 1:50pm
The missing link between severity of sanction and degree of deterrence is probability of punishment.
(Ignoring crimes of passion, obviously.)
Infovores
Dec 2 2021 at 2:57pm
Guns may be a counterexample. Liberals believe gun control will reduce gun violence while conservatives often insist it will do nothing to keep guns out of the hands of bad people. Admittedly conservatives do believe gun control will deter patriots from buying guns, but I think this only deepens the counterexample.
The “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” argument suggests that gun control will deter what conservatives adore (patriot gun purchase), but not what they abhor (violent crime).
Matthias
Dec 2 2021 at 7:41pm
I mostly hear about gun control in the context of allowing or banning guns, or requiring more or less paperwork.
I wonder why I don’t ever hear much about taxing guns and ammunition?
From an orthodox economics perspective, someone who was worried about bad externalities that come with gun ownership should push for taxes to internalise those, shouldn’t they?
Jose Pablo
Dec 4 2021 at 6:40pm
The discussion about the effects of gun control is, very likely, the most nonsensical that you can have (akin to discussing the sex of angels).
Just look at European, Canadian, Japanese or Australian gun violence statistics.
This is a no-problem in every single civilized country on Earth but the United States.
Jose Pablo
Dec 4 2021 at 6:55pm
You seem to equate “deterrence” with “penalties” but there is another “driver” of deterrence which is the “enforcement”.
The probabilities of getting away with your crime are pretty high. More than 50% for murder, more than 70% for rape, more than 90% for car theft (and this are the probabilities of “being detained”, the probability of not serving time is even bigger)
And as happens with deterrence, everybody seems to believe that “enhanced enforcement” works well against the behaviors they abhor but it is pretty much useless (or even counterproductive) against the ones they condone.
J. Goard
Dec 6 2021 at 11:40pm
@Jose Pablo:Am I incorrect in assuming that a low enforcement rate for murder must be because most murders occur within gang culture where “snitches get snitches” and neither police nor the broader culture really care about the victims, whereas I as the potential “marginal murderer” would face a much greater chance of enforcement for killing any of the people I might ever end up motivated to kill?
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