Deterrence Perspective

Theory
JAY MARK P. CHICO, RSW,MPA, MABS
deterrence

• to prevent by fear; hence, to hinder or prevent from action by fear of

consequences, or difficulty, risk, etc.

• is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from offending.

• punishment serves to deter others from committing crimes, and to

prevent the criminal from repeating his crime.
• Deterrence is a theory from behavioral psychology about preventing or
controlling actions or behavior through fear of punishment. This theory
of criminology is shaping the criminal justice system of the United States
and other various countries.
• Deterrence is often contrasted with retributivism, which holds that
punishment is a necessary consequence of a crime and should be
calculated based on the gravity of the wrong done (vengeance or
revenge oriented)
• The concept of deterrence has two key assumptions: the first is that
specific punishments imposed on offenders will "deter" or prevent them
from committing further crimes; the second is that fear of punishment
will prevent others from committing similar crimes.
Cesare Bonesana-Beccaria
• 15 March 1738 – 28 November
1794
• An Italian criminologist, jurist,
philosopher and politician
• Widely considered as the father
of classical criminal theory and
well remembered on his treaties
On Crimes and Punishments
(1794)
• Founding work in the work of
penology and the Classical
School of Criminology by
promoting criminal justice
Jeremy Bentham
• 15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832
• was a British philosopher, jurist,
and social reformer.
• founder of modern utilitarianism.
• Deterrence theory can be traced to such early utilitarians as Cesare Beccaria
and Jeremy Bentham. The underlying idea is that people will commit crimes
to the extent they are more pleasurable than painful. Certain, severe, and
swift legal punishments increase the pain for crimes and, thereby, can deter
people from committing them.
• Three tenets served as the basis of Beccaria’s theories on criminal justice:
free will, rational manner, and manipulability. According to Beccaria -- and
most classical theorists -- free will enables people to make choices. Beccaria
believed that people have a rational manner and apply it toward making
choices that will help them achieve their own personal gratification.
• Beccaria openly condemned the death penalty on two grounds: 1.) because
the state does not possess the right to take lives and 2.) because capital
punishment is neither a useful nor a necessary form of punishment.
 Beccaria also developed in his treatise a number of innovative and
influential principles:
• punishment had a preventive (deterrent), not a retributive, function;
• punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed;
• the probability of punishment, not its severity, would achieve the
preventive effect;
• procedures of criminal convictions should be public;
• in order to be effective, punishment should be prompt.
• Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of
morality ties into legislative practices. He lays down a set of criteria for
measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will
create.
• The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration,
certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these
measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when it
should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more
pleasure or more pain for a society.
• The legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure
and the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.
• Deterrence can be divided into three separate categories.
General deterrence –manifests itself in policy whereby examples are
made of deviants. The individual actor is not the focus of the attempt at
behavioral change, but rather receives punishment in public view in order to
deter other individuals from deviance in the future.
For example, in the Islamic Crime & Punishment system (Hodood, i.e.
plural of Hadd), applied 1400 years ago, the punishment for crimes was
performed in public, and was aimed at general social deterrence.
Specific deterrence –focuses on the individual deviant and attempts to
correct his or her behavior. Punishment is meant to discourage the
individual from recidivating.
Incapacitation –is considered to be a subset of specific deterrence.
Incapacitation aims to prevent future crimes not by rehabilitating the
individual but rather from taking away his ability to commit such acts.
Under this theory, criminals are put in jail not so that they will learn the
consequence of their actions but rather so that while they are there,
they will be unable to engage in crime.
 Marginal deterrence –a principle in the theory of criminal justice,
states that it is prudent to punish a more severe crime more severely than
a lesser crime and a series of crimes more severely than a single crime of
the same kind. Marginal deterrence is intended to deter criminals to limit
their criminal acts. Without marginal deterrence, a criminal could benefit
from committing additional crimes or using illegal methods to suppress law
enforcement, witnesses or evidence.
Classical Criminology and Deterrence

• Beccaria believed people want to achieve pleasure and avoid pain.

• Crime provides some pleasure, thus to deter crime one must administer
some pain
• Individuals have free will: Freedom to make personal behavioral choices
unencumbered by environmental factors such as poverty or ideological
beliefs.
• Individuals maximize utility (e.g., happiness, food, resources) by
weighing benefits and costs of their future actions before deciding on
behavior.
• Primary purpose of punishment is deterrence rather than vengeance.
• Severity: Punishment must be just severe enough to overcome the gain
from a crime. Punishment that is too severe is unjust, and punishment
that is not server enough will not deter.
• Without proportionality, people will not be deterred from committing
more serious crimes (e.g., if rape and murder both punished with death,
a rapist would have little reason to refrain from killing the victim).
Criticisms on Deterrence Perspective Theory

• it assumes that human beings are rational actors who consider the
consequences of their behavior before deciding to commit a crime
• another problem in assessing deterrence is that most potential offenders
are not aware of sanction risks and consequences before they commit
an offense
• If there was 100% certainty of being apprehended for committing a
crime, few people would do so. But since most crimes, including serious
ones, do not result in an arrest and conviction, the overall deterrent
effect of the certainty of punishment is substantially reduced. Clearly,
enhancing the severity of punishment will have little impact on people
who do not believe they will be apprehended for their actions.
Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura
• Born December 4, 1925 (age 89)
Mundare, Alberta
• Canadian/American psychologist
• Known for Social cognitive
theory,
Self-efficacy, Social learning
theory, Bobo doll experiment,
Human agency, Reciprocal
determinism
• Social learning theory states that learning is a cognitive process that takes
place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct
instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement.
• models are an important source for learning new behaviors and for achieving
behavioral change in institutionalized settings.
• Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a cognitive process that takes
place in a social context.
• Learning can occur by observing a behavior and by observing the consequences
of the behavior (vicarious reinforcement).
• Learning involves observation, extraction of information from those
observations, and making decisions about the performance of the behavior
(observational learning or modelling). Thus, learning can occur without an
observable change in behavior.
• Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely responsible for learning.
• The learner is not a passive recipient of information. Cognition, environment,
and behavior all mutually influence each other (reciprocal determinism).
• Social learning theory draws heavily on the concept of modelling, or
learning by observing a behavior. Bandura outlined three types of
modeling stimuli:
Live model –in which an actual person is demonstrating the
desired behavior.
Verbal instruction –in which an individual describes the desired
behavior in detail and instructs the participant in how to engage in the
behavior.
Symbolic –in which modelling occurs by means of the media,
including movies, television, Internet, literature, and radio. Stimuli can be
either real or fictional characters.
• Exactly what information is gleaned from observation is influenced by
the type of model, as well as a series of cognitive and behavioral
processes, including attention, retention, reproduction and motivation.
• During a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner,
Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers
of reward and punishment in classical and operant conditioning were
inadequate as a framework, and that many human behaviors were
learned from other humans.
• In 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as
the Bobo doll experiment, designed to show that similar behaviors were
learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of
models.
• the Bobo doll experiment emphasized how young individuals are
influenced by the acts of adults. When the adults were praised for their
aggressive behavior, the children were more likely to keep on hitting the
doll. However, when the adults were punished, they consequently
stopped hitting the doll as well.
• Social learning theory has been used to explain the emergence and
maintenance of deviant behavior, especially aggression.
• Criminologists Ronald Akers and Robert Burgess integrated the
principles of social learning theory and operant conditioning with Edwin
Sutherland's Differential Association Theory to create a comprehensive
theory of criminal behavior.
• Burgess and Akers emphasized that criminal behavior is learned in both
social and nonsocial situations through combinations of direct
reinforcement, vicarious reinforcement, explicit instruction, and
observation.
• Both the probability of being exposed to certain behaviors and the
nature of the reinforcement are dependent on group norms.
Criticisms on Social Learning Theory

• Biological theorists argue that the social learning theory completely

ignores the individual’s biological state.
• The social learning theory rejects the classical and operant conditioning.
• Many critics believed that the Bobo doll Experiment conducted was
unethical and morally wrong because the children were trained to be
aggressive.
ethnomethodology
Harold Garfinkel
•(October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011)
•sociologist, ethnomethodologist,
and a Professor Emeritus at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
•known for establishing and
developing ethnomethodology as a
field of inquiry in sociology. He
published multiple books throughout
his lifetime and is well known for his
book, Studies in Ethnomethodology,
which was published in 1967.
•Coined the term
‘ethnomethodology’ to describe
what fascinated him about the jury
deliberations and social life in
general
• Ethnomethodology is a theoretical approach in sociology based on the belief
that you can discover the normal social order of a society by disrupting it.
Ethnomethodologists often deliberately disrupt social norms to see how
people respond and how they try to restore social order.
• Ethnomethodology is based on the belief that human interaction takes place
within a consensus and interaction is not possible without this consensus.
• The consensus is part of what holds society together and is made up of the
norms for behavior that people carry around with them. It is assumed that
people in a society share the same norms and expectations for behavior and
so by breaking these norms, we can study more about that society and how
they react to broken normal social behavior. 
• Ethnomethodologists argue that you cannot simply ask a person what norms
he or she uses because most people are not able to articulate or describe
them. People are generally not wholly conscious of what norms they use and
so ethnomethodology is designed to uncover these norms and behaviors.
• Ethnomethodology grew out of social phenomenology during the 1960’s,
and has shown more durability in terms of continuing contribution
especially to the sociology of crime an deviance.
• Rather than a theory, it is a general approach used in criminology and
all other areas of sociological study.
• To criminology, the most important element of ethnomethodologists’
work is practical and involves clear interpretations of the positions,
action and thoughts of the actor in the crime. It is a method of
understanding the world through the eyes of the individual actors.
• For ethnomothodology, the experiences of the person involved in the
activity is essential and his shown by how he makes social interactions
with others.
• Ethnomethodology has contributed to several advances in the methods
of criminological inquiry. First, it has questioned the uncritical use of
official statistics on crime and deviance as accurately reflecting crime
itself.
• Secondly, ethnomethodology has urged that conceptions of what is
criminal or deviant be examined in specific historical circumstances.
• Ethnomethodologists are interested in disturbing the normal situations
of interaction to uncover taken-for-granted rules
 The Breaching Experiment

• Breaching experiments involve violating the everyday rules as a

technique for discovering social order through its disruption – introduced
by Garfinkel in the 1960s
• Social reality is violated to shed light on the methods by which people
construct social reality
• The researcher enters a social setting, violates or breaches the rules
that govern it, and studies how the interactants deal with the breach
• Social reality is violated to shed light on the methods by which people
construct social reality