Crime, Sanctions and Scientific Explanation

Abstract

There is no dearth of theoretical and empirical literature dealing with the relation between crime and sanctions. In the last decade, interest in the subject seems to have quickened, no doubt prompted to some extent by a well advertised and substantial rise in rates of reported crime. Recent legalistic developments,' because of their presumed influence on crime rates, have also heightened our interest in the subject. Public pressure to do something about crime and the political responses to that pressure have provided additional stimuli. Yet despite a good deal of scholarly attention and society's compelling need to know what relation, if any, exists between crime and sanctions, we cannot honestly say that we know much about the subject. To quantify the relation between the two variables we need data, and it is undoubtedly true that the quality of the data available for empirical investigation is unusually poor.2 Criminal statistics impose constraints on the questions that can be asked, handicap the research effort and interject an annoying degree of imprecision in the statistical results. Yet, these deficiencies are troublesome nuisances, not roadblocks, in the path of scientific inquiry. The data are not so bad that the truth cannot be wrung out of them.3 Our poor scholarly performance has another explanation. There is good reason to suspect that our problem in understanding the crime-sanctions relation lies in the nature of the relation itself. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that past empirical analysis of the Crime-Sanctions (C-S) relation has been incorrect.

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