Studies on incarceration as crime deterrence, rather than simply punishment, show that the effect isn't cut and dried:
"The economists take advantage of an Italian policy reform in 2006, where more than a third of the Italian prison population was released. Their get-out-of-jail-free card came with one caveat: if they were caught breaking the law again, their unserved sentence would be automatically added to the new one. This was a boon for the economists, as it meant that otherwise very similar people faced gentler or harsher sentences for future crimes, depending on how much time they had left on their existing sentence (i.e. when they had committed their original crime). The economists combined this with information on reoffending rates, to see if people with harsher sentences were less likely to reoffend.
They found that the convicts did seem to respond to the harsher sentences. They estimated that previously convicted criminals discount the future at a rate of 0.74: in other words, they care about events in one year’s time around three quarters as much as events today. This compares to discount rates of around 0.95 more common in the population at large. The economists compare different groups; the highly educated are most sensitive to heftier sentences, while immigrants and drug-offenders are least sensitive. "
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/criminal-justice
"1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment."
https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
Given the abysmal crime clearance rates below, how do we better our enforcement of laws to have effective crime deterrence?
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