"Deterrence" solely operates on future actors. "Retribution" on those who have already transgressed. We know that the vast vast vast majority of crimes are not committed with a cost-benefit analysis. So no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes. No man willing to kill his cheating wife thinks "Well, I could 15, 17 tops, sure, but 25 is too much. Okay, I need a new plan".
Do you have any references to support that “no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes”?
I would expect that more strict sentencing has diminishing returns. The difference between no crime, versus a crime and a fine, versus a crime and jail or prison time, are steep escalations, but the difference between 15 and 25 years in prison seems much smaller. I agree you probably won’t prevent many murders by raising the minimum sentence on murder, but other less severe crimes/sentences don’t present the same obvious conclusion to me.
For deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them, the same reason that they can't be deterred by other things they don't know like the lyrics to the Shriekback song "Going Equipped" †
† Going Equipped is reference to an English crime, I don't know if Americans have it, in which it's illegal to have with you things whose purpose is to help you commit burglary or various similar offences. Prosecutors need to show that you had things which were obviously useful for these crimes (e.g. bolt cutters, a ladder), and show intent and that you weren't at home..
> deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them
This is not true. I may not know the specific punishments for some crimes. But I know they’re tough, and that has deterrence value.
The deterrence element of punishment is often overstated. Punishment is a really poor behavioral modifier. For punishment to reliably modify behavior, it has to be immediate and consistent. The criminal justice system is neither. It is not only behavioral scientists that are aware of the flaws, criminologists also look at the data, and there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code.
What criminologists have found however is that racial minorities are often given the harsher punishment when available (the reason WA deemed the death penalty unconstitutional back in 2018; and they had the data to back it up). So the deterrence value seems to be primarily used to discriminate against minorities, not to reduce crime rate.
> there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code
This is literally why I flagged the link between retribution and deterrence [1]. Retribution is the moral layer that communicates deterrence.
There's a wide spectrum of behaviors in relation to future penalties. Some people are so far gone that they don't care about death. This includes people who livestream their murder sprees or are willing to commit suicide bombings, for example. There's no prospect of deterring them. At best you can permanently isolate surviving perpetrators from the rest of society. Until we invent slap-drones [1] I wouldn't trust them to roam free again.
Other people won't violate minor rules even when there's nobody watching. Some people will come to a full stop at every stop sign, even when there's perfect visibility and no cross traffic, even when there's no cameras or police cars around.
In between these two extremes you do have people who are deterred by enforcement. My sister didn't come to a full stop at a certain intersection on the way to work until she was ticketed for it. She stopped completely every time afterward. For this in-between set of people who respond to deterrence, likelihood of facing a penalty is more important than the severity of a penalty [2].
The problem I have seen repeatedly is that catching more violators is more expensive/difficult than increasing the severity of punishment, so lawmakers are tempted to increase penalties to "make up" for rare enforcement. Fining $1 for littering and catching half of litterers seems mathematically equivalent to fining $5000 for littering and catching 1 in 10000 litterers. It's also a lot cheaper to catch only a handful of people. But the rare-enforcement, high-penalty approach has a much weaker deterrent effect because most people are not mathematically rational agents and fail to consider long tail events. The deterrent effect of extreme penalties is even weaker for murder. Most people are not interested in murdering anyone even in circumstances where they would get away with it. The remaining subset of people with a non-negligible propensity to murder is enriched in people who behave erratically and cannot be deterred by rational means.
This is very much not the case.
"Deterrence" solely operates on future actors. "Retribution" on those who have already transgressed. We know that the vast vast vast majority of crimes are not committed with a cost-benefit analysis. So no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes. No man willing to kill his cheating wife thinks "Well, I could 15, 17 tops, sure, but 25 is too much. Okay, I need a new plan".