CNET reports new sentencing guidelines for some types of piracy.

This week's sentencing adjustments arose from a law that President Bush signed in April called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. It gave the commission 180 days to revisit its rules to make them "sufficiently stringent to deter, and adequately reflect the nature of, intellectual property rights crimes."

Do stiffer sentences in fact deter? Many studies of everything from shoplifting to drug offenses to tax fraud suggests that sentences have little or no effect on deterrence without a sufficiently high likelihood of being caught. And a high likelihood of being caught may deter even with a light sentence.

It seems odd to me that so many people who ought to be aware of these studies--judges, legislators, and so on--continue to speak as if stronger sentences are an effective deterrent in themselves.

Some studies:

Daniel S. Nagin & Raymond Paternoster, The Preventive Effects of the Perceived Risk of Arrest, 29 Criminology 561, 580 (a real fear of arrest is likely to deter individuals from committing crimes); Raymond Paternoster, Decisions to Participate in and Desist from Four Types of Common Delinquency, 23 L. & Soc'y Rev. 7, 9 (1989) (finding that the active decision maker makes ongoing assessment of sanction threats); Raymond Paternoster & Leeann Iovanni, The Deterrent Effect of Perceived Severity, 64 Soc. Forces 751, 753 (1986) (severity of a sanction could well amplify the deterrent effect); Raymond Paternoster et al., Perceived Risk and Social Control, 17 L. & Soc'y Rev. 457 (1983) (discussing deterrent effect of risk of punishment and the severity of that punishment); Steven Klepper & Daniel Nagin, Tax Compliance and Perceptions of the Risks of Detection and Criminal Prosecution, 23 LAW & SOC. REV. 209, 238-239 (1989)(no meaningful correlation between the perceived severity of formal sanctions and deterrence)...

And there are many more...

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:26 AM | General

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