Abstract legal codification deters crime by engineering a mental link between offense and punishment
Evidence
By defining offenses, fixing scales of punishments, identifying who in the bureaucratic-legal hierarchy is to execute the punishment, the legal code also functions as one of the ever-potent tools of power. By creating a mental association of crime and punishment, the legal code instills in the minds of people the feeling of the inevitability of punishment and its link to the crime being performed. Laws, civilian or military, owing to their abstract codification of crimes and their corresponding punishments, and to their association of the possible benefits of crime with the greater disadvantages of punishment, function as an effective deterrent to crime, and thus as a powerful means to impose discipline. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 691
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The cost-benefit reasoning in the legal deterrent echoes Benthamite penology and the rational-choice framework familiar from the law-merchant and social-capital chapters.
Related
- Military legal codes linked each crime to a fixed exact punishment (similarity 0.81)
- Criminal justice marks, prevents, and punishes wrong conduct in sequence (similarity 0.80)
- Military law codified precise crimes and punishments unlike vague civilian law. (similarity 0.79)
- Punishment deters when its expected cost merely exceeds crime’s benefit (similarity 0.79)
- Punishment must make the crime-punishment code immediate in act and reality (similarity 0.79)
- Certainty, not severity, makes punishment deter because it fixes crime-punishment links in minds (similarity 0.78)