Certainty of apprehension deters drug crime but severity of punishment does not

Evidence

Most of the studies on the effects of drug sanctions on crime focus on their general or aggregate effects. Typically, these studies measure the extent to which drug crime is responsive to changes in drug law enforcement and/or incarceration for drug offenses. Such studies find that law enforcement activities that increase the certainty of apprehension have genuine suppressive effects on drug offending, although the effects often are only temporary; in contrast, law enforcement activities that increase the severity of drug sanctions have little or no effect on drug offending (Braga & Weisburd, 2012; Nagin, Cullen, & Jonson, 2009; Western, 2006). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1075

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to deterrence literature in criminal justice (Beccaria’s certainty-vs-severity insight) and to the pragmatism theme of the reader’s research on sanction effects. — connects to: Punishment severity does not affect crime rates; Drug enforcement can be engineered through price rather than prohibition — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1351; Raising penalty severity theoretically deters crime but complex systems prevent it — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1135
• QUESTION: If severity has little deterrent effect but certainty does, does this asymmetry also hold for non-drug crimes and across racial groups?
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1075