RT Article
T1 Experience or deterrence?: revisiting an old but neglected issue
JF European journal of criminology
VO 14
IS 4
SP 485
OP 502
A1 Hirtenlehner, Helmut 1970-
A2 Wikström, Per-Olof H. 1955-
LA English
YR 2017
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1578506417
AB Deterrence theory states that fear of sanctions secures compliance with the law. Empirical research on the deterrent effect of legal sanctions has remained inconclusive though. This applies especially to perceptual deterrence studies. Most of them are cross-sectional in nature and rely on measures of self-reported previous offending, which implies that they actually explain past criminal behaviour from current perceptions of risk. However, such a temporal ordering of the concepts is more congruent with experiential effects according to which previous criminal involvement lowers subsequent risk perceptions rather than depicting deterrent relationships. The few longitudinal studies that have attempted to disentangle experiential and deterrent effects are based on samples from North America. Their common finding is that experiential effects exist and that they are substantially larger than the deterrent effect. Most of them reject the notion of deterrence. This work contributes to the discussion by for the first time addressing the experience–deterrence issue with panel data collected in the UK. Results show that associations between current risk estimates and prior offending found in cross-sectional studies reflect chiefly experiential effects. Evidence in support of deterrence remains very limited.
K1 Causes of crime
K1 Deterrence
K1 Experiential effect
K1 Juvenile delinquency
DO 10.1177/1477370816671750