A New York judge sentenced a woman who pleaded guilty to fatally shoving an 87-year-old Broadway singing coach onto a Manhattan sidewalk to six months more in prison than the eight years that had been previously reached in a plea deal.
A New York judge sentenced a woman who pleaded guilty to fatally shoving an 87-year-old Broadway singing coach onto a Manhattan sidewalk to six months more in prison than the eight years that had been previously reached in a plea deal.
Harsher sentences do not effectively work as deterrence from the data we currently have. The US has the highest incarceration rate, by a large margin, so all else being equal we should have the lowest crime rate, right? This isn’t true, so we can pretty reasonably say our method is not working and is placing a larger burden on society than it needs to (though it’s making some people very wealthy).
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/criminal-deterrence-and-sentence-severity-analysis-recent-research
In what myopic world do you live in where “all else is equal”?
Also, you’re confusing “harsher sentences” with “incarceration rate.” They are not the same.
Obviously all else isn’t equal. However, given a large enough data set (the entire world) it’s clear it isn’t working because we’re literally the worst. Thats why I said all else being equal, because variations should average out across the sample and we should be able to compare performance.
They aren’t the same, but they’re closely related. If we double all sentences then, over time, the incarceration rate would double, all else being equal. If each prisoner is spending more time in prison, more people will be in prison at any given time.