A Legislative Study of the Effectiveness of Criminal Penalties

Abstract

In 1966, the California Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure began an evaluation of the effectiveness of criminal penalties and an examination of possible alternatives to these penalties. It discovered that increasing the severity of sentences does not deter crime. For a deterrent to be effective, the potential offender must be aware of its existence. But research revealed that the general population had the least amount of knowledge about criminal penalties, while those who had engaged in crime had the greatest knowledge of penalties. Research further indi cated that certainty of arrest and imprisonment was more of a deterrent than lengthy incarceration. The last phase of the study is a search for alternatives to make the commission of crime more difficult.