Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory

The deterrence doctrine can be traced to Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, who argued more than 200 years ago that people will refrain from committing crime if they are threatened with certain, severe, and swift legal punishment for it. This argument has strongly influenced the criminal justice policies of Western nations, including the United States and Canada. Despite its long history in criminological thought, empirical tests of deterrence theory were scant before the late 1900s. The impetus for testing came mainly from Jack P. Gibbs's 1968 article on the deterrent effects of the certainty and severity of imprisonment for homicide, and from his 1975 book on deterrence that set the agenda that guided a generation of deterrence researchers. Gibbs's goal was the construction of a systematic deterrence theory that could be used to generate effective penal policies.

Effects of Legal Punishment

Studies of the death penalty in the mid-1900s generated doubts among many criminologists about the deterrent effects of legal punishment overall. For example, George Vold found that U.S. states without the death penalty had relatively low homicide rates. Gibbs identified several problems with such studies as Vold's. First, questions about the “general efficacy of [legal] punishment [could not] be answered by [studies of] the death penalty alone”; in fact, other types of legal punishment could be stronger deterrents (Gibbs, 1968, p. 515). Second, Vold ignored the certainty of execution for homicide. Whether persons in a particular state can be executed for homicide—whether there is a statutory provision for the death penalty—is a different issue than whether they actually are executed. Gibbs observed that the deterrence doctrine makes no predictions about the effects of statutory provision for a type of legal punishment. No punishment can deter if it is never used; hence, defensible tests of deterrence theory need to include actual legal punishments.

In his 1968 test of deterrence theory, Gibbs looked at the relation among U.S. states between the actual certainty and severity of imprisonment for homicide and the homicide rate. Certainty was estimated for each state by dividing the number of persons admitted to prison for homicide during 1960 by the 1959–1960 average annual number of homicides. Severity was expressed as the median number of months served on a homicide sentence by persons in prison in 1960. Consistent with the deterrence doctrine, there was a significantly lower homicide rate in states with a high certainty of imprisonment for homicide. However, there was a weaker association between the severity of imprisonment and the homicide rate. Gibbs's 1968 study inspired a flurry of additional tests of deterrence theory by researchers who conducted further analyses of the same data or examined crimes other than homicide (e.g., Gray & Martin, 1969; Tittle, 1969).

Perceived Deterrence

In addition to actual legal punishments, Gibbs believed that tests of deterrence theory should include measures of (1) perceived punishments, (2) other causes of crime, and (3) distinctions among types of deterrence. Much of Gibbs's research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, conducted with colleagues and graduate students at the University of Arizona, included these additional variables and distinctions.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution