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The Deterrent Effect of Arrest and Conviction on Crime Rates in Indian States and Territories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

William C. Bailey
William C. Bailey*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, The Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio - U.S.A
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Extract

The research reported here consists of a multivariate analysis of the deterrent effect of arrest and conviction on crime rates for Indian states and federal territories for the period 1967 to 1973. The deterrent effect of arrest and conviction are examined separately for six serious offenses with sociodemographic factors introduced into the analysis as control variables.

The last decade has witnessed a number of empirical investigations of the deterrent effect of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment on major felony rates for states, counties, and cities in the United States. As hypothesized, and consistent with the deterrence doctrine, these investigations have rather typically revealed a substantial inverse relationship between the certainty of punishment and offense rates. Contrary to the deterrence hypothesis, however, only a slight negative, and in some cases a positive, relationship has been found between the severity of legal sanctions and offense rates; These findings have brought many American Criminologists to conclude that no longer can the threat and application of legal sanctions be dismissed as an important determinant of crime (Tittle and Rowe, 1974 ; Tittle and Logan, 1973 ; Sjoquist, 1973 ; Orsagh, 1973 ; Phillips and Votey, 1972 ; Ehrlich, 1972). What remains unclear from this line of recent research, however, is the extent to which the results of these studies can be generalized outside of the United States, for to our knowledge, no comparable research has been conducted in other countries. Accordingly, we can only speculate at this point whether similar results would occur if the deterrent effect of arrest, conviction and imprisonment were examined in other than American states and cities.

Information

Type
III. — Comparative Analysis of the Criminal Justice Systems
Information
International Annals of Criminology , Volume 17 , Issue 1-2 , 1978 , pp. 21 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 International Society for Criminology

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