March, 2009

Retribution’s Legitimacy

by James Q. Wilson
The Conversation
March 30th, 2009

Bruce Western somehow manage to transpose my factual statements into political slogans with which he disagrees. I said prison deters. It does: see the research work of Daniel Nagin, Steven Levitt, and many others. He denies this (for reasons he does not explain) but then adds that the certainty of punishment deters crime. But the [...]

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Deterrence and Values

by Bruce Western
The Conversation
March 27th, 2009

Two points for Lott. First, he writes that “locking up people in prison might be a very important way of deterring those who have nothing else to lose.” How much deterrence does he see among the young African American dropouts, 60 percent of whom are going to prison, and many more are spending time in [...]

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