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- Title
The Deterrent Effect of Perceived Severity: A Reexamination.
- Authors
Paternoster, Raymond; Iovanni, Leeann
- Abstract
Abstract In a recent study, Grasmick and Bryjak argue that the failure of previous perceptual deterrence researchers to find an inverse relationship between perceived severity of punishment and criminal involvement is due to the fact that they used an invalid measure of perceived severity and tested an additive rather than an interactive model of the deterrence process. Using cross-sectional data, Grasmick and Bryjak found a moderate inverse relationship between their "refined" measure of perceived severity and self-reported past criminal conduct for those who also perceived the certainty of punishment to be high. This paper attempts to replicate and extend Grasmick and Bryjak's research using panel data. With a correct temporal ordering of variables and an identical severity measure, however, we find that perceived severity has no deterrent effect on later deviant behavior. Our data reveal that the "refined" measure of Grasmick and Bryjak confounds the threat of legal sanctions with the fear of informal penalties, and that the greatest effects on delinquent involvement are from those informal sources of social control.
- Subjects
PUNISHMENT; CRIME; DEVIANT behavior
- Publication
Social Forces, 1986, Vol 64, Issue 3, p751
- ISSN
0037-7732
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2578823