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Common sense can explain the deterrence doctrine: most individuals prefer to avoid prison and thus are discouraged from engaging in criminal behavior, especially that behavior likely to be detected and punished.Even citizens alarmed by the amount of crime committed in the United States must acknowledge that the threat of punishment deters most individuals, most of the time.The practical problem facing contemporary deterrence researchers, law makers and other social policy makers is to develop the correct "formula" for using the threat of punishment to deter those individuals who are relatively resistant to legal threats, i.e., those individuals who commit common or predatory crime.One commentator has aptly phrased this problem by stating: "The crucial question is not simply whether negative sanctions deter, but rather under what conditions are negative sanctions likely to be effective."'Commentators, with some exceptions, 2 criticize the deterrence research literature as being largely "atheoretical and divorced from a body of ideas that predicts the conditions under which legal
Miller et al. (Wed,) studied this question.