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Every society seems afflicted by "rising crime."Most societies respond with one of two deterrents: Draconian justice for the worst offenders, or comprehensive punishment proportional to the crime.Traditionally, Britain deterred crime by punishing severely those few scoundrels whose examples would be most sanguine.In Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800, J.M. Beattie 1 argues that an apparent failure of this harsh system of justice led England to remodel its penal philosophy, adopting instead a milder, proportional approach, and eventually replacing selective execution with massive imprisonment.Beattie's basic data are the prosecutions recorded in the assize files 1.
Shaw et al. (Wed,) studied this question.