Identifying “deterrable” offenders: Implications for research on deterrence

This article outlines a theoretical framework that distinguishes three forms of responsiveness to legal sanction threats: acute conformist, deterrable, and incorrigible. It then investigates the implications of the framework with data from a perceptual deterrence survey administered to 412 university students. The findings suggest the preeminent empirical regularity in deterrence research—that the deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment far exceeds that of the severity of punishment—may be overstated. An analysis confined to deterrable offenders suggests that the severity effect (relative to the certainty effect) may exceed that reported in extant research.