Does An Arrest Deter Crime Essay Research

Does An Arrest Deter Crime. Essay, Research Paper

The police are known sometimes to be intimidating, influential, and authoritative. The reaction of civilians to the police intervening with them, or their direct orders can vary with individuals. A study was done in 1981 in Minneapolis, to find out if the act of arresting or the threat to arrest all domestic violence offenders or possible offenders, deters further crime. Four different cities were used in this experiment, Milwaukee, Omaha, Dade County in Florida, and Colorado Springs. Three different strategies were used by the police: arresting the suspect, ordering the suspect from the premises for 24 hours, and trying to restore order (Berk, 1992). Lawrence W. Sherman and Douglas A. Smith have written an article in the American Sociological Review which states that despite deterrence theories, arrest had no overall crime reduction effect in repeat domestic violence offenders. Race nor record of prior arrests prove any effect of restrain for further domestic violence (Sherman 1992). Subsequently, Richard Berk, Alec Campbell, Ruth Klap, and Bruce Western, all from the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote an article that promotes that arresting an offender does have diversified effects. Depending on their racial background, employment, and previous arrest records, increased crime did occur. Both articles were written about

the same study.

Sherman and Smith’s article depict different case studies on arrests in a period of time. Sherman, from a previous article (1984, p.78), explains that people who are more “socially bonded people are more deterrable”. Which suggests that people who are unemployed, not married, or not happily married may be more unlikely to be deterred by an arrest. This is so due to possibly a socially bonded person might show stronger effects of wanting to stay outside of a jail while a person who isn’t as socially bonded might show

less of restraint to be incarcerated (Smith 1992, p.681).

Sherman and Smith form General Deterrence Hypotheses about the interaction between legal and informal threats of punishment. The first is conditional hypotheses then the replacement hypothesis, and finally the additive hypothesis. The conditional hypothesis claims that legal threats only deter potential offends are sufficiently tied to conventional society to suffer from its trauma of arrest. The replacement hypothesis assumes that the threat of legal control is effective only when informal control is absent.

The additive hypothesis which is derived from Wrong (1961) and by Grasmick and McLaughlin (1978), claims that both informal and legal controls deter potential offenders. The more of either type of control, the greater the deterrence (Smith, 1992, pp. 681-682). They also determined that on average, individuals with strong bonds to spouses and to employment have a greater stake in conformity than unmarried

and unemployed individuals (Smith 1992, p. 683).

The suspects that were sampled varied by race and in “stakes in conformity.” Almost all (91 percent) of the suspects were male. Blacks comprised 79 percent of the suspects. Over one-half (56 percent) of the suspects were unemployed at the time they entered the experiment. The employed suspects were generally blue-collar service jobs. The majority of the couples (70 percent) had never married each other, but 68 percent reported living together for two years or more. About one-third of the suspects had a record of a prior incident of domestic violence (Smith 1992, p. 683).

The findings of the study varied on different variables. 36.3 Percent of the offenders were involved in at least one subsequent incident of violence in the period following the experimental case. Out of 411 repeat offenders, 45 percent had more than two incidents during any of the variable follow-up periods (6 to 18 months). The rate for all the suspects for annual rate of subsequent violent incidents was .612 incidents per suspect per year, which is roughly a 1 out of 2 suspects per year for additional

violence. Repeated violence is significantly higher for unmarried, black, and unemployed men. Subsequent battering as also more likely if the suspect had engaged in domestic violence during the previous year. Also, among married victims, only 11 percent of the known incidents were not

reported to the interviewers compared to 29 percent for unmarried victims. A similar pattern holds for employment status, which is 28 percent withheld among victim of the unemployed compared to 21 percent among the employed. In addition, 28 percent of victims who were black withheld compared to 14 percent among whites. However, results indicate that whether the subject was arrested or simply warned had no significant association with the occurrence or number of subsequent violent incidents (Smith 1992, pp. 683-685).

To summarize, the question of arrest influences subsequent violence is generally depending on the arrested person’s stake in conformity. Arrested persons who lacked a stake in conformity were significantly more likely to have a repeat offense than their counterparts who were not arrested.

Conversely, those who were married and employed, arrest deterred subsequent violence (Smith 1992 p. 685) In contrast to the article stated above, Berk, Campbell, Klap, and Western researched and examined the sam