Making the Punishment Fit the Crime or Taliban Justice? Optimal Penalties Without Commitment

No 175, Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract: This paper argues that graduated penalties observed in most legal systems may be an attempt to direct law enforcement e orts towards crimes that are socially more harmful, thereby achieving better deterrence overall. The critical assumptions are-- the state cannot commit to a monitoring strategy, and has mixed motives (objectives other than deterrence). However, graduated penalties arise only in the presence of secondary motives that value punishment in itself, such as retribution or nes collected from violators. Other motives that are unrelated to the size of punishment, such as prevention of criminal attempts, will also lead to distortions, but those cannot be corrected by restructuring penalties. The overall harshness of a criminal justice system and the retributive instincts of its designers may be related in counter intuitive ways, and law enforcement may be improved through strategic delegation.

Keywords: Commitment; crime; deterrence; retribution; graduated penalties. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2009-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cdedse.org/pdf/work175.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Working Paper: Making the Punishment Fit the Crime or Taliban Justice? Optimal Penalties without Commitment (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cde:cdewps:175

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cdedse.org/

The price is free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics Delhi 110 007. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sanjeev Sharma ().