Justifying punishment: Deterrence
Bentham thought that the reason why punishment, though evil in itself, was justified was fairly clear.
General prevention ought to be the chief aim of punishment and is its real justification.
If we could consider an offense which has been committed as an isolated fact, the like of which would never recur, punishment would be useless. It would only be adding one evil to another. But when we consider that an unpunished crime leaves the path of crime open, not only to the same delinquent but also to all those who may have the same motives for entering upon it, we perceive that the punishment inflicted on the individual becomes a source of security to all.The position that Bentham puts here is called the “deterrence theory of punishment.” It says that punishment is justified to the extent that it succeeds in discouraging or deterring crime.
Bentham was a utilitarian. It follows that he thought that the punishment should be of the minimum severity necessary to avoid the harm done by crime. If the severity of the punishment produced more disutility in the offender than the disutility of the offenses it was meant to deter, then it could not be justified. Making lifetime imprisonment with hard labor the punishment for all crimes would, no doubt, reduce the disutility caused by criminals very substantially: but, according to Bentham, it would have too high a cost.
First of all (and granting, for the sake of argument, that it is possible to compare the utilities of different people), the total disutility caused by people stealing small sums of money is nothing like as great as the disutility that would be caused by punishing many people so severely.
Second, any criminal justice system will make some mistakes. We saw in Chapter 2 that there were good reasons for accepting falli- bilism—the view that any of our beliefs about the world might be incorrect.
If that is so, then however careful we are in our criminal trials, sometimes we will punish innocent people. The disutility caused to these innocent people must be taken into account along with the disutility suffered by criminals.There is something very appealing, I think, in the idea that punishment is justified by its deterrent effect. However much we may disapprove of criminals or dislike them, and however strong the desire we sometimes feel for revenge, it would surely be a good thing if the harm done to convicted offenders—and especially to innocent people wrongly convicted—was justified by its contributing to the common good. Certainly, many people would think that if it could be shown that the threat of punishment made no differ- ence—that people would commit no more crimes even if there were no more punishments—there was something wrong with a system that inflicted so much harm to no positive effect.
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