Crime and punishment in the Army.

Abstract

The relationship between crime and punishment is examined and a dilemma in this relationship is identified. Labeling theory suggests that leaders responsible for enforcing the law respond to the crime they see by increasing punishment, under the assumption that punishment will deter crime, whereas recipients often respond to this punishment with a feeling of injustice, which then incites them to break the law more frequently, resulting in more serious problems on a delayed basis. The operation of this sort of dilemma in a U.S. Army population was tested with cross-lagged panel correlation, using companies (groups of about 200 soldiers) as the unit of analysis. In SO companies, company leaders punished their subordinates, particularly blacks, as a response to the lawlessness they attributed to these subordinates, while subordinates responded to this punishment in the ensuing months with a sense of injustice and increased lawlessness. Observations are offered about the usefulness of the methodology, and about the implications of the dilemma that has been identified, for law-abidingness.

Increasing intrinsic interest with superfluous extrinsic constraints.

“…Of these subjects, 32% who participated in the scared-straight program subsequently committed their first offense, compared to only 5% of the controls, z = 1.79, p = .07. 3 Sim-ilarly, Hart (1978) reported that in the Army, the nonjudicious application of punishment served to increase rather than decrease offense rates.…”

Treatment in corrections: Martinson was wrongp.

“…Gibbs, 1978) as evidenced by deterrence proponents is frankly a sad state of affairs for such a development can only lead to an abandonment of further research. This cynical scenario, hopefully, may not come to pass as there are some fruitful avenues for deterrence research (e.g., Erickson & Gibbs, 1979;Hart, 1978) that require further exploration. Nevertheless, quick and easy deterrent solutions are far from evident at the present time.…”