The New Current in the Study of General Deterrence (<Symposium>Contemporary Society and Sociology of Crime : in Search of New Perspective)

Abstract

This paper deals with the study on general deterrence in these two decades with particular focus on economic approaches and on policy-experiments. In the United States, federal agencies and federal funds were established in the late sixties and the early seventies to support the study of crime and criminal justice. Many economists were mobilzed and organized by the Federal Government to fix the optimal crime control policy. Accordingly, many economic studies and policy-experiments on general deterrence have been conducted since the late sixties in the United States. Both these two kinds of studies are policy-oriented because economic studies imply the idea of the optimal allocation of the resources of the criminal justice system, and in policy-experiments, some social control variables (eg. police activities) are operated by state or local agencies. In addition, the author points out the development of the idea that economics has come to deal not only with economic behavior in the strict sense but also whatever behavior is regarded as a choice under uncertainty. This idea which is called "economic imperialism" and the mobilization of economists by the Federal Government as mentioned above have made many economists engage in econometric studies on general deterrence. On the contrary, either policy-experiments or econometric studies on general deterrence have scarcely been done in Japan. First, the deterrence of crime has not been a political issue and therefore the government has not supported the study of deterrence. Second, economists are neither interested in economics of crime, nor in law and economics. Third, in the field of criminal law, law professors are absorbed in doctorinare studies and pay little attention to the scientific and empirical study of deterrence. In the field of civil law, however, the idea of law and economics has been gradually accepted in the past decade. Therefore the idea of law and economics will possibly exert an influence on the field of criminal law and the idea of economics of crime will emerge within several years.