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Crime and Punishment: On the Optimality of Imprisonment although Fines are Feasible.
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posted on 2009-04-20, 15:45 authored by Ingolf DittmannA general result of the literature on crime and punishment is that imprisonment is not
optimal if fines can be used instead. This paper presents a positive model which predicts
the opposite for serious crimes, namely that imprisonment will be used, even if
offenders could pay a correspondingly high fine. Hence, this model can explain
mandatory prison sentencing, which is often found in practice for serious crimes.
In contrast to the standard normative model in which a social planner chooses the
detection probability and the type of punishment, this model separates these two
decisions. In the first stage of the model, the individuals determine the type of
punishment in a referendum. Given this decision, the government chooses the detection
probability in the second stage. The main result is that individuals vote unanimously for
imprisonment if the harm caused by the considered crime – and therefore the size of the
penalty – is large.
History
Publisher
Dept. of Economics, University of Leicester.Available date
2009-04-20Publisher version
http://www.le.ac.uk/economics/research/discussion/papers2000.htmlBook series
Papers in Public Sector Economics;00/1Language
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