The Deterrence of arrest
The police are known to be intimidating, influential, and authoritative. The reaction of civilians to the police intervening with them, or their direct orders can vary with individuals. A study was done in 1981 in Minneapolis, to find out if the act of arresting or the threat to arrest all domestic violence offenders or possible offenders deters further crime. Four different cities were used in this experiment, Milwaukee, Omaha, Dade County in Florida, and Colorado Springs. Three different strategies were used by the police: arresting the suspect, ordering the suspect from the premises for 24 hours, and trying to restore order (Berk, 1992). Lawrence W. Sherman and Douglas A. Smith have written an article in the American Sociological Review which states that despite deterrence theories, arrest had no overall crime reduction effect in repeat domestic violence offenders. Neither race nor record of prior arrests proves any effect of restrain for further domestic violence (Sherman 1992). Subsequently, Richard Berk, Alec Campbell, Ruth Klap, and Bruce Western, all from the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote an article that promotes that arresting an offender does have diversified effects. Depending on their racial backgr
Sherman and Smith form General Deterrence Hypotheses about the interaction between legal and informal threats of punishment. The first is a conditional hypotheses, the second a replacement hypothesis, and finally the additive hypothesis. The conditional hypothesis claims that legal threats only deter potential offenders and are sufficiently tied to conventional society to suffer from its trauma of arrest. The replacement hypothesis assumes that the threat of legal control is effective only when informal control is absent. The additive hypothesis, which is derived from Wrong (1961) and by Grasmick and McLaughlin (1978), claims that both informal and legal controls deter potential offenders. They also determined that on average, individuals with strong bonds to spouses and to employment have a greater stake in conformity than unmarried and unemployed individuals. The suspects that were sampled varied by race and in "stakes in conformity." Almost all (91 percent) of the suspects were male and blacks comprised 79 percent of the suspects. Over one-half (56 percent) of the suspects were unemployed at the time they entered the experiment. The employed suspects were generally blue-collar service jobs. The majority of the couples (70 percent) had never married each other, but 68 percent reported living together for two years or more. About one-third of the suspects had a record of a prior incident of domestic violence (Smith 683). Sherman, L.W. Crime, punishment and stake in conformity: Legal and extralegal control of domestic violence. American Sociological Review, 1984. pp. 78-80. Before writing this paper, I believed that if someone threatened to arrest another person, the person would normally not consider the illegal act again. However, afterwards I learned that people don't care about what will happen to them at the time because they commit these crimes out of sudden hate and anger. I discovered that if people could better understand one another they would not be so hostile to the ones they loved. They would understand their point of view instead of scrutinizing it and turning violent. Unfortunately, the world is losing much of its conformity everyday because of new technology. This is forcing people to become more independent and not rely and interact with other people so much, which will, in turn, destroy the closeness and dependence of others in society which help us to stay a safe and caring community. In the two articles stated above, the basic argument is whether the police have such
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Approximate Word count = 1705
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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