ABSTRACT
The chapter considers what constitutes relevant evidence of the deterrent effects of imprisonment and the quality of the evidence in existing research. A good place to begin is examination of crime trends. In the US from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, there were increases in both property and violent crime rates. The drop occurred at the time when mass incarceration in the US was causing the imprisonment rate to double, raising the question whether increased imprisonment was responsible. Despite its eighteenth-century foundations, discussions of deterrence were largely argumentative and ideological until the late 1960s when Gibbs and Tittle first tested two key deterrence predictions. Gibbs examined the relationship among US states between the objective certainty and severity of imprisonment and the homicide rate. Gibbs observed that social condemnation of homicide could produce a lower homicide rate, and it also could produce greater objective certainty and severity of imprisonment for homicide.
