Abstract
This paper purports to consider visceral factors influences on the criminal behavior in the current literature of economics of crime and analyze the optimal and actual criminal law through Becker’s model. First, it tries to investigate the comparative responsiveness of different kinds of crime to the deterrence variables and verify the hypothesis that visceral factors are more influential on the committing of violent crimes through surveying 15 empirical studies. The result of this survey verified that violent crimes are less responsive to the deterrence variables than non-violent crimes. Relatively higher influence of visceral factors on the committing of violent crimes can be considered through lower amounts for crime supply’s punishment and probability of apprehension elasticities in the Becker’s model. Optimality in this framework implies that these crimes should be punished leniently that implicitly indicates that expected punishment doesn’t work as deterrent in this case. From a policy making point of view, because visceral factors play a strong role in committing violent crimes, severe punishment may be ineffective and preventive policies addressing the roots of violent, visceral crimes may represent a superior alternative.
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Notes
Although visceral factors are distinct from tastes in underlying mechanisms and effects on well-being and behavior, there are important interdependencies between them. Tastes are importantly shaped by visceral factors. For example, one’s taste for barbecued chicken may well underlie one’s visceral reaction to the smell of comingled charcoal, grease, and tomato sauce. At the same time, the visceral hunger produced by such smells, and the visceral pleasure produced by subsequent consumption, are likely to reinforce one’s preexisting taste for barbecued chicken (Lowenstein 2004).
For murder just first lag of arrest is significant at the level of 10 %. For assault none of the estimated coefficients for arrest lags are significant.
For robbery, burglary and vehicle theft most of the estimated coefficients for arrest lags are significant at the level of 5 %.
In some studies robbery is considered as violent crime. But here because the primary motive of robbery is pecuniary and they use violence as a tool we assume that visceral factor’s influence on robbery is relatively lower than on its influence on murder and assault.
For example in one of their specification, the estimated coefficients for homicide, robbery and burglary are −0.69, −1.86 and −13.87 respectively. All of them are significant at the level of 1 % (see table 1 in Devin e al. (1988), American Sociology Review).
The estimated coefficients for violent crimes, however, are not significant but all are negative and lower than estimated ones for property crimes components.
For more detailed and formal style of these propositions refer to Loewenstein (2004).
“Actual value” means the value implied by the individual’s behavior; “desired value,” means the value that the individual views as in his or her self-interest (Lowenstein, Loewenstein 2004).
For more detail about Becker’s model refer to Becker (1968).
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Appendix: summarized tables of surveyed empirical studies
Appendix: summarized tables of surveyed empirical studies
This appendix shows estimated results for deterrence variables in the empirical papers that have been surveyed in the Sect. 3. For saving the space we have just reported the estimated coefficients for deterrence variables not for all employed covariates in the mentioned study (see Tables 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).
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Ghasemi, M. Visceral factors, criminal behavior and deterrence: empirical evidence and policy implications. Eur J Law Econ 39, 145–166 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-012-9357-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-012-9357-9