I think DD's statement :
"Punishment will always be the best deterrence for the majority, there will be a much smaller group that don't respond. That is why the majority of us don't go around robbing banks to make ourselves richer, but some do."
- reveals more about DD's thinking than he realises. It is simply another way of saying that most of us would commit whatever crime of our fancy if we could get away with it. One might conclude that he is assuming most people follow his thinking. I doubt he is right.
We could have a mature discussion on the subject in hand - or we could have a personal slanging match on misperceived concepts about each other. Please do not continue to choose the latter!
The statistics you refer to are for criminals which are mostly the "smaller group that don't respond" that I referred to. They are not meaningful with the majority of the population who are not criminals.
There may be the odd saint that has
never been put off by the threat of getting caught and being punished but I don't think the majority of people fit into that category.
I also did not say that the threat of punishment was the
only reason that the majority do not commit crime.
The CSEW report uses reported crime and discovered crime, it does not include crime out of those categories. It does not cover all incidents reported to the police nor the majority of incidents that are not reported to the police whose numbers are escalating at an alarming rate.
From the statistics:- The crimes that are mostly likely to be recorded as reported have not dropped by 50%, the crimes least likely to be recorded as reported are dropping rapidly. There seems to be a correlation?
I cannot remember the last time I reported a crime where the police have not put me under considerable pressure to withdraw my statement. They are playing to the statistics, this is not entirely their fault because statistics have been forced upon them as a priority and so their focus is not where it should be.
If the "new" approach to punishment was working, you would especially expect to see a corresponding drop in re-offending statistics, unfortunately that is not the case, re-offending statistics only have a very small fluctuation and no significant trend in decreasing.
