NCJ Number
131198
Date Published
1990
Length
25 pages
Annotation
In 1978, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Science issued a report which maintained that methodological problems in deterrence research prevented the use of existing research results as grounds for policy change. The NRC voiced several objections to macro research which found that arrest and imprisonment rates had deterrent impacts.
Abstract
The first objection was based on the risk of spurious correlation caused by the ratio variable of sanction variable to crime. The research also seemed to confound deterrence and incapacitation effects. Finally, numerous causal direction problems explained why more arrests, police presence, or imprisonment may or may not be affected by the crime rate. Recent research efforts in the area of deterrence are outlined and categorized according to basic research design (cross section versus time series analyses). The major issue faced by researchers is the ability to deal with simultaneity or likely reciprocal causation problems. Some of the procedures used to deal with simultaneity include lagged independent variables, attempts to explain away simultaneity, and simultaneous equations. The author recommends that criminology journals reject papers that do not explain how they deal with methodological problems and accept for publication short comments that criticize past articles for failing to include such explanations. 1 figure and 26 references