Kouralia wrote:Severity of punishment does not deter offending. Principally the likelihood of being caught and being afforded that punishment deters that offending - in a rational offender.
That doesn't actually make any sense - an offender can weigh the odds of being caught and of being punished but they can't assign any weight to punishment at all? If we took this completely seriously, you would be saying that holding the possibility of being caught and sentenced equal, it would have exactly the same effect if the sentence was one spank on their bottom by their mother with an open hand or being thrown into a vat of acid along with their entire family to two generations and two degrees.
It would seem to me (and most people I think) the risk calculation must go something like: (Lc*Lp)*Sp, where Lc and Lp are some value between 0 and 1 and Sp is an arbitrary value according to the perceived severity of punishment. If Lc and Lp are very low then yes it would follow that the value of Sp would not be hugely important, [and really the calculation is probably non-linear with sufficiently low values vanishing to beneath consideration and sufficiently high values exploding to infinity aka certainty] but it doesn't rule out that Sp would matter at all.
Though this isn't impossible it implies a very odd way of assessing risks and rewards and much more likely I think anyone who argues for that construction is making implicit assumptions about the way offenders assess the consequences of being caught, sentenced and punished (like the stigma of being a convict, if we assume that is significant the weight of the punishment will be much less dependent on the nominal severity of the sentence) which are not justified for a general understanding as opposed to a particular one.
