What punishment and deterrents are for

1. Recidivism is reoffending, meaning committing another crime after being punished for an earlier one.
2. Punishment sets out to reduce criminal and anti-social behaviour in two ways.
3. The first is protecting the public by keeping the offender away from the chance to offend again.
4. The second is acting as a deterrent, making offending unpleasant enough to put the person off repeating it.
5. A punishment is also meant to warn everyone else, since people who see the cost may decide crime is not worth it.
6. Deterrence works through conditioning, pairing the crime with an unpleasant consequence until the person links the two.
7. The three punishments to know are prisons, community sentences and fines.

Prisons, community sentences and fines

1. Prisons
   1. Prison removes the offender's freedom, so the public is protected for as long as the sentence lasts.
   2. Losing your freedom is meant to be the strongest deterrent of the three.
   3. Reoffending after release is high, and it is highest after short sentences, so that deterrent often fails.
   4. Prison can also work as a school for crime, because it surrounds a person with criminal role models.
   5. It costs the offender their job and their housing, so they come out with fewer reasons to stay lawful.
2. Community sentences
   1. The offender stays in the community and completes requirements such as unpaid work, a curfew or a treatment programme.
   2. Because they keep their job and their family ties, the things that support going straight stay intact.
   3. They cost far less to run than a prison place, and reoffending is generally lower than after a short prison sentence.
   4. Plenty of people see them as too soft, so they may deter less than a prison sentence would.
   5. They are also unsuitable for serious or violent offences.
3. Fines
   1. A fine is an immediate financial cost, cheap to administer and well suited to minor offences.
   2. A wealthy offender absorbs the same fine without noticing, so it barely deters them.
   3. Someone with no money cannot pay it at all, which can push them into further offending to find the cash.
   4. A fine also does nothing about why the person offended in the first place.

Why deterrence often fails

1. Deterrence assumes the offender weighs the risk of being caught against the reward before acting.
2. A great deal of crime is impulsive, so no weighing up happens at all.
3. Addiction, debt and poverty can make the immediate need far louder than any penalty months away.
4. Eysenck's theory adds a reason of its own, because an offender high in extraversion is difficult to condition and so learns poorly from being punished.

Evaluating punishment

1. Punishment reliably protects the public and answers the demand that a crime has a consequence.
2. It deters some offenders, particularly first-timers with a job and a home they do not want to lose.
3. High reoffending rates, especially after short prison terms, show that deterrence fails for many others.
4. Punishment leaves the causes of offending untouched, so it cuts recidivism far less on its own than when it is combined with rehabilitation.

Turning this into marks

1. When a strength and a weakness are both asked for, keep them to the same punishment, such as prison protecting the public and prison having high reoffending after release, rather than one general point about punishment.
2. Name the punishment and the mechanism, such as a community sentence keeping the offender in work, because writing that it helps them does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is answering only about prison, when community sentences and fines each carry marks of their own.