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Penalty hikes represent failure of imagination

Here's a thought for the day while I'm busy at the capitol this morning - something I wrote in reaction to a blog commenter here about the effectiveness of increasing criminal penalties as social policy:Penalty enhancements almost always reflect a lack of imagination about other ways to influence human behavior. Enhancing current penalties should be a last resort since it's among the least effective approaches - once something is illegal, making it more illegal won't reduce the number of people who do it much. Instead, penalty hikes are usually the first thing legislators want to do, even though by definition it's an admission that the same strategy (criminalizing the behavior) failed to solve the problem in the first place.Discuss.

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).