Punishment for the Sake of Deterrence is Justified

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Introduction

The author is a strong supporter of the notion that "punishment for the sake of deterrence is justified", and this is because people tend to obey the law after calculating the consequences attached by the law to a particular act of crime. Punishing a person for a crime in order to deter others from performing the same crime again does not guarantee us that the crime will never be performed by anyone at all, but it definitely lowers the number of people who would commit the same crime in future. In some instances deterrence has not proved effective in curbing the crime and for hardened criminals it fails to deter them from committing the crime second time, for such people the severity of the punishment has to be so intense that it teaches them a lesson, that is why the severity of punishment varies from one crime to another and from one situation to other situation. By punishing the offender we deter the individual offender from committing the crime again in the future. Moreover, "the deterrent theory emphasizes the necessity for protecting society, for so treating the prisoner that others will be deterred from breaking the law" .

The deterrent theory emphasizes the necessity for protecting society, for so treating the prisoner that others will be deterred from breaking the law. For example, if a news channel highlights that the police have caught many drunk and drive cases last night, then it's very probable that a common man would fear to drive after getting drunk. Here the certainty of getting penalized is what makes a man not commit crime. When the sentence is penalizing, it deters others and is a safeguard to the society.

Deterrence in almost all penal laws of the world is conceived as a most prudent puni...

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...mer, John Austin on Punishment; http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679829.001.0001/acprof-9780199679829-chapter-3; accessed on 19-03-1014

21. Anthony F. Lang Jr., Punishment, Justice and International Relations: Ethics and Order After the Cold War, Routledge, 2009; http://books.google.co.in/books?id=fXvkrzBsr-AC&dq=kelsen++punishment&source=gbs_navlinks_s; accessed on 19-03-1014

22. Hans Kelsen, Collective and Individual Responsibility in International Law with Particular Regard to the Punishment of War Criminals, 31 Cal. L. Rev. 530 (1943); http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol31/iss5/3; accessed on 19-03-1014

23. George A. Thoma (1981), A Note on John Stuart Mill's Views on Capital Punishment. History of Economics Society Bulletin, 3, pp 49-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1042771600004890; accessed on 19-03-1014

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