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1967 Wis. L. Rev. 703 (1967)
Types of Deviance and the Effectiveness of Legal Sanctions

handle is hein.journals/wlr1967 and id is 723 raw text is: TYPES OF DEVIANCE AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LEGAL SANCTIONS WILLIAM J. CHAMBLISS* Does the imposition of legal sanctions deter crime? Are criminal sanctions so structured that they maximize what- ever deterrent effect they may have? Professor Chambliss reviews some of the empirical data bearing on these ques- tions. He concludes from this evidence that the legal sys- tem may be operating inefficaciously: It punishes most se- verely those persons and crimes that are least deterrable, and it punishes least severely those persons and crimes that are most deterrable. In the last analysis a legal system must be judged according to the impact it has on the social order. If that impact is largely dele- terious tothe lives of men, then maintaining the legal system can scarcely be justified. If, on the other hand, the law contributes in some important ways to the goals of society and its members, then there is justification for keeping it. And, of course, if the legal system is useful in certain ways but deleterious in others, then this condition cries out for changes to increase its effectiveness while maintaining those aspects found to have desirable consequences. Not all of the presumed consequences of the law are equally amenable to empirical verification. For example, the idea that if a person commits a criminal act the state must punish him because this is the only way to restore the balance of nature to its proper order is not amenable to systematic investigation. Such a position rests, ultimately, on the purely philosophical assumption that retri- bution for wrongdoings is intrinsically valuable. Such vague and ill-defined assertions about the consequences of the law have in recent years been relegated to a much less important place than the more directly demonstrable question of whether or not the presence of laws and the imposition of punishment acts as a deterrent to crime.' As Schwartz and Skolnick point out: Legal thinking has moved increasingly toward a sociologi- cally meaningful view of the legal system. Sanctions, in particular, have come to be regarded in functional terms. In criminal law, for instance, sanctions are said to be de- signed to prevent recidivism by rehabilitating, restraining * Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara; Russell Sage Resident in Sociology and Law, University of Wis- consin, 1966-1967. B.A., 1955, University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., 1960, Ph.D., 1962, Indiana University. I am indebted to Robert Seidman for valuable assistance and encour- agement in the preparation of this article. 1 See the discussions in Andenaes, The General Preventive Effects of Punishment, 114 U. PA. L. REV. 949 (1966); Andenaes, General Prevention- Illusions of Reality?, 43 J. CRnm. L.C. & P.S. 176 (1952).

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