Part II: Response to Critique of Brodt and Smith

• Author: Alfred S. Regnery
• DOI: 10.1177/088740348700200106
• Published date: 01 March 1987
• Date: 01 March 1987

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CJPR, VOL. 1, NO. 1, 4/88,
©IUP
Dialogue
Part II:
Response to Critique of Brodt and Smith
Alfred S. Regnery
Leighton and Regnery Law Offices
In their response to my 1985 article Getting Away With Murder. Brodt and
Smith raise several issues which deserve a response. It is evident, from the
outset, that they agree with little, if anything, of what I had to say. It is also
evident that they approach the issue from the standpoint of the social worker
or the sociologist, and that I approach it from the social enforcement per-
spective. The approaches that we take exemplify the crux of the debate over
juvenile, and indeed criminal, justice policy in the United States today.
The issues raised in my original article, as well as in Brodt and Smith’s
response, are important to the entire debate not only about juvenile crime,
but about all crime as well. What needs to be understood first, however, is
that the policies advocated in my original article are not, as my critics imply,
new, nor are they very radical. In fact, they are probably the dominant position
advocated by most professionals and policy makers today.
Brodt and Smith state, for example, in regard to my thesis that the juvenile
justice system’s principle mission should be to concentrate on serious repeat
offenders, that &dquo;the implications of such a significant shift in orientation require
careful review before steps are taken to implement these ideas.&dquo;
Steps have been taken to implement these ideas -
many steps, in fact, and
many of the ideas have been implemented.
Let’s look at the issues they choose to examine, one by one:
Deterrence
Brodt and Smith ridicule the notion that there may be incentives and dis-
incentives within the justice system to encourage good behavior and to dis-
courage misbehavior -
and they are by no means the originators of such
ridicule. Studies of deterrence effectiveness are notoriously poor and incon-
clusive, perhaps because there are too many variables to allow us to measure
what we are doing. But one must wonder if studies are really the answer, and
whether instead the answer does not come from simple logic: in every other
aspect of human nature, incentives and disincentives do work, and form the
basis of much of our society. In child rearing, school, jobs, the market place,

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professions, driving automobiles, and a thousand other things we are involved
in, we rely on incentives and disincentives to get from others what we want.
Why, then, should not such incentives and disincentives have an impact on
crime? Criminals are certainly not so much different from the rest of us that
they are immune from pleasure and pain, or threats of either (Crimes of passion,
obviously, are not affected by such incentives).
In regard to the argument my critics raise about deterrence, we do not know
as much as we would like about the effect of deterrence policies because the
research does not provide us with the answers. The only really effective test
of the deterrence system would...