Intimate Interactions

Do deterrents work? If you make a deterrent awful enough, does it stop crime? Has capital crime ended where the death penalty exists if you don’t count executions as murders? Yana, a criminology researcher from the University of Ottawa is here to help us unpack these things. Since it’s six figures per prisoner per year in our current system, and if these very expensive, punitive deterrents don’t successfully deter crime, what does? What programs exist that reduce criminals reoffending - that’s called recidivism. So how can we take people who have committed a crime and have them not commit crimes anymore - that’s called rehabilitation. We pose the question: does knowing you’ll be caught for certain deter crime? And if so, with technology evolving, how easily can we catch people and then offer a small consequence that is enough to deter but not so much it eats through public funds in the wasteful, harmful way our current punitive system does. Keep in mind we’re spending this much on prisons while simultaneously