The Real Impact of General Deterrence: Empirical Insights from the Robbery Data of Three American Cities

General deterrence theory relies on the critical assumption that prospective offenders will be deterred from committing crimes when they are aware of the apprehension and punishment of others. This idea has been reiterated across thousands of years of Western political thought and has significant implications in modern American criminal sentencing, though it has not been historically subjected to rigorous testing. The recent availability of voluminous crime data permits a deeper examination of the real impact of sentencings on crime trends and allows the opportunity for previously impossible analyses regarding the efficacy of general deterrence. To examine whether there is evidence to support the critical assumption underlying general deterrence, this article examines five years of robbery data from three geographically, politically, and demographically diverse American cities: Boston, Massachusetts; Mesa, Arizona; and Washington, District of Columbia. By analyzing robbery trends in relation to the announcement of robbery sentences in these cities, the author seeks to determine whether there is an offense-relative general deterrence relationship between sentences and subsequent robberies committed within each community. An integrative data analysis also examines the aggregate data from these three cities to identify broader patterns indicative of the efficacy of general deterrence in criminal sentencing.