2014
Daniel S. Nagin
Society’s responses to crime through punishment.
Nagin was lauded for his methodologically advanced studies on the deterrent effects of punishment. His findings show that deterrent effects of capital punishment are difficult to demonstrate, and that the deterrent effects of other sanctions are limited. According to Nagin’s research findings, life sentences without possibility of parole do not have better preventive effects than fixed-term sentences. He also showed that high rates of prosecution per crime show greater preventive effects than do increasing the length of prison sentences.Daniel S. Nagin
Born 1948 in the US. Daniel S. Nagin was professor at Carnegie Mellon University (United States) at the time of the award.
Showed that increasing risks of arrest is more effective at preventing crime than lengthening prison sentences.Showed that increasing risks of arrest is more effective at preventing crime than lengthening prison sentences.
Research on the deterrent effects of punishment
Daniel S. Nagin was awarded the 2014 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research on how the likelihood of discovery and punishment affects crime, and for his contributions to a more evidence-based use of prisons.
Daniel S. Nagin and his colleagues have studied the deterrent effect of criminal sanctions in a wide range of settings and institutions. In 2012, the U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty, which Nagin chaired, published a report concluding that the existing research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment was incomplete and inconclusive. That report, in turn, has been cited in some debates leading to abolition of the death penalty in US states.
Nagin has also conducted research on the use of statistical methods to analyse different trajectories of crime in longitudinal data, identifying changes in the seriousness or persistence of criminal behaviour over the life course.
Why reduce the prison population?
A key conclusion from Nagin’s research is that society is better able to prevent crime by increasing the risk of detection – in other words, by increasing the likelihood that an offender will be caught for each offence committed – rather than by focusing on making (rarer) punishments harsher. Severity does not seem to compensate for certainty.
He has, for example, presented strong empirical evidence that investment in well-functioning policing has a significantly greater impact on crime levels than increasing the prison population.
His findings on the effects of imprisonment helped to contribute to a reduction in the number of people incarcerated in the United States for the first time in forty years.