A Challenge for Crime Deterrence Models: Irrational Juvenile Fatalism

The Journal of Adolescent Health has a new study, Unrealistic Fatalism in U.S. Youth Ages 14 to 22 (subscription may be required), which concludes that 6.7% of all studied youth believed they would not live much past 30.  This is conisistent with a 2000 study in Public Opinion Quarterly (subscription required) which showed that nearly 4% of 15 and 16 year olds believed that they would probably die before age 20.  All of this complicates any good deterrence model for kids.  We already know that developmental progress limits kids’ ability to behave like rational actors.  This new study (in tandem with existing work) shows that a 20 year sentence for a 20 year old may actually be read as a 10 year life bid.  I’m not sure how that affects an offender’s valuation of that sentence – whether an effective life sentence looks more or less daunting than a 20 year sentence followed by a return to society – but I’m confident that it does affect valuation.  The question I grapple with regularly is not whether punishment can deter, but whether we have any economic or agent-based models sufficiently sophisticated (taking into account data like this) to give us even the remotest hint of how we can harness the power of deterrence.