Gordon P. Waldo

TL;DR: This article showed that the effect of perceived sanctions on criminal involvement is minimal once social definitional factors (moral commitment, informal sanctions) are controlled, and that past studies report an experiential effect, not a deterrent effect.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the relationship between a defendant's SES and the sentence received by a prisoner and found that there is no support for the conflict proposition, and this conclusion was further strengthened when controls were introduced for "prior record" and demographic characteristics of the defendant.

TL;DR: The authors found that perceptions of severe punishment are largely unrelated to admitted theft or marijuana use, and that general deterrence appears not to be working for either offense, that is, punishment of “other when perceived by ego appears unrelated to ego's admitted criminality, and the expectation that arrest or maximum penalties upon conviction would be likely (certain) for oneself appears somewhat related to lower levels of marijuana use and larceny.

TL;DR: For instance, this article found that self-reported behavior (petty theft, marijuana use, payment using bad checks) over the past year is correlated with perceptions of legal sanctions measured a year earlier (Time 1) and perceptions of sanctions at the time of the self-reports (Time 2), for a random sample of 300 undergraduates at a large state university.

TL;DR: This article examined the relative and cumulative impact of perceived informal as well as formal sanctions upon self-reported marijuana use for 321 randomly chosen university students and found that the strength of deterrence relationships is the same for males and females.