Do Legal Sanctions Reinforce Social Sanctions? Evidence 19th Century Brittany

Nicolas Gérard Vaillant ()

Homo Oeconomicus, 2005, vol. 23, pages 333-346

Abstract: In a society that stigmatizes, how do judges or jurors judge criminals who possess a high stock of social capital: do they reinforce the effect of social sanctions by pronouncing higher legal sanctions? Do they behave impartially? Or do they attenuate the sentence, in order to produce a constant global deterrent effect? By using data from the 571 sentenced infanticide mothers in Brittany in the 19th century, the aim of this paper is to provide answers to these questions, and more generally to give evidence on the relationship between offender characteristics and sentences. This is implemented in estimated Multinomial Logit equations, which feature the verdicts announced to the infanticide mothers as the dependent variables, and the various personal characteristics of the mothers, the circumstances and objective of the murder, and the “technique” used to commit crime as the right hand side variables. The results show that jurors, i.e. members of the civil society, tend to reinforce the punitive effect of social sanction.

Date: 2005

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hom:homoec:v:23:y:2005:p:333-346

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