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Last week I came across an interesting column by Donald Boudreaux titled "less severe punishments deter murders"! In his article Donald introduces a concept which I refer to as “the substitution effect of punishment” or in an anothr words the effect of punishment for one crime on the tendency toward committing some other ones. Based on my experiences people are usually ignoring or underestimating such an important effect.

I think Donald's example is nice enough to take and follow. He is discussing the effect of intensifying the punishment for rraappping on murder rate! We already know that common people usually are in favor of more severe punishments for the rraapists when they read the everyday news about such cases. They would mainly be supporting the idea of executing rraapists to terrify potential criminals and to prevent them thinking about it. Indeed such a punishment is already an established one in Iran for hundreds of years. Therefore we are talking about a real case in the real world. According to Donald, which I also maintain the same idea, this policy is not neccessarily the optimal one for the society. But why?

Why one should be against executing the rraapists, those who are one of the most hideous criminals? The answer is justified by looking into the effects of such punishment on other related crimes, mainly murdering, which are more dangerous to the society. When a rraapist is expecting the same cost (death penalty) for either solely rraapping a woman or rraapping and murdering her, he would have higher incentive to kill her in order to keep his identity unknown. On contrast, if he knows that rraapping somebody would be punished by life imprisonment, for example, and killing her/him punished by being hanged then he would think more carefully about the consequences of his actions. In this case he would have higher incentive to let she go alive to save his life in case of being captured. Of course there is another side as well. If he leaves the victim alive then he may hope that she/he would remain silent to keep her/his dignity and won't tell it to anybody else but if he kills her/him then the police and the family will definitely start some investigations.

Apply this theorem for a recent case in Mashhad, Iran. Two young man rraapped a teenager boy and released him afterwards. They were arrested and hanged very quickly. This story is giving a clear signal to other criminals. It says if you rraapped somebody don't let your victim go alive because in any case you will be executed with only difference that in the second case (letting her/him go) the risk of being identified is much higher. As a result a "rational" criminal might have higher tendency toward choosing the first choice (killing the victim) rather than releasing her/him.

Note that I am telling the total social costs of not killing the rraappists is necessarily lower than executing them. There are two effects of death penalty against the rraapists at the same time, lowering the likelihood of rraapping on the one hand and increasing the tendency toward killing the victims on the other one and the total effect is not that much clear. Borrowing the idea from Donald I just wanted to elaborate the neglected part of the story.