“Punishment as Placebo”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Sheldon Evans now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

The modern criminal punishment regime has failed to deliver on its promise of public safety.  For all of the resources expended and all of the human costs incurred, the ever-growing carceral state does not make us safer.  Scholars across the social sciences have studied these shortcomings for decades using various methodologies.  The burgeoning prison population has little relation to the crime rate, which advocates have argued supports decarceration efforts to remedy the inefficiency, inequality, and subordinating effects of harsh sentencing policies and institutional design choices that have supported the mass incarceration crisis.  What then justifies the continued propagation of this failed regime?

This Article proposes a new balancing of considerations to answer this question that innovates punishment theory through the medical and experimental lens of placebos.  The efficacy of policy must be balanced with its public perception; thus, a policy may not be effective at fixing a problem, but this is often less important than the perception of the policy.  A medical placebo treatment may be physiologically inert, but it still can have a positive psychological and therapeutic impact by making the patient feel better because they think they are receiving effective treatment.  In the same way, the cultural value of mass incarceration extends beyond its failed effectiveness by providing psychological and therapeutic value to help the public cope with their fear of crime, their moral commitments to justice, and their socialized feelings towards offenders.

This placebo methodology offers several unique insights about punishment theory and practice that learn from the extensive medical research and ethics literatures.  By viewing punishment as a placebo, the modern punishment regime must confront unique questions concerning the social harm of punishment, the justifications for public deception, the ethics of experimentation, and the perverse economics of inefficacy.  These theoretical synergies also provide practical insights into how to reverse and regulate such placebo punishments while focusing on a more humane and ethical punishment future.