Our system of criminal justice rests upon two pillars: punishment and deterrence. But unlike punishment, there is no empirical evidence that deterrence works. In fact, the overwhelming evidence demonstrates that deterrence is a myth. This is an important issue because deterrence of white collar offenders is now a signature priority of the Department of Justice. As Attorney General Merrick Garland remarked recently at the ABA White Collar Conference in San Francisco:
It is our first priority because – as everyone who has counseled individual corporate officers know – the prospect of personal liability has an uncanny ability to focus the mind. That prospect is the best deterrent to corporate crime. And deterrence – after all – is what we are after.[1]
But consider the evidence that deterrence doesn’t work. The United States imprisons more people than any other nation both per capita and in absolute numbers, even more that China, which has a population 4.4 times as large. Yet, with the exception of France, we have a higher crime rate than those nations with the next ten largest economies: China, Japan, Germany, the UK, India, Italy, Canada, South Korea, and Russia.[2]
There were laws against drug trafficking long before I became an Assistant United States Attorney in 1981, but there were no mandatory minimum sentences.[3] In 1980, 5,244 individuals were convicted for drug offenses,[4] by 2019, that figure had ballooned to 20,393.[5] In 1981, the DEA estimated that 50,000...
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday (April 6, 2026) accused Congress of unleashing a “foreign-influenced misinformation campaign” against him and his wife Riniki Bhuyan Sarma ahead ...