Punishment and solidarity? An experimental test of the educative-moralizing effects of legal sanctions

Objectives: Both scholars and legal practitioners have long theorized that a central function of criminal punishments is to reinforce moral values and, in so doing, symbolically reaffirm the vitality of the shared beliefs that underpin social trust and bonding—or what Durkheim refers to as “mechanical solidarity”. Crime, according to this theoretical scholarship, is a symbol of disconsensus and possesses the potential to trigger a demoralization cascade. Punishment counteracts the demoralizing effect of crime by demonstrating that a consensus remains about the moral boundaries in society and that legal authorities continue to have the motivation and resources necessary to enforce this consensus. Versions of this denunciatory or expressive theory of punishment can be found in the criminological, sociological, and legal literatures. All varieties of the theory share a common feature: to date, they have largely escaped empirical scrutiny. Methods: The current study tests this theoretical tradition’s foundational hypotheses using data from a randomized factorial survey experiment conducted with a sample of 5042 Americans. Results: The findings provide no support for expressive theories of punishment. However, the evidence does show that punishment may play an important role in reducing the emotional impact of crime on citizens. Specifically, when the offender is caught and punished it appears to diminish the aversive emotional reactions (e.g., anger) caused by learning that a crime was committed in the first place. Conclusions: Our study suggests that, although punishing crimes may not influence individuals’ social or moral beliefs, it might serve another important function by attenuating potentially criminogenic emotional reactions to crime, such as anger. The sanctioning effect, then, shares similarities with conventional coping mechanisms described in general strain theory

Search for supersymmetry in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, and at least one tau lepton in 20 fb−1 of √s= 8 TeV proton-proton collision data with the ATLAS detector

© 2014, The Author(s). A search for supersymmetry (SUSY) in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, at least one hadronically decaying tau lepton and zero or one additional light leptons (electron/muon), has been performed using 20.3fb−1of proton-proton collision data at √ s= 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No excess above the Standard Model background expectation is observed in the various signal regions and 95% confidence level upper limits on the visible cross section for new phenomena are set. The results of the analysis are interpreted in several SUSY scenarios, significantly extending previous limits obtained in the same final states. In the framework of minimal gauge-mediated SUSY breaking models, values of the SUSY breaking scale Λ below 63 TeV are excluded, independently of tan β. Exclusion limits are also derived for an mSUGRA/CMSSM model, in both the R-parity-conserving and R-parity-violating case. A further interpretation is presented in a framework of natural gauge mediation, in which the gluino is assumed to be the only light coloured sparticle and gluino masses below 1090 GeV are excluded