Roger J. R.

Levesque

This becomes clear, we think, from a consideration of three factors found relevant to the
proportionality determination: (1) the inherent gravity of the offense, (2) the sentences
Imposed for similarly grave offenses in the same jurisdiction, and (2) sentences imposed for
the same crime in other jurisdictions.
(The psychology and law of criminal justice processes, Nova Publishers, 2006)

Punishing those who deserve it helps to eliminate lawbreaking

Peter Aranella – 1992 [UCLA Law School], “Convicting the Morally

Blameless: Reassessing the Relationship between Legal and Moral
Accountability,” 39 UCLA L. Rev. 1511, August 1992. LexisNexis. MJ. John
Lewis.

What are those benefits? H. L. A. Hart has argued that the law's conduct-responsibility
requirement maximizes the utility of individual choice within a coercive legal framework. n40
This fair attribution requirement serves to reassure the law-abiding members
of the community that their individual choices will be respected and valued
n41 because they know that serious criminal liability and punishment
[*1533] will be limited to those actors who could have acted otherwise and
who appear to be at fault for what they have done. In addition, demonstrating
that the criminal was at fault for conduct that he could have avoided
committing fosters the deterrent value of the law's most efficient sanction:
moral stigma. Imposing moral censure when the public believes that the
individual could not have avoided the violation undermines the censure's
deterrent efficacy. n42 In short, the conduct-attribution model of "moral"
responsibility constitutes a "disguised" method of enhancing social utility.

Incapacitation and deterrence reduce crime

Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford – 2000, “The Social Benefits of

Confining Habitual Criminals,” CJL Foundation. MJ. John Lewis

The idea that increased incarceration of criminals will reduce the rate of
crime has two bases in common sense. First, incentives matter. When the
incentives to engage in or refrain from a particular behavior change, the
number of people who choose to engage in that behavior changes. This
principle is the basis of much of behavioral psychology and all of economics.
In criminology, this effect is called deterrence.26 Second, the crime rate is
determined by the number of criminals, not by the availability of victims, and
removing a criminal from the street to prison prevents him from committing
crimes against the general public.27 Reducing crime by direct restraint is
called incapacitation.
The anti-incarceration hypothesis that neither effect is significant, i.e., that prison neither
deters nor incapacitates, is extremely difficult to swallow. There will always be some people
who cannot be deterred because they act without thinking. There will always be some who
do not need to be deterred because their character and conscience would prevent them
from committing crimes even if they could do so with impunity. Between the wild beasts and
the saints, though, there will always be a large segment of the population that
refrains from crime out of fear of the consequences, i.e., that is deterrable, and
the size of that segment naturally depends on the severity of the
consequences. For incapacitation, the often-heard notion that if we
incarcerate one criminal another will take his place28 assumes that there are
a fixed number of places. This assumption makes no sense. As high as the rates
of burglary and robbery are, there are still far more targets than crimes each year.29

Juvenile law does not have safeguards to protect youth

Barry C. Feld. “Abolish the Juvenile Court: Youthfulness, Criminal

Responsibility, and Sentencing Policy Source: The Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology” (1973-), Vol. 88, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 68-136.
Northwestern University <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144075>

Quite apart from its unsuitability as a social welfare agency, the

individualized justice of a rehabilitative juvenile court fosters lawlessness and
thus detracts from its utility as a court of law as well. Despite statutes and
rules, juvenile court judges make dis- cretionary decisions effectively
unconstrained by the rule of law. If judges intervene to meet each child's
"real needs," then every case is unique and decisional rules or objective
criteria cannot constrain clinical intuitions. The idea of treatment necessarily
entails individual differentiation, indeterminacy, a rejection of
proportionality, and a disregard of normative valuations of the seriousness of
behavior. But, if judges possess neither practical scientific bases by which to
classify youths for treatment nor demonstrably effective programs to
prescribe for them, then the exercise of "sound discretion" simply constitutes
a euphemism for idiosyncratic judicial subjectivity. Racial, gender, geo-
graphic, and socio-economic disparities constitute almost inevi- table
corollaries of a treatment ideology that lacks a scientific foundation. At the
least, judges will sentence youths differently based on extraneous personal
characteristics for which they bear no responsibility. At the worst, judges will
impose haphaz- ard, unequal, and discriminatory punishment on similarly
situ- ated offenders without effective procedural or appellate checks.

Harsher punishment generally deters crime

BRIEF 4 Juvenile or Adult Court: Research on Future Offending Shari Miller-

Johnson, Joel Rosch
Adolescent Offenders and the Line Between the Juvenile and Criminal
Justice Systems(pg.22)

Another study of general deterrence used national data to see how the
probability of being punished affected future crime rates among juveniles
and adults.13 It found that increasing the probability of punishment lead to
decreases in crime. The greater the difference between the stricter adult
systems and the more lenient juvenile systems, the more the crime rate
declined. In the few states where the probability of punishment was greater
in the juvenile system than in the adult system, crime increased when
juveniles moved into the adult system. These findings support the idea that
for young offenders, when there is less likelihood of punishment there is
more crime, and when there is more likelihood of punishment there is less
crime.

Studies show that the human brain does not mature until at least
the early twenties.

[Lucy C. Ferguson, Staff Member, American University Law Review,

December ’04, American University Law Review, 54:441, p. 455]

For many years, scientists believed that the brain reached maturity in the pre-adolescent
years. Yet recent technological advancements, such as the onset of high-
resolution magnetic resonance imaging ("MRI") in the 1980s, have changed the
way that researchers examine the brain and have cast doubt on this theory. Current
MRI and behavioral studies indicate[d] that the brain does not fully mature until the
early-to mid-twenties. There is also clear evidence that the brain does not reach
its full weight until approximately age twenty and that the "myelination" process
continues into the early twenties; markedly so in young men. Variance in myelination is
associated with differences in intelligence, indicating that increased complexity of the
brain's nervous system appears to result in more effective brain functioning.