Credibility and Law Enforcement

The precommitment approach to law enforcement is inappropriate as a positive theory of crime and punishment because it is inconsistent with the institutional structure of U.S. law enforcement. We develop a formal model which integrates theories of optimal sanctions, individual criminal behavior and the allocation of effort to apprehension, and imposes credibility constraints on the choice of sanction—i.e., given the severity of a crime and the individual characteristics of the criminal, the sanction imposed must be optimal from society's perspective, after the crime has been committed