There's a wide spectrum of behaviors in relation to future penalties. Some people are so far gone that they don't care about death. This includes people who liv

There's a wide spectrum of behaviors in relation to future penalties. Some people are so far gone that they don't care about death. This includes people who livestream their murder sprees or are willing to commit suicide bombings, for example. There's no prospect of deterring them. At best you can permanently isolate surviving perpetrators from the rest of society. Until we invent slap-drones [1] I wouldn't trust them to roam free again. Other people won't violate minor rules even when there's nobody watching. Some people will come to a full stop at every stop sign, even when there's perfect visibility and no cross traffic, even when there's no cameras or police cars around. In between these two extremes you do have people who are deterred by enforcement. My sister didn't come to a full stop at a certain intersection on the way to work until she was ticketed for it. She stopped completely every time afterward. For this in-between set of people who respond to deterrence, likelihood of facing a penalty is more important than the severity of a penalty [2]. The problem I have seen repeatedly is that catching more violators is more expensive/difficult than increasing the severity of punishment, so lawmakers are tempted to increase penalties to "make up" for rare enforcement. Fining $1 for littering and catching half of litterers seems mathematically equivalent to fining $5000 for littering and catching 1 in 10000 litterers. It's also a lot cheaper to catch only a handful of people. But the rare-enforcement, high-penalty approach has a much weaker deterrent effect because most people are not mathematically rational agents and fail to consider long tail events. The deterrent effect of extreme penalties is even weaker for murder. Most people are not interested in murdering anyone even in circumstances where they would get away with it. The remaining subset of people with a non-negligible propensity to murder is enriched in people who behave erratically and cannot be deterred by rational means. [1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone [2] "Frequency of enforcement is more important than the severity of punishment in reducing violation behaviors" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108507118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108507118