This book is a mixture of the old and the new, of ideas that took root in me as a young man and those that have steered my research in more recent years. It is a book that brings together questions that intrigued criminologists decades ago with ones that hold center stage today in the field of criminology.

As a graduate student at the University of Arizona in the middle and late 1970s, I was privileged to work with a group of faculty members that included Maynard Erickson, Jack Gibbs, and Gary Jensen. Their joint research concentrated on the deterrent effect of legal sanctions, but unlike many others working on the issue at the time, they conceived of the topic in a broad sociological sense. How much does the public know about the criminal sanctions prescribed by law, and how can sanctions deter those who are unaware of them? How does one measure the severity of a legal punishment, and how does the objective severity of a punishment (say, years spent in prison) correspond to its perceived severity? Do public perceptions of crime (e.g., the relative incidence of different offenses) and of punishment (e.g., the conditional probability of arrest) accord with reality? Only later was I to realize how truly original and prescient much of this work was. But the mutual interest of these investigators in the social psychology of crime and punishment was to stimulate one persisting line of research in my own career.