I'll try to be brief so that Gretta can also get her two bits in.
Deterrence is something that I look at as a criminal law professor. Indeed, in our regular criminal justice system, which deals mostly with street crime and with people who are not motivated largely by a rational weighing of pros and cons, deterrence, as the literature shows, is of a questionable value.
Where deterrence does have the most powerful influence, according to the research, is in dealing with large-scale economic crime, where those persons have the most to lose by being investigated and found guilty. The difficulty with deterrence with even that group, however, is the second proposition that's very well known in deterrence literature. That proposition is that it's not the size of the penalty that is the biggest deterrent; it's the probability of actually getting caught. The bigger the offence, the more enforcement you have, and then the higher the probability of being apprehended, the more likely it is that the business person is going to say, “No, I'm not prepared to take that risk.”
When we have low enforcement, even if we have big fines, we don't have the real deterrent value that we need. I'm not speaking against high sanctions for those individuals—they should have them—but it's not really going to deter others effectively unless we can also demonstrate that we are serious about catching you and have the resources to catch you. At the moment, these persons know that the risk of getting caught is very low.