Jurisdictional Differences in Deterring Marijuana Use

There are two common contingencies that affect the extent to which the law coerces conduct: the jurisdiction and the offense. The jurisdiction in which crime is committed or contemplated reflects the nature of the legal threat (e.g., its certainty and severity), while the offense reflects behavior-specific barriers to effective legal threats. This paper reports a comparison of deterrent effects in two jurisdictions with widely differing penalties for marijuana use. The results indicate that both jurisdictional and offense characteristics are important, and that legal mechanisms were more important in that jurisdiction that had the least severe penalty for marijuana use, thereby suggesting that enforcement patterns were more important than the severity of the penalty. Moreover, extralegal controls were important mechanisms of social control in each jurisdiction.