Peer review journal article Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Peer review journal article - Essay Example The data showing welfare fraud states that 43.6 million people are in poverty line in USA, while 9.2% were unemployed and is the place where the governments as allocated a huge budget share. Due to this, government came up with Electronic Benefit Transfer where people are given debit cards which they can use to buy food staffs and other basic commodities, this idea also resulted to more fraudulent activities as the debit cards were in the hands of irresponsible people who could not even take care of their own families. Deterrence theory is one in particular which makes assumptions about human behavior in order to reduce crime. Humans are normally assumed to be hedonistic, rational and calculate prior steps to committing crime. To some extent these assumption are true because human being are thinking machines and usually beliefs and prefer pleasure than pain. He or she must calculate and weigh carefully the option or cost of doing a crime and being caught in it or committing a crime successfully. The cost benefit analysis is a pre-requisite which always in human mind. Punishment or the consequences involve in committing a crime if outweigh the benefits then punishment will deter a person from committing the crime. In actual sense, for these sanction threats to work and deter a person from committing a crime, he must perceive and believe that the punishment would be most likely to be imposed that is to say there must be high chances of being caught up in the crime then sanction being imposed quickly after detection, and that the sanction will be more severe. In short, if the assumptions of deterrence theory are to be correct then it must be seen that cost of committing crime is higher than the benefits. The government has several alternatives to use in order to curb the fraudulent activities and they include; increasing the number of fraud investigation officers which will help in crime detection