People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them. The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince more of the public that people who commit crimes are usually caught. Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.
1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs
A lot of crimes are also committed by people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting. It doesn't matter how bad or how certain the consequence is, because they aren't thinking about it at all.
But apparently there are far fewer such people in Singapore. How would you explain this?
I think the explanation is that growing up in an environment where even small infringements are consistently punished makes people think about the consequences more.
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