Comment by HappMacDonald

Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD).

First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.

Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.

And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.

So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.