[Raydovsky]

Yet , countries with the highest crime rates have the toughest punishments.

[whatshisface]

That is one of the clearest examples of both causal directions being plausible.

[Barrin92]

Is that true? Crime across the Islamic world is remarkably low despite many countries being much more unstable. East-Asia, another region with generally harsh punishments is very safe. Like, even large Chinese cities with over ten million citizens and incomes far below what you see in the West have very low crime rates. Not to speak of more comparable countries lke Singapore.

[0dayz]

The Islamic world is also notorious for how corrupt and non transparent it is, so getting accurate crime statistics beyond murder is going to be hard.

[SideQuark]

Depends on the crime and the punishment. I'd like to see the data you used to make this claim, since looking at many single cases it is certainly not clear that your claim is true.