The 1960's saw the implementation of policies based on the notion that persons with adequate income have no incentive to commit crime, yet the crime rate rose dramatically. When Nixon became President in 1968, the conservative crime theology emerged with emphasis on reversing the decline in moral values and making retribution certain, swift, and unpleasant. In 1979, Tennessee adopted a comprehensive crime bill that embodied this retributive approach for certain violent crimes. This get-tough legislation should have had general and special deterrent and incapacitation effects. An examination of robbery rates per annum per 100,000 population for 1972 through 1986 in Tennessee and in seven Southern control States and the U.S. average indicates that Tennessee showed the greatest increase in robberies: 350 percent of the control group's as a whole and 150 percent of the National increase. Additional analyses suggest that the legislation did not produce a simple displacement effect from armed to simple robbery, and that increases could not be accounted for by differences in reporting or recording. Further analysis suggests that the effectiveness of the legislation may have been undercut by two factors: sanctions were already severe prior to the law reform, and the judicial justice system's own law of equilibrium may have nullified effects through such mechanisms such as plea bargaining and parole decisions. 15 tables and 214 notes.