Addressing how the threat of punishment acts as a deterrent to crime, the author examines individuals’ responsiveness to legal sanction threats. Following a discussion of criminology studies focusing on the various ways that sanction threats are said to deter crime, this article presents the methodology used in this study. Surveys were conducted among 412 undergraduate university students after presenting students with a hypothetical situation in which the students had been drinking and had to determine whether they would drive home. Analyzing survey answers through multivariate estimates of certainty and severity effects demonstrated that 21 percent of respondents were acutely conformist, 62 percent of respondents were deterrable, and 8 percent of respondents were incorrigible. Furthermore, survey results indicate that prior drunk driving occurred least among acute conformists and most often among the incorrigibles. The author concludes that 38 percent of these college students appeared unresponsive to threatened criminal sanctions for drunk driving, demonstrating a wide disjunction between deterrence theory and reality. Tables, references, appendices