Amnesty –forgiving all of the current and previous violators but renewing a threat to punish future violators– always seems like a reputation fail. If we are granting amnesty today then doesn’t that signal that we will eventually be granting amnesty again in the future?
But there is at least one environment in which a once-only amnesty is incentive compatible and effective: when crime has bandwagon effects. For example, suppose there’s a stash of candy in the pantry and my kids have taken to raiding it. I catch one red-handed but I can’t punish her because she rightly points out that since everybody’s doing it she assumed we were looking the other way. A culture of candy crime had taken hold.
An amnesty (bring me your private stash and you will be forgiven) moves us from the everyone’s a criminal because everyone’s a criminal equilibrium to the one in which nobody’s a criminal. The latter is potentially stable if its easier to single out and punish a lone offender than one of many.
Cheap Talk 
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April 29, 2013 at 7:38 am
Anonymous
“An amnesty (bring me your private stash and you will be forgiven) moves us from the everyone’s a criminal because everyone’s a criminal equilibrium to the one in which nobody’s a criminal.”
April 29, 2013 at 11:08 am
dph
I see this differently. Amnesty works when you move to different regulatory regime, and amnesty those that would have been caught up in the new regime.
From your example, you are implicitly moving from criminalizing the the raiding, to criminalizing the POSSESSION of the ill-gotten goods (easier to catch and prosecute). You then amnesty the possession without asking questions of HOW it came into being pre rule-change.
You often see this in cases where the regulations were either not clear, or not clearly enforced (tax regulations, possession of prohibited weapons) and the regulations were clarified, and penalties will be going up.
Put another way, amnesty only works if the entity offering the amnesty has a credible threat of higher penalties, more investigation, or greater chance of being caught in the future and not taking advantage of the amnesty will mean that the offender will get the book thrown at them.