Judicial punishment' s power to deter people from committing crimes is a function of the severity of the penalty and the likelihood of one' s actually receiving the penalty  Occasionally, juries decide that a crime' s penalty is too severe and so refuse to convict a person they are convinced has committed that crime
Thus, increasing the penalty may decrease the deterrent power of judicial punishment
Success in attaining one's first academic job depends on the quality of one's dissertation and the amount of time spent working on it in graduate school. But sometimes, so much time is spent on a dissertation that it becomes too lengthy to be coherent and its quality suffers. So spending more time working on a dissertation can lead to less success in attaining a first academic job.