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Topic: Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime (Read 1739 times) |
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Blunderov
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Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime
« on: 2007-06-11 17:30:45 » |
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[Blunderov] Even if the death penalty is in fact a deterrent it does not necessarily justify retaining it . Without having found out anything about how these studies are conducted, I find it difficult to imagine how it would be possible to prove anything one way or another by using before and after statistics unless these results were completely unequivocal which I gather they are not. Nobody who commits murder expects to be caught, otherwise it would be irrational to commit the crime in the first place.
freakonomics
11 June 2007, 17:29:39 | Steven D. Levitt
Associated Press reporter Robert Tanner writes an article today stating that evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty reduces crime. As with most media coverage of controversial issues, there is a paragraph or two in which the other side makes its case. In this instance, the lone voice arguing against the efficacy of the death penalty is Justin Wolfers, a professor at Wharton who just can’t seem to keep his name out of our blog. Tanner does his best to make Wolfers look bad, quoting him as dismissing these studies because they appear in “second-tier journals.”
Given the evidence I’ve examined, I believe that Wolfers is on the right side of this debate. There are recent studies of the death penalty– most bad, but some reasonable — that find it has a deterrent effect on crime. Wolfers and John Donohue published an article in the Stanford Law Review two years ago that decimated most of the research on the subject.
Analyses of data that stretches further back in time, when there were many more executions and thus more opportunities to test the hypothesis, are far less charitable to death penalty advocates. On top of that, as we wrote in Freakonomics, if you do back-of-the-envelope calculations, it becomes clear that no rational criminal should be deterred by the death penalty, since the punishment is too distant and too unlikely to merit much attention. As such, economists who argue that the death penalty works are put in the uncomfortable position of having to argue that criminals are irrationally overreacting when they are deterred by it.
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Blunderov
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Re:Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime
« Reply #1 on: 2007-06-12 02:17:13 » |
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[Blunderov] Happily my instincts appear to have been sound in respect of those recent studies which purportedly show that executions are a deterrent.
Bush-science, in a word.
scienceblogs
Death Penalty
Category: criminology
Posted on: March 6, 2006 12:33 PM, by Tim Lambert
When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research has always seemed suspect to me -- since a very small fraction of murderers are executed in America, it seems unlikely that any effect could be detected above the noise of all the other factors that affect the crime rate. Now a paper by Donohue and Wolfers* has been published that is absolutely devastating to the papers that found deterrence. Donohue and Wolfers reanalyze the data used in those papers and found that the deterrence effect goes away if you look at it sideways. For example, one of the most recently touted papers found that each execution deterred 18 murders. However, the description of the model used in that paper was slightly inaccurate. When D&W followed that description the result was that each execution caused 18 murders. Since we don't know which model is the correct one, the data just does not tell whether the death penalty deters or not. Similar problems occur with the other papers that found an effect.
Also on the death penalty: Steve Levitt catches Paul Rubin misrepresenting Levitt's research on the death penalty in Senate testimony.
*Link did not work at time of posting.
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Re:Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime
« Reply #2 on: 2007-06-12 20:07:47 » |
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I'm against the death penalty but I can't help but be skeptical of a conclusion that states an execution can be responsible for causing more homicide. I just don't see a plausible chain of cause and effect. I guess I would need to read that study.
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Hermit
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Re:Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime
« Reply #3 on: 2007-06-13 10:08:13 » |
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Here is a direct method by which the death penalty can cause a rise in murders. Where murder and rape are both punishable by death, there is strong motivation for the rapist (who tends to work in private) to kill his victim to greatly reduce the probability of being convicted. Because he only has one life and if that is forfeit for the rape, then he may as well play double or quits. This is not a hypothesis, it was the case in South Africa for Black on White rape in the 1970s and this phenomenon lead to many women's organizations calling for an end to this well intentioned but extremely harmful sentencing folly. A similar factor in the early 1970s may have resulted in the death of many traffic police, simply because the penalties for "excessive speed" were ratcheted up to "save fuel," while the penalties for vehicular homicide were left standing. The statistical bump in "killed on duty" deaths suggested that motorists may have been unable to resist the temptation when an officer jumped into the road to wave the motorist down. Of course, the statistics may simply reflect that the officers were simply exposed to more risk because there were more speeders. Difficult to tell at this distance. As Russell noted, the emotional investment in arguments tends to rise exponentially in inverse proportion to the evidence. This is because even an idiot will eventually give up if it is evident to all that his position is untenable. It is only when the delusions are pathological that a plethora of opposing evidence and, or, total lack of supporting evidence acts to strengthen the disconnection from reality. The small minority of terrified Americans left imagining that illegally invading Iraq has helped make them safer might be a good example of the latter.
The few primitive cultures retaining the death penalty tend to be religious, brutal, violent and barbaric. But I repeat myself. In such societies murders tend to be more prevalent and this dominates the statistics. Worth noticing that most murders are "crimes of passion" where the murderer not only knows the victim but is usually related. Outside of vehicular homicide, your nearest and dearest are the most likely people to be involved in your death. It is difficult to imagine that such murders would be deterred by an analysis of application of the death penalty vs the probability of a conviction*.
I wrote and lost a long reply based on the fundamental fact that "correlation isn't causation" and that the idiots advocating this idea are clearly as mathematically impaired as they ethically befuddled. But pro death penalty arguments fail on so many grounds it is difficult to think of any reasoning that compels its continued existence. After all, modern neuroscience indicates that for many criminals they are not strictly liable for their crimes in that they did not technically "form an intention". Which voids much criminal law. Psychology has shown us that rather than paying, as the law does, the highest credence to eyewitness testimony, that it should be regarded (as I have done for decades) as the least reliable evidence there is; worse even than purely circumstantial evidence. When this is coupled with the routine "piling on" of charges - as is usual in America (in order to persuade accused to plead guilty to lesser charges) - the number of false convictions soars**. When actual convictions and sentencing show massive bias, meaning that inequity is an inherent component of the system, then you have left the realms of deterrence and entered the dirty halls of vengeance and bigotry. Which, I would suggest, any unbiased examination of American penology will conclude is the primary sentencing factor and the only resulting social effect is the brutalization of the affected society.
Kind Regards
Hermit
PS I used to support the Death Penalty on two grounds. One was that we ought to protect ourselves and our society, even other prisoners (and possibly jailers), by preventing the repetition of murder by those already convicted of same. This argument fails when we realize that so long as we are prepared to sentence some murderers to death and others not, and execute them irrespective of the likelihood of repetition, that we are asserting that we can manage the risk and thus the death penalty is not required at all. The second reason was that the death penalty would be less cruel than life imprisonment, and leave the society with more dignity. This is still possibly the case, but it should not be our choice. I think that every incarcerate (like every non-incarcerate) should have the choice of electing for a state assisted euthanasia, so long as they are of sufficiently clear mind and hold to the purpose long enough to persuade society that this is a free choice.
* Even though unrecognized murders are not included (because there are no good statistics available. My own analysis, based on post-post mortem opening of cases based on other indications, leads me to suspect that between 30% and 50% of all homicides are not recognized as such.), still only 40% to 50% of (recognized) murders lead to a trial, and only 20% or so of those trials lead to a conviction. Usually when the evidence is overwhelming and the prosecutor has a signed confession, but not unusually when the defendant's lawyer is incompetent (which means the defendant is too poor to hire a competent advocate). Not having a witness to testify as to how the crime was committed is the most significant factor in murders where the defendent acted alone, and is why it is much easier to get a conviction when a group is involved and they can be brought to testify against one another. And of course, dead victims can't testify making murder unlike most kinds of trials.
**The situation is not helped when this is coupled with an easily swayed jury, not infrequently carefully selected for its stupidity and or likelihood to be swayed by emotional argument, rather than a judge and assessors skeptical by training and experience.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Does the Death Penalty Really Reduce Crime
« Reply #4 on: 2007-06-13 14:37:08 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2007-06-13 10:08:13
Here is a direct method ...
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[Blunderov] A typically lucid and rewarding analysis from the Hermit. A pleasure to read.
An interesting question appeared recently on "Ask a Philosopher."
"Question about Death, Punishment (Jyl Gentzler responds): In what sense is being put to death a punishment? How we can talk about things like "suffering" or "loss" if a person is dead (i.e., not conscious)?"
The full reply is at: http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/1596
but the tack that I want to take is that the genius of this question is how very clearly it reveals that the 'punishment' in capital punishment resides in the mental torment which is inflicted on the condemned prior to the execution.
The Japanese have apparently refined this concept far beyond the namby pamby practice of the West. There, the condemned are never informed of the date of their execution. The executioner simply turns up and guards haul out the unfortunate wretch who is for the drop that day with no warning. One prisoner recounted how the guards once hauled out a protesting, supplicating prisoner and belatedly discovered they had the wrong man half way to the scaffold, whereupon they returned him to his cell and fetched another man out instead.
Executions are rather rare in Japan and so it is the case that a condemned prisoner might spend twenty or thirty years on death row. They might even never actually be executed. But every time a guard appears...
Death by a thousand deaths. Perfect sadism.
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