Crime and punishment
Many claim that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent to crime. This overlooks the obvious: the executed criminal does not return to a life of crime. What brought this to mind was this story of a convicted rapist who murdered a 14 year old girl. I don’t understand why this man was alive, much less free. I wonder how long it will be until he’s released again.
Posted on May 11th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: law
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You tread right into the swamp of my first, never completed, dissertation proposal.
There are four aims of criminal punishment: deterrence, punishment per se, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. You have conflated deterrence and incapacitation. Last time I checked, there was no sound scientific evidence that deterrence works, by death penalty, incarceration, whatever.
What you want here is permanent incapacitation this guy. Predicting recidivism, however, is extremely counter-intuitive. Turns out that the property crime types are the most likely to commit further crimes of this same nature, whereas recidivism among murderers is very low frequency and very difficult to predict. Our penal system is bursting at the seams with prisoners who shouldn’t be there.
I’m not disagreeing with you. I am merely pointing out that it’s a very complicated problem. Add the facts that we are now in a DNA testing era and that even the guilty sit for a “cruel and unusual” length of time on death row — man, you got a criminal justice mess on your hands.
A good start would be clearing our prisons of persons busted for possession of marijuana and also persons with development disabilities such as mental retardation. Then you would have the policy option of choosing to permanently incapacitate (i.e. incarcerate) this guy, along with a bunch of other people who fit the same profile but won’t ever commit another serious crime.
Now, pick your lesser of two evils. My views on this policy question have been dead in the U.S. for a quarter century.
A government should not have the right to kill its citizens.
CCL,
With exception of Timothy McVeigh and the junkie who beat up my grandmother to steal her jewelry, I agree.
I have issues with sexual predators who murder children. I think they should be put down like rabid dogs. As far as that goes, a rabid dog is an innocent brute who contracted a fatal disease. The sexual predator deserves death; the dog merely requires it.
Until we come up with a perfect system, we will kill innocent people by mistake. The use of DNA has freed many from death row. If you think its OK to kill innocent people, go ahead and get in line.
I’ve seen studies that show a relation between capital punishment being enforced and a drop in the murder rate. I don’t think the state or anyone has the right to kill innocent people. That is murder. But a society must have standards it is willing to uphold. If you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt, then you forfeit the right to live. If it takes some DNA testing so be it. I think you will find the DNA evidence will convict more than free.
My point is that when the government kills one innocent person that is one too many, and until and unless the government becomes absolutely perfect in selecting who it kills, it should not have the right kill anyone.
Look, I’m as fearful and skeptical of government and the people who gravitate to its power centers as you and the next guy but ‘absolutely perfect’ (?). Them is strong words. I see your point.
The studies showing a relationship between capital punishment and “the murder rate”, are quite flawed usually, from design to data interpretation. “The murder rate”: go look at this FBI-generated reporting of crimes figure, specifically, it’s operational definition of the study and ponder making it the dependent variable in a quasi-experimental study design. Even if conducted flawlessly, it is almost impossible to control for other variables that may explain data variance found in our even more vague, but more importantly, low frequency, “implementation of the death penalty” (your independent variable). If anyone found anything more than a small correlation without any evidence of a causal relation, I’d be shocked.