Josh

I apologize in advance for the fact that this is going to be long and probably boring. Here goes. I was reading my local newspaper yesterday and I ran across an article about Manhattan’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. He said:

“the death penalty drains public resources while doing nothing to deter crime.�

He stated this while urging legislators to drop efforts to restore the death penalty in New York State. In June of 2004, the Court of Appeals in Albany struck down the death penalty statue. The Court of Appeals stated that it was constitutionally flawed. Morgenthau stated further that “…The only honest justification for the death penalty is vengeance.� This leads me to my question. Does the death penalty deter crime? I’m going to provide a few theories here and then I’ll let my own opinions go wild. I took a class on the History of Gangs and we talked about various theories concerning the death penalty. The pain versus pleasure principle in punishment/deterrence states that the threat of punishment must be severe enough to counter the benefits or pleasures that the criminal would receive from the crime. Also, the punishment must be administered quickly so that potential criminals will see a clear cause and effect relationship between the crime and the punishment. There are two kinds of deterrence, general and specific. General deterrence is when a punishment deters potential criminals from committing crimes while specific deterrence refers to the inability of convicted criminals to commit further crimes as a result of their punishment. There is no doubt that capital punishment is a specific deterrent, but is it a general deterrent as well? There is evidence supporting both sides of this argument. Since the early 20th century, social scientists have been examining the general deterrent effect. In 1967, Thorston Selling, a noted researcher, concluded that “The presence of the death penalty in law and practice has no discernible effect as a deterrent to murder.� However, in the mid-1970’s, these results were countered by a statistician named Isaac Ehrlich. He looked at national crime rates from 1930 to 1970 and he estimated that each execution deterred between 7 and 8 homicides. But it must be noted that statisticians have not been able to duplicate these results. Many believe that social science is incapable of determining the effectiveness of capital punishment because of rough and incomplete data. These people believe that common sense will deter crime, stating that people fear death more than life in prison. Ernest van den Haag said “What is feared most deters most.� He also believes that capital punishment may not prevent all murders but it has prevented some. Because of this, many believe that it is enough to support this theory. Many people for the death penalty argue that the execution is not carried out in a reasonable amount of time after sentencing. (It takes an average of ten years from conviction to execution.) Many say that because of this, it eliminates the cause and effect relationship between crime and punishment. The brutalization theory argues that instead of deterring crime, capital punishment actually increases murder rates because the state, through executions, devalues human life. William Bowes and Glenn Pierce studied homicide records in New York State between 1907 and 1963 and found that murder rates increased slightly in the months following an execution. Also, there is the argument that because most murders are unplanned and impulsive, murderers aren’t deterred by capital punishment. In such an emotional state, a murder is unlikely to think about the distant possibility of execution. There is evidence to support all these theories. However, I believe that we won’t really know if capital punishment is a deterrent to crime unless state governments perform swift executions after convictions. However, because of all the appeals involved in death penalty cases, I’m afraid that we won’t ever get that chance. Despite this, I believe that swift executions wouldn’t deter crime all that much. It might make a small impact, but overall it wouldn’t really help. In my opinion, the death penalty is wrong. It goes against everything involved in human rights. If anything were to deter crime it would be life in prison. But no one has the funds to allow this to happen. Mostly because all of the funds are eaten away on Death Row. Our prisons are over-crowded and poorly run. The focus of prisons isn’t rehabilitation, but to keep criminals locked away until their sentence is over, when criminals can appear back on the streets and terrorize more people. In order to start a decline in prison, we first need to rehabilitate criminals that have a chance of getting out of prison so they do not become repeat offenders, or can stop repeating offenses.