Death Penalty May Save Lives

[dopa345]

Interesting article from the NY Times about a week ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/18deter.html?_r=1&oref=login

Personally, I support the death penalty simply because I feel that there are certain crimes heinous enough to warrant it but if it truly does deter crime and save lives, that's obviously an added bonus. I suspect this won't change any minds on those who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds but it does add an extra wrinkle to the argument.

 

[bigdaddy]

And smoking is good for you!

And the death penalty is bad for the simple reason that it kills innocent people.

 

[mdmrn]

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, but these are some interesting statistics.

Then again, anyone who's ready Freakanomic can see what people can do with statistics...

 

[mykevermin]

Freakonomics: yuck. That's what happens when an economist thinks he's a sociologist.

To a large extent, the participants in the debate talk past one another because they work in different disciplines.

“You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.” Responding to the new studies, he said, “is like learning to waltz with a cloud.”

To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop.

“To say anything else is to brand yourself an imbecile,” said Professor Wolfers, an author of the Stanford Law Review article criticizing the death penalty studies.

The available data is nevertheless thin, mostly because there are so few executions.

In 2003, for instance, there were more than 16,000 homicides but only 153 death sentences and 65 executions.

“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”

The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.

Troof.

Here's where the problem in the analyses lie:

A 2003 paper by Lawrence Katz, Steven D. Levitt and Ellen Shustorovich published in The American Law and Economics Review found a “a strong and robust negative relationship” between prison conditions, as measured by the number of deaths in prison from any cause, and the crime rate. The effect is, the authors say, “quite large: 30-100 violent crimes and a similar number or property crimes” were deterred per prison death.

There is a relationship that exists, but what it suggests is that would-be criminals have a distinct and fully aware knowledge of what the prison conditions are like. To some degree, there is anecdotal truth in that (what criminologists call "indirect experience" with crime - knowing someone who has spent time in prison/jail, or knowing someone who is a successful criminal). Criminals are clustered in certain areas, and that increases their likelihood of being exposed to each other. However, plenty of research shows stronger relationships between the *perception* of legal sanction/punishment and deterrence than actual imposed sanctions. What you *think* the justice system/corrections systems are like matters more than what they actually are like. Think of why you personally don't commit crimes: do you have first-hand knowledge of the justice system, conviction rates, sentences, and prison conditions? Of do you have an *idea* of what they're like, with no verifiable evidence of what they genuinely are like?

This recent research is just repeating the same things that were done in the 80s and 90's (when the bulk of mass incarceration occurred), that found no deterrent effect or a defiant effect (negative effect) of imprisonment. For some, the higher likelihood of incarceration, in addition to the clustering of criminals and ex-prisoners in communities, reduced any stigma of being imprisoned. When an adult black male stands a 30% chance (forgive my inability to recall the author who found that) of going to prison, it's a common occurrence, and normalized as a result.

I think that these researchers are just fortunate in their timing, as the crime rate has been on a substantial decline since the mid-1990's. The dependent variable in their research, then, is more an artifact of crime rates that are declining for reasons other than deterrence, rather than because of increased punishment.

 

[Mike23]

A professor recently told us that the Death penalties' support was falling in the states, and that no doctor would sign the death certificates, which list the cause of death as "justifiable homicide". Is that true? Google searches fail.

If you ever wanted to see what the rise of the conservative movement in Canada entailed, the death penalty is an excellent place. Now, they could never re-instate it without being thrown directly out of office, and indeed many of the caucas members may not believe in it.

Instead of doing this, Harper has been more subtle. He announced that Canada would not automatically seek clemency for the Canadians being convicted abroad and sentenced to the death penalty, as well as no longer co-sponsoring a UN resolution opposing its use.

The entire opposition is united on this. Stephane Dion even wrote a letter to the Governor of Montana, asking that his sentence be commuted, on the basis of humanity and justice.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/11/22/death-penalty.html?ref=rss

As an aside, I know that takes this thread way off-base, but it's a rant I've held in for a while.

 

[elprincipe]

Ridiculous assertion by economists. They shouldn't be applying economic theories to the social sciences. Most people who murder are not doing so while in a rational state of mind, weighing the pros and cons. If that were so, there would be a heck of a lot fewer murders.

Besides, there are plenty of countries where the death penalty is banned and have far lower murder rates that the U.S. How does this study explain that?

 

[trq]

[quote name='elprincipe']Ridiculous assertion by economists. They shouldn't be applying economic theories to the social sciences. Most people who murder are not doing so while in a rational state of mind, weighing the pros and cons. If that were so, there would be a heck of a lot fewer murders.

Besides, there are plenty of countries where the death penalty is banned and have far lower murder rates that the U.S. How does this study explain that?[/QUOTE]

Agreed.