(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Matthew Malthouse]

On 12/04/2012 01:38, Marc Aramini wrote:
> I am not going to get too involved here, as it will no doubt veer further and further from its Wolfe origins, but the claim that the death penalty is not a deterrent from further crime ... does that imply that other systems just pay for people for life, that there is a higher percentage of unremediable repeat offenders in the death penalty countries, or that all violent crimes are just one offs that are not repeated?
>
> It seems very clear to me that if a person is prone to kill for some reason, that circumstance may come up more than once in their life.  You have already deterred future crime by either incarcerating them or killing them.  Incarceration costs money, money which we would bedgrudge the homeless who have not committed crimes.
>
> I think the ultimate detterent from repeat offenses is clearly a quick death not tied up in a too long and costly appeals system.  How can that not be a crime deterrent?  (Remember that some people in charge of the venue were executed for not enough seats at the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman - wow!)

Deterrence is *the* big claim for capital punishment.

But the statistics don't support that.  US homicide rates have dropped 
from approximately 9.5 per 100,000 population per year in 1990 to 5.4 on 
2009.  But they dropped more or less equally in death penalty States and 
non death penalty States.  Moreover the 14 non death penalty States 
started with and consistently retained a lower murder rate throughout 
being at or below the national average.

All sorts of reasons that capital punishment might be deemed beneficial 
but deterrence is not one of them.

Matthew