It
is argued that the death penalty acts as a deterrent in ways that other
penalties don't, and thereby lowers the crime rate and improves public safety. I'll admit, that doesn't work for my psychology.
Whether I lose my life after fifteen years in prison or after fifty,
I've still lost my life. But that's just me. I'm not a representative
sample.
We'll try to analyze this argument from a statistical perspective, as well. Going back to our public safety argument, we can figure that something like 120 innocent people are on death row right now. Since they'll be there for about fifteen years, that's about 8 innocents per year killed if we keep the death penalty. Will the deterrence effect of the death penalty existing prevent more murders than that?
The homicide rate in the US is about 14,000 per year. I can't find a number for how many of those are premeditated (and thus subject to deterrent effects), but we can come up with a reasonable number. There are about 100 new death sentences per year, and not all premeditated murders result in a death sentence due to differing laws and circumstances and plea bargains. So let's say 1,000 murders a year are premeditated. In that case, if the death penalty deters even 1% of potential premeditated murders, it makes up for the lost innocent lives.
That's an effect so small that almost no experiment I can imagine could convince me it existed. Smarter people than me have tried, and the results are similarly unconvincing. Given that, I think that's where deterrence has to land: it might work, it might not, and there's no way to tell. This argument is null in either direction.
We'll try to analyze this argument from a statistical perspective, as well. Going back to our public safety argument, we can figure that something like 120 innocent people are on death row right now. Since they'll be there for about fifteen years, that's about 8 innocents per year killed if we keep the death penalty. Will the deterrence effect of the death penalty existing prevent more murders than that?
The homicide rate in the US is about 14,000 per year. I can't find a number for how many of those are premeditated (and thus subject to deterrent effects), but we can come up with a reasonable number. There are about 100 new death sentences per year, and not all premeditated murders result in a death sentence due to differing laws and circumstances and plea bargains. So let's say 1,000 murders a year are premeditated. In that case, if the death penalty deters even 1% of potential premeditated murders, it makes up for the lost innocent lives.
That's an effect so small that almost no experiment I can imagine could convince me it existed. Smarter people than me have tried, and the results are similarly unconvincing. Given that, I think that's where deterrence has to land: it might work, it might not, and there's no way to tell. This argument is null in either direction.
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