Death Penalty As Deterrent

11:42 am EST November 18th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 14 Comments

That’s not why I am a death penalty supporter, but there’s new research.

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”

It should be hard – very hard – to execute someone. But we should have the option.

Topic: Crime

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14 Responses to “Death Penalty As Deterrent”

pawtrax says:

November 18, 2007 at 12:53 pm

Sigh. Please don’t go bashing some idiotic “media research” group like Brent Bozell’s bunch of clowns then turn right around and hand pick a quote from an article to claim the article supports your point of view. The article doesn’t support your point of view at all. The next few paragraphs after your quote:

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”

But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”

It doesn’t sound to me like there is any reason to assume that these studies definitively prove anything.
pawtrax says:

November 18, 2007 at 12:56 pm

And this:

“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.
Oliver Willis says:

November 18, 2007 at 2:55 pm

Do you understand its ridiculous to say I cherry picked something when I link to it? Unless you want me to put up the whole story.
pawtrax says:

November 18, 2007 at 5:44 pm

No, you don’t have to post the whole story. But are you suggesting that you presented article and the quote you pulled in an accurate way? Because you didn’t. You might have said, “there’s new research, it’s disputed, but here’s why i’m convinced …”
megamoze says:

November 18, 2007 at 9:16 pm

I hate to disagree, Oliver, but I’m sure cutting hands off in Saudi Arabia discourages theft too. That doesn’t make the barbaric practice an acceptable “option” that should be practiced by any reasonable civilized government.
pawtrax says:

November 18, 2007 at 10:11 pm

Magazone makes the larger point here of course — leaving aside the fact that these studies are disputed.
Oliver Willis says:

November 19, 2007 at 2:52 am

Cutting hands for theft is idiotic. Executing someone for murder or mass killing is perfectly logical. If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?
megamoze says:

November 19, 2007 at 3:17 am

Cutting hands for theft is idiotic.

Sorry, Oliver, you just argued that deterrence was a perfectly reasonable justification for state-sponsored barbarity. Now it’s idiotic? You can’t have it both ways.

Executing someone for murder or mass killing is perfectly logical. If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?

The eye-for-an-eye justification is the definition of barbarity. Like it or not, cutting off hands makes about as much sense and is about as logical as state-sponsored execution. The death penalty does, after all, exclude us once again from the ranks of every other civilized country in the world (except Japan, who have only executed 39 prisoners in 14 years), and instead puts us in the company of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

If you believe that the state has the right to take a prisoner’s life, then there is no reasonable way to object to torture or any other form of abuse. The moral line you’ve drawn is off the charts.
z_adura says:

November 19, 2007 at 3:18 am

Oliver, killing someone for killing someone is idiotic as well.
SpiderJ says:

November 19, 2007 at 9:57 am

If you could prove to me that the death penalty is always applied fairly and only to the guilty, then maybe you’d have a hope of convincing me that the death penalty is a necessary state function.

Otherwise, the system is just as broken and undependable as, say, the missile defense shield. We should have ended the death penalty the first time it was proven that an innocent man was put to death. Instead, we just pretended it was an aberration that would never happen again.
pawtrax says:

November 19, 2007 at 11:42 am

“If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?”

Im sorry there’s an inherent logic in here? Is it a logic we can apply consistently across all crimes? A rapist should be raped, for instance?
Oliver Willis says:

November 19, 2007 at 2:31 pm

Well if the glove fits…

I didn’t say I endorsed the deterrent argument. I personally don’t believe that a possible killer decides to not kill because the state has the death penalty. But I think that for the most horrible, heinous crimes, we need to have the ultimate penalty on the table.
SpiderJ says:

November 19, 2007 at 2:54 pm

My question is this: how is death a more horrible penalty than lifetime incarceration? And in the most horrible, heinous cases, how is lifetime incarceration in a small, rarely-opened SuperMax cell a “better” penalty than death?

Death happens and it’s possible that the condemned won’t even remember he was punished (because he won’t remember anything at all). Why is that a more severe penalty than allowing the murderer to be alone with his thoughts until his body finally shuts down?

The death penalty satisfies us. And it still doesn’t bring our loved ones back.
lisa4k2002 says:

November 20, 2008 at 7:25 pm

as far as innocent being put to death, there is no recorded incident of that happening in over a century. The United States has the most accurate system to teh tune of 99.6% being correct. And if you are truly worried about the innocent, the murderers should be put to death to save the innocents from him killing again, whether it be other inmates, prison guards or anyone they can get thier hands on!!