Stormsmith wrote:The murder rate is higher in the US than in Japan, Europe, England and Canada, amongst others. We don't have the death penalty. If the DP is such a good deterring force why is the murder rate in the US so high? Oughtn't the opposite be true?
If the murder rate is higher in some areas than others for reasons unrelated to the existence of capital punishment, and a higher murder rate results in greater political returns from appearing tough on crime, then we might expect capital punishment to be implemented in areas where crime is, on average, higher. That could make it seem like there are no, or even negative, returns on implementing capital punishment.
Though, Suntzu is, in part, correct. You're not comparing apples and apples in that example either. Building explicitly on what Suntzu claimed, the U.S. murder rate
is driven in a large part by descendants of blacks slaves (blacks, otherwise, have quite a low murder rate, as I recall) and descendants of Scotch-Irish immigrants
*. In the case of the former, the rate of crime is probably related to a distinctly low level of social mobility open to the black youth which both accentuates the expected gains from crime, and frames the losses from getting caught in much lower terms. In the case of the latter, it is probably more-so related to their honor culture - murders by Scotch-Irish descendants tend to be more passionate and ill-meditated. Nevertheless, it seems obvious there's unique cultural factors which determine at least some of the variance. Then there is access to guns
**. Larger population densities. More intense rates of impoverishment. And a host of other characteristics that make the US qualitatively different than the other countries referred to.
So, just to state the point only implied so far, there's a bunch of reasons that crude national comparisons are probably highly inappropriate here.
The truth of the matter is that we don't know what effect capital punishment has on crime. Publications indicating either direction tend to have rather noted issues. I'd lean towards the arguments of professional criminologists: that murder tends to be either pathological, passionate or carried out with under-stated expectations about their chance of getting caught and, thus, the deterrent effect is probably quite close to nil. But much stronger arguments, which have empirical support, are that, it's more expensive
***, there's an unacceptably high rate of false convictions, and your likelihood of having the penalty imposed bares considerable relation to characteristics that shouldn't ever enter consideration (i.e. being a member of the working class, being black, etc.).
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* But not Hispanics.
** This probably has a similarly bidirectional relationship with crime rates.
*** With little added value as compared to a sentence of life without parole.
That the King is insane is now old news.
Irrelevant to the argument. Colour of skin doesn't change the fact that the death penalty is not a deterrent.
. The disparities for various racial combinations of defendant and victim were even wider and are shown in the table below.
- By ingliz
- By Deutschmania
- By Rancid