Self-Defense & Violence Prevention Blog

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Death Penalty Does Not Deter Murder

Jeremy J. Collins recently wrote an article about the death penalty. In the article he included that following statistics:

Murder rates are lower in states without the death penalty. This holds true even when comparing neighboring states.

While Southern states account for over 80 percent of the executions in this country, they have consistently had the highest murder rate of the nation’s four regions.

Since 1972, homicide rates in Canada and the United States have moved in lockstep, yet in that period, Canada has not executed a single person and the United States has executed over 1,000 people. When homicides go down in the United States, they go down in Canada, even though Canada does not use capital punishment.

One of the authors of the Emory study (Joanna Shepherd) found in a separate study that while the death penalty deterred murder in six states, it actually increased murder in 13 states and had no effect on the murder rate in eight states. Other studies have found that the death penalty has a “brutalization effect,” increasing the number of murders.

Generally, I believe most people already consider it settled that the death penalty does not deter murder.

I personally do not have a preference between executing or permanently jailing unrehabilitatable victimizers. However, I find it asinine to use execution or incarceration as a form of moral punishment or vengeance. I only want them used to protect innocent people from victimization. To that end, we incarcerate convicted victimizers so that they can not physically hurt anybody.

If we can rehabilitate them, then I say let’s do it and release them so that we can make room for more victimizers.

I would much rather have a rehabilitated ex-murderer set free than a unrehabilitated sexual assaulter.

What do you think?

By | August 8th, 2007 | LEAVE A COMMENT

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