Punishment

[Faust]

no, most of it is paraphrased bits I've picked up over the years, some of it comes from Burroughs observations on crime and punishment and the rest comes from a discussion I was having with my uncle, he's a psychoanalyst, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.

[Requia ☣]

he's a psychoanalyst, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him[/b].

Smart move.

[Faust]

he's a psychoanalyst, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him[/b].

Smart move.

He is a crackpot who cant manage his own life but he has some interesting ideas. Burroughs was more my source but I'm not going to go citing pieces, if you disagree I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

[Requia ☣]

I have no idea, it sounds right, but if I just accepted things because they sound right to me I'd be no better than a psychoanalyst.  I got access to psychinfo back though, so I may take a look through it and see whats been done on this later today.

[Faust]

I have no idea, it sounds right, but if I just accepted things because they sound right to me I'd be no better than a psychoanalyst.  I got access to psychinfo back though, so I may take a look through it and see whats been done on this later today.

I generally take things posted on a forum with a pinch of salt anyway.

[Placid Dingo]

Criminologists report that the death penalty does not deter murder

A recent study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology reported that 88% of the country's top criminologists surveyed do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide.  Eighty-seven percent of them think that the abolition of the death penalty would not have a significant effect on murder rates and 77% believe that "debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems." (M. Radelet and T. Lacock, DO EXECUTIONS LOWER HOMICIDE RATES?: THE VIEWS OF LEADING CRIMINOLOGISTS, 99 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 489 2009)

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-death-penalty

SOme other stats suggest the opposite:

During the temporary suspension on capital punishment from 1972-1976, researchers gathered murder statistics across the country. In 1960, there were 56 executions in the USA and 9,140 murders. By 1964, when there were only 15 executions, the number of murders had risen to 9,250. In 1969, there were no executions and 14,590 murders, and 1975, after six more years without executions, 20,510 murders occurred rising to 23,040 in 1980 after only two executions since 1976. In summary, between 1965 and 1980, the number of annual murders in the United States skyrocketed from 9,960 to 23,040, a 131 percent increase. The murder rate -- homicides per 100,000 persons -- doubled from 5.1 to 10.2. So the number of murders grew as the number of executions shrank. Researcher Karl Spence of Texas A&M University said:

      "While some [death penalty] abolitionists try to face down the results of their disastrous experiment and still argue to the contrary, the...[data] concludes that a substantial deterrent effect has been observed...In six months, more Americans are murdered than have killed by execution in this entire century...Until we begin to fight crime in earnest [by using the death penalty], every person who dies at a criminal's hands is a victim of our inaction."

Notes Dudley Sharp of the criminal-justice reform group Justice For All:

    "From 1995 to 2000," "executions averaged 71 per year, a 21,000 percent increase over the 1966-1980 period. The murder rate dropped from a high of 10.2 (per 100,000) in 1980 to 5.7 in 1999 -- a 44 percent reduction. The murder rate is now at its lowest level since 1966. "

http://www.wesleylowe.com/cp.html

Again, same arguement, this time from David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., a Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation.

Using a panel data set of over 3,000 counties from 1977 to 1996, Professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul R. Rubin, and Joanna M. Shepherd of Emory University found that each execution, on average, results in 18 fewer murders.[17] Using state-level panel data from 1960 to 2000, Professors Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd were able to compare the relationship between executions and murder incidents before, during, and after the U.S. Supreme Court's death penalty moratorium.[18] They found that executions had a highly significant negative relationship with murder incidents. Additionally, the implementation of state moratoria is associated with the increased incidence of murders.

But then somebody else points out the homocide RATE does not increase with executions;

From 1976 to 1996, the number of executions per year in the United States has increased from 0 to just under 60. The homicide rate per 100,000 population has remained constant at just under 10. 3...

   In 1967, a study by Thorsten Sellin 6 compared the homicide rates between neighboring states in which some had the death penalty, and others did not. Sellin also compared murder rates before and after states either abolished or reinstated the death penalty. He found no statistically valid difference in rates in both cases. These results were summarized in a book by J.Q. Wilson. 7 The study might have been affected by the numbers of executions at the time; they had dropped to near zero in the U.S., so that even those states with death penalty laws on the books were not exercising them fully....

A 1998 research study conducted for the United Nations concluded: "This research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis."

This same source concedes thAT...

A study by Isaac Ehrlich found that the murder rate responded to changes in the likelihood of execution. He concluded that 7 or 8 murders were prevented by each execution from 1933 to 1967....

A study by Kenneth Wolpin showed that each execution, on average, reduced the number of murders in England by 4...

Though they also said...

Comparing adjacent states where one state has the death penalty and the other does not, frequently shows that the states with capital punishment have a much higher homicide rate...

   The FBI  Uniform Crime Reports Division publication Crime in the US for 1995 reports that there were 4.9 murders per 100,000 people in states that have abolished the death penalty, compared with 9.2 murders in those states which still have the death penalty. "In no state has the number of murders diminished after legalizing the death penalty"....

Canada's homicide rate has dropped 27% since the death penalty was abolished in that country (for ordinary crimes) in 1976. For many years prior to 1976, the federal government had converted each death sentence to life imprisonment.

(All from http://www.religioustolerance.org/execut4.htm)

Finally, my favourite economists say this;

Associated Press reporter Robert Tanner writes an article today stating that evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty reduces crime. As with most media coverage of controversial issues, there is a paragraph or two in which the other side makes its case. In this instance, the lone voice arguing against the efficacy of the death penalty is Justin Wolfers, a professor at Wharton who just can't seem to keep his name out of our blog. Tanner does his best to make Wolfers look bad, quoting him as dismissing these studies because they appear in "second-tier journals."

Given the evidence I've examined, I believe that Wolfers is on the right side of this debate. There are recent studies of the death penalty — most bad, but some reasonable — that find it has a deterrent effect on crime. Wolfers and John Donohue published an article in the Stanford Law Review two years ago that decimated most of the research on the subject.

Analyses of data stretching farther back in time, when there were many more executions and thus more opportunities to test the hypothesis, are far less charitable to death penalty advocates. On top of that, as we wrote in Freakonomics, if you do back-of-the-envelope calculations, it becomes clear that no rational criminal should be deterred by the death penalty, since the punishment is too distant and too unlikely to merit much attention. As such, economists who argue that the death penalty works are put in the uncomfortable position of having to argue that criminals are irrationally overreacting when they are deterred by it.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/does-the-death-penalty-really-reduce-crime/

[Doktor Howl]

So what if it works?  It's irreversible, and there's no means to redress an error.

[Placid Dingo]

I was meaning to provide a reference salad for Faust's point. There's some in there with the stats that suggest it does work, then others that say it doesn't. Plus a couple which suggest Capital Punishment INCREASES the liklihood of violent crimes, which seems consistant with Fausts point. The impression I get is that it is NOT an efficient way to discourage crime, but figured I'd let people read the stats as they saw fit.

Also, I'd generally agree with your point about redress.

[Faust]

I was meaning to provide a reference salad for Faust's point. There's some in there with the stats that suggest it does work, then others that say it doesn't. Plus a couple which suggest Capital Punishment INCREASES the liklihood of violent crimes, which seems consistant with Fausts point. The impression I get is that it is NOT an efficient way to discourage crime, but figured I'd let people read the stats as they saw fit.

Also, I'd generally agree with your point about redress.

Awesome, cheers. I was pretty much expecting that, Most of the studies are probably biased in whichever direction the researchers believe, it would explain the mixed results.

[Requia ☣]

Ah, what I'm specifically looking for in what faust was saying earlier is the idea that treating criminals as failures rather than demons is an effective deterrent to crime.  Thing is, if this is true, then it provides a way to get some of the effects of reform based crime fighting without the consent of the government.  All you would have to do is convince people or the media to change the way they talk about crime.

It could also be used to say, combat civil issues like music piracy (well, some people just aren't successful or ethical enough to pay for our stuff...) or to provide deterrent against the kinds of things the government has no intention of trying to stop (see the financial fuckery thread).

Finding stuff that says reform based programs have lower recidivism than punishment is *easy*, its the reasons behind that I'm looking for details on.

[Telarus]

Do these studies even consider the amount of violence and crime that happen _in prison_?