Deterrence

Leslie Cantu:

Fear of death deters people from committing crimes, proponents say. They also believe that if attached to certain crimes, the penalty of death exerts a positive moral influence by placing a stigma on certain crimes like manslaughter, resulting in attitudes of disgust and horror to such acts. Furthermore, retentionists insist that the deterrent influence of the death penalty reaches across state lines into jurisdictions that have abolished it, and so all benefit by its continued use. Perhaps this is the intended goal of the Violent Crime Control And Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It "establishes constitutional procedures for the imposition of the death penalty for federal crimes. It applies to federal statutes that previously carried the death penalty and creates many new capital offenses. As a result of the Act, the death penalty may now be imposed for nearly sixty federal crimes. New capital offenses include the murder of a federal prisoner serving a life sentence, and drive by shootings in the course of certain drug offenses" (Internet 3/8/95). Those in support of capital punishment think achieving model citizens and a better society happen through fear and intimidation.


Dustin Cox:

The first argument that I shall contend with is that capital punishment does not deter crime. Opponents of capital punishment say the death penalty is not necessary. Other countries that no longer have the death penalty have not experienced an increase in the number of murders. The idea is that the death penalty does not deter crime. Countries such as Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and Belgium have not carried out executions since the early part of the century, yet these countries have not experienced a rise in crimr rates (Block, 1983). However, deterrence is not the question when you are looking at the retributive value of capital punishment. In short, deterrence can only work if the threat of punishment is combined with the conviction that the forbidden acts are not only illegal and therefore punishable but immoral. Without the conviction of morality, the easily frightened will not break the law, but the fearless will break the law, the irrational will break the law, and all others will break the law.

Apparently certain sections of this society have been desensitized to the point that human life has no value whatsoever. To that section of the population nothing will hold deterrent value. These people do not think about the consequences of their actions. Lack of foresight and morals, however, cannot be used as an excuse for the toleration of crime. Capital punishment is a retributive justice, and no direct correlation to murder rates can be logically applied with respect to the death penalty's deterrent value. Actual statistics about the deterrent value of capital punishment are not available because it is impossible to know who may have been deterred from a committing a crime.


Edward Laijas:

If people are thinking of committing murder and are aware that they will be released because of early parole, then it will not effectively deter any future crime from happening.


Jon Manning:

If capital punishment were carried out more it would prove to be the crime deterrent it was partly intended. Most criminals would think twice before committing murder if they knew their own lives was at stake. As it turns out though very few people are executed and so the death penalty is not a satisfactory deterrent. During highly publicized death penalty cases the homicide rate is found to go down but it goes back up when the case is over (Bailey).


Jessica Spinler:

Executions maximize public safety through a form of incapacitation and deterrence. Incapacitating a person is depriving s/he of the physical or intellectual power of natural of il/legal qualifications (Webster, 574). Executing a person takes away the capacity of and forcibly prevents recurrence of violence. Deterrence is the act or process of discouraging and preventing an action from occurring (Webster, 307). The possibility of execution would give a potential pause in the thought process of the murderer, using fear as an incentive for preventing recurrence or quite possibly the first occurrence of murder.


Jana Wofford:

Use of the death penalty as intended by law could actually reduce the number of violent murders by eliminating some of the repeat offenders thus being used as a system of justice, not just a method of deterrence. Opponents of the death penalty will argue that although it is said to exist as a crime deterrent, in reality it has no effect on crime at all. Modern supporters of capital punishment no longer view the death penalty as a deterrent, but as a just punishment for the crime, a shift from the attitudes of past generations.(Norman 1) Previously the deterrence argument put the burden of proof on death penalty advocates, but recently this argument has become less effective due to what one source said, "...in recent years the appeal of deterrence has been supplanted by a frank desire for what large majorities see as just vengeance." (Dionne 178-180)


Xavier (Frankie) Yanez:

According to advocates of the death penalty the main reason some of them take their position is because they feel that capital punishment deters crime. They feel that the murderers in this world will not kill if they know this. My answer to this is that the death penalty does not deter. People who are in the "business" of killing take measures to make sure they do not get caught; they skillfully concoct plans to make sure they are not suspected of criminal activity. A person who gets caught for killing another individual is usually someone who did not plan to murder in the first place. These individuals fall into the "crimes of passion" category. Crimes of passion are defined as unlawful acts of an individual which are unplanned and erupt as a result of a fit or rage or anger. These illegal actions usually stem from drunkenness or a short term loss of logic thinking which can be attributed to anger. The death penalty it would seem would logically deter crime, but the problem is that most murderers are unplanned and are not a result of logic.

There is other evidence which refutes the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent. During the 1930's the federal government, under the direction of Jack Gibbs, investigated the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring serious crime. The results of Gibbs investigation is that capital punishment did not deter. However, during the 1970's Prof. Isaac Ehrlich found out through his research that capital punishment did deter (Van den Haag, 210). Many advocates of capital punishment base their opinions on his results, but what many of them do not know is that no one else besides Ehrlich has come up with the same results (Blumstein, 358). The conclusion that researches have drawn up during the past decade is that the death penalty does not significantly have an effect on serious crime one way or the other.