Consider all the evidence for the deterrent effect of capital punishment and the evidence against any deterrent effects. Should the death penalty be scrapped as a punishment? Is it efficient?
What ever the out come maybe, if capital punishment is implemented or not, resources are going to be lost or wasted. Labor: The victim that was killed. The new prisoner that will never see the light of day. The the guards in the that have to monitor the prisoners. All of the appeals, the court cost, the lawyer costs are wasted on one single event that had happened. Material goods: The prison building, and jail houses are structures that don't produce any type of good. It is a sinkhole. If capital punishment was implemented, it needs to be carried out right away so that we are not wasting resources on a soon to be dead person.
With all the inconclusive evidence of whether capital punishment does or does not have a deterrent effect, I do believe it should be scrapped as a punishment. As Winter states, “the irrational criminal… grossly overestimate the impact of the deterrent effect” (pg. 45). Empirical evidence shows that only 1 in every 200 criminal on death row is actually executed, not to count those who appeal to have their sentence turned into life in prison. The rational criminal almost has no fear of the death penalty. Moreover, the death penalty as currently constituted is more costly. It has 2 different trails, for conviction and sentencing, and on top of that numerous appeals. The death penalty allocates more resources to execute a prisoner, instead of keeping them incarcerated. Furthermore, as mentioned by the group defending the death penalty, one argument is to keep criminals from committing these future crimes again, yet prisons incarceration already keeps them from committing further crimes. Furthermore, in executing a prisoner, we may have a incurring a social loss, in which that prisoner could have provided some sort of benefit to society. Capital punishment is currently to costly a punishment to continue with. The deterrent effects seem to be slim at best, and its resources would could use in other opportunities.
Depending on where the evidence comes from, any article that supports or deters the death penalty is greatly influenced by the person who wrote it. Therefore, trying to determine if it works or not is unknown, one can't really say for sure. But, think of this, lets say your have a fairly good size dog in your backyard protecting your property. If a robber was randomly breaking and entering based on the ease of access into a house, their probably going to pass up the house with a dog. Will the owner ever know if the dog paid off....no, but the dog did.(Personal Experience) Think of the death penalty as that dog. I know for some people out there it HAS to be a deterrent. It keeps the honest...well honest, reason being is because regardless if you kill somebody your gonna die or go to jail for a long time. I do feel that the process needs to be faster which would increase efficiency but security is always going to have a cost. Building jails to house people has to be done. It a deterrent just like the death penalty but on a different scale that affects different types of individuals. Its another way to keep the honest...HONEST!
After everything I have heard about the death penalty, I think it should be abolished. If the majority of people on death row don't get executed (1 for every 200), how does that deter criminals. The certainty of punishment in this case death penalty is very small, yet the severity of punishment is very high. Criminals have been known to react more to the certainty of punishment than severity and in the case of the death penalty the certainty is really low. The costs associated with the death penalty are also very high. The appeal process and actual execution process have been estimated to cost $2.5 million. The criminal instead could be sentenced to life in prison without parole. This would still cost the public, but at only a rate of about $20,000 a year. The death penalty hasn't been proven to be a successful deterrent effect. Why pay for something that has such a high cost, if it can't conclusively be considered effective?
No, the death penalty is not efficient, and should be 'scrapped'. Evidence isn't conclusive enough to prove that it is an effective deterrent; and, even if it was, unless it is A LOT more effective than life without parole, why use something that costs so much more?
"State prisons have a revolving door, according to a report based on the largest study ever conducted of the relapse into criminal behavior in the United States... [67] percent of former inmates released from state prison in 1994 were charged with at least one serious new crime within the following three years, the U.S. Justice Department report shows..." . Therefore according to the datum above, we may conclude (by contradiction) that if prison is not a deterrent therefore death penalty is. Also during the classroom debate, I believe (if I remember correctly) that many points pointed out was about cost. Well the reason why death penalty is costly is highly due to the lifespan of each case; however if the lifespan of each case is decrease or any of the many other factors(number of trials, isolation, appeals, amount of juries, etc) is change will result in a major decrease in cost.
It depends on the Institutions available within a given State. In the US, the State has provided a legal system which can be exploited in such a way that could rack up excessive costs. And given the subjective nature of the value people place upon their lives, the people within the Institution have an incentive to partake in non-efficient spending in order to keep their life. Therefore, the presence of a death-penalty within American jurisprudence inevitably creates large inefficiencies from an economic standpoint since costs people take to merely avoid death will require far too many resources and spending than the benefits permit.
However, a different State structure could very well encourage the use of the death penalty.
i believed that death penalty should be abolished. it cost a lot of money to put someone in death penalty because we have a court trial which is costly high hire a lawyer. instead of putting death penalty, we can increase the probability of apprehension and also increase level of severity. we can reduce the crime because of those actions therefore, it is more efficiency rather than using death penalty.
In my opinion, I think that the death penalty for capital punishment should be scrapped due to the fact that it does not provide efficiency in using scarce resources in the criminal justice system in particular and for society as a whole. Although capital punishment seems to have a good magnitude of deterrent effect on murder crimes, the process of which it is carried out takes such a long time, and thus is costly with regards to the use of resources (time, money to keep the criminals in jail, trials, etc.) Also when capital punishment is performed, society has to go through social loss considering the fact that it loses the production power from the criminals being executed (assuming that they can contribute to the work force of the economy). Overall the death penalty is a costly method of punishment, in which not only it does not achieve any efficiency but it also causes more social loss to society.
Brandon has a point; institutions matter. If the system makes money through the death penalty process then it will be very difficult to observe and report on the true costs & benefits or the real deterrent effect.
In my opinion, the death penalty is inefficient when looked at economically. It is not a very good deterrent of criminal acts based on the facts presented in class. Also, the cost of condemning someone to death is too costly, and those resources could be of better use elsewhere. With cost of one execution, a whole fleet of policemen could be trained and hired and put on salary for a year. This would increase the chance of apprehension which would be a very effective deterrent to future murders. Or, the money could be used to provide funding to research and development organizations that may try to find better ways to improve conviction rates in murders through DNA, ballistic, or other methods. With a higher chance of apprehension and higher conviction rates, people would think more rationally before committing heinous acts on another person. The purpose of capital punishment is to be a deterrent for people not to commit violent crimes, and if people are not deterred from committing them, the punishment needs to be re-evaluated or restructured in a way to be less costly on the taxpayers.
**From Brandon Chapman** From an efficiency standpoint it seems that capital punishment should indeed be scrapped. Due to the relatively inconclusive data that there is a significant deterrent effect from the use of capital punishment, it becomes hard to justify its large cost per execution. The lack of speediness and all the added costs of the appeals and lawyers really builds for the case against capital punishment. The resources used in this drawn out process can very well be used in much more efficient ways. From expanding police forces or training inmates to learn skilled jobs that we can then extract their labor from while imprisoned. So unless the process can be implemented much faster there seems to be no real need to spend the extra resources on capital punishment, when a punishment of life without parole can be implemented.--Brandon Chapman
I believe that the death penalty is not efficient and it should be scrapped. Instead of sentence them to death row they should just spend their life in prison. It cost more to execute a prisoner then to keep them in prison for life. They have to go through appeals and getting lawyers to hear their case AGAIN. We as American citizens are paying for the appeals and our money can go to other resources in society.
I think the death penalty as it currently exists is very inefficient and should be done away with. The lack of solid empirical evidence that can survive repeated tests fails to justify the huge costs associated with capital punishment. The uncertainty of punishment also plays a big role in its inefficiency; if the process were somehow streamlined so that the threat of being executed for committing a crime was more real then I think it would certainly deter more people from committing that crime. I think another interesting issue is the presence of rationality in people who murder others. At least for those who murder out of passion, are they acting rationally - carefully considering the costs and benefits of their actions - at that moment?
I believe that with the structure that it is under now, the death penalty should be abolished. It currently wastes many valuable resources that could be used for other things that directly benefit society. The slight deterrent effect that does occur is not enough to counteract the wasted resources. On top that, life in prison could serve just as much of a deterrent. It seems that if some aspects of it were changed, such as the amount of time that it takes for someone to actually be executed, it might be more efficient. Also, if people were actually executed much more quickly than they are now, it might even increase the deterrent effect. Right now, many probably don’t think that much about the consequences because they know that if it was ever to happen, it wouldn’t occur for many many years, so they probably aren’t thinking about it as much before they commit the crime.
Some of the research I did had differing/conflicting arguments and data supporting whether the death penalty was a deterrent or not. The process of enforcing the death penalty is very long and drains obvious resources (time, money, effort, etc). From an efficiency standpoint, it should be scrapped. An economic point of view would suggest that life in prison would be more efficient and drain the taxpayers money even less then it already does. From a personal standpoint, I believe it should be kept just because it seems logical and fair to put the most violent and dangerous criminals to death. Overall, this is an economic class so to keep it simple, the death penalty should be scrapped. Someone who spends life in prison will ultimately die of old age and or die at the hands of another inmate. The current system allows the states to basically premeditate the murder of these criminals (in sense, even though it is not necessarily the same ). I don’t believe many criminals think about how many crimes they can commit, or how severe of a crime they can commit without getting the death penalty or basically keeping track of how many crimes they can commit before being considered for capital punishment. A lot of these murders and brutal crimes are done out of passion or anger, drug use, etc . So it may be the case that the person is not thinking logically at the time, and are a detriment to themselves and everyone in their path. I know other people have covered similar points, but these are all relevant arguments. In the realm of Economics though? SCRAP it. -Mychal
I believe the death penalty should be abolished. Not only is it cheaper to implement life without parole for the punishment of sever crimes than it is to execute an inmate but evidence shows that the death penalty does not works as a deterrent effect. There are also moral implications about what it says about American Society that even though this policy is inefficient, we are going to peruse the justification of murder of members of society by a designated group of individuals for punishment of the murder (or in some cases, a combination of lesser crimes depending on state) by a different member of society. The act of murder is violent; what ever content it falls in. I also believe that the inmates on life with out parole can serve as a potential source of revenue to the victims in the form of reparations if they are able to generate revenue while in prison. This can be from regulated(not in violation of humyn rights or prisoner rights working conditions)work opportunities to inmates or by working in some other way to produce a reparation to the victim.
The economic approach to capital punishment cannot be determined by explicit costs alone. The explicit costs of conviction, imprisonment, appeal, and execution are easy to calculate, and would infer that capital punishment is inefficient and wasteful. However, the costs to the victims is not as easy to assess. Additionally, it should be investigated whether the death of an offender is equal to the harm caused to the victim's families. What will the cost be for vengeance? Using Becker's model, it might be more efficient to allow the offender to work inside of incarceration and pay restitution to the families. This may have an impact on vengeance. Ultimately, capital punishment may need to be addressed by more than just the economic discipline.
Before this class I was not clear on how the death penalty really worked and if or not it served as a deterrent to future crimes. During the in class discussion it made sense to me that the death penalty was not efficient and the statistics showed that it was not a good deterrent. To start off the cost alone is enormous having to pay around 2 million dollars just for the lawyers and appeals and then another 90,000 dollars just to put them to death. On the other hand it only takes 20,000 per year for someone to serve a life sentence without parole. In addition, the rational criminal would rather have the death penalty then to have to sit in a cell for the rest of his life. With that said it is simply not fulfilling the deterrent part everyone expected. It is not efficient because 1 out of every 200 prisoners on death row actually gets executed. It doesn't even make sense to keep the death penalty going if it doesn't do its job in the first place.
There is no doubt, in rational individuals, that the greatest personal injury one can suffer is the loss of his or her own life. Now, if someone killed one of our loved ones like our brother, sister, mother, father, grandpa/grandma etc., without a doubt, we would suffer greatly (assuming we care for them). So, as individuals would we really make the situation better by doing the same thing to the individual who killed our loved one by killing them in return? My answer is going to be, that for that moment in which we resent that individual we will answer, yes. Anyways, an eye for an eye as they say, no? Well, the death penalty serves two purposes. The first purpose it serves is to “try and repair the injury”, and the second is to prevent further “evils in the future,” (Mill). In class, we have concluded that there is no deterrent effect associated with the death penalty in our current state and time. It hasn’t been proven to prevent “evils in the future,” and more than that, it is too costly. So for that matter, I would say we should abolish the death penalty. Now, if it was up to me, and someone murdered someone, the best way to prevent further “evils in the future” would be to torture them alive. I wouldn’t mind burning them alive, hitting them, kicking them or doing to them any torture one can think of. Furthermore, I would permit the family members affected to perform these acts, since they are the ones that need the reparation. On top of this, they would probably do it for free and some wouldn’t hesitate doing it. I think that by doing this, future murders (rational ones) would think a little bit more about committing a murder before doing it, but at least the affected family would get a little more satisfaction than just watching the state killing him/her with love, a needle! In the end, this is my belief, but I know that this would be unconstitutional.
By considering all the evidence generated in states were capital punishment is allowed, the deterrent effect of capital punishment does not shows much change in criminals behavior. There is not concrete evidence that shows that the deterrent effect is efficient while talking about capital punishment. In all of those states, the rate of crimes has remained the same even though capital punishment is implemented. Criminals do not suffer and pay the equivalent damage that they generate to society while committing a crime. The humans who suffer are the victim's and criminal's family. It is also not efficient because the state loses much money in the process. That money could be designated to other departments and generate more efficiency to society in other aspects. The death penalty should be scrapped as a punishment and life imprisonment should be implemented for those criminals.
What ever the out come maybe, if capital punishment is implemented or not, resources are going to be lost or wasted.
ReplyDeleteLabor: The victim that was killed. The new prisoner that will never see the light of day. The the guards in the that have to monitor the prisoners. All of the appeals, the court cost, the lawyer costs are wasted on one single event that had happened.
Material goods: The prison building, and jail houses are structures that don't produce any type of good. It is a sinkhole.
If capital punishment was implemented, it needs to be carried out right away so that we are not wasting resources on a soon to be dead person.
With all the inconclusive evidence of whether capital punishment does or does not have a deterrent effect, I do believe it should be scrapped as a punishment. As Winter states, “the irrational criminal… grossly overestimate the impact of the deterrent effect” (pg. 45). Empirical evidence shows that only 1 in every 200 criminal on death row is actually executed, not to count those who appeal to have their sentence turned into life in prison. The rational criminal almost has no fear of the death penalty. Moreover, the death penalty as currently constituted is more costly. It has 2 different trails, for conviction and sentencing, and on top of that numerous appeals. The death penalty allocates more resources to execute a prisoner, instead of keeping them incarcerated. Furthermore, as mentioned by the group defending the death penalty, one argument is to keep criminals from committing these future crimes again, yet prisons incarceration already keeps them from committing further crimes. Furthermore, in executing a prisoner, we may have a incurring a social loss, in which that prisoner could have provided some sort of benefit to society. Capital punishment is currently to costly a punishment to continue with. The deterrent effects seem to be slim at best, and its resources would could use in other opportunities.
ReplyDeleteDepending on where the evidence comes from, any article that supports or deters the death penalty is greatly influenced by the person who wrote it. Therefore, trying to determine if it works or not is unknown, one can't really say for sure. But, think of this, lets say your have a fairly good size dog in your backyard protecting your property. If a robber was randomly breaking and entering based on the ease of access into a house, their probably going to pass up the house with a dog. Will the owner ever know if the dog paid off....no, but the dog did.(Personal Experience) Think of the death penalty as that dog. I know for some people out there it HAS to be a deterrent. It keeps the honest...well honest, reason being is because regardless if you kill somebody your gonna die or go to jail for a long time. I do feel that the process needs to be faster which would increase efficiency but security is always going to have a cost. Building jails to house people has to be done. It a deterrent just like the death penalty but on a different scale that affects different types of individuals. Its another way to keep the honest...HONEST!
ReplyDeleteAfter everything I have heard about the death penalty, I think it should be abolished. If the majority of people on death row don't get executed (1 for every 200), how does that deter criminals. The certainty of punishment in this case death penalty is very small, yet the severity of punishment is very high. Criminals have been known to react more to the certainty of punishment than severity and in the case of the death penalty the certainty is really low. The costs associated with the death penalty are also very high. The appeal process and actual execution process have been estimated to cost $2.5 million. The criminal instead could be sentenced to life in prison without parole. This would still cost the public, but at only a rate of about $20,000 a year. The death penalty hasn't been proven to be a successful deterrent effect. Why pay for something that has such a high cost, if it can't conclusively be considered effective?
ReplyDeleteNo, the death penalty is not efficient, and should be 'scrapped'. Evidence isn't conclusive enough to prove that it is an effective deterrent; and, even if it was, unless it is A LOT more effective than life without parole, why use something that costs so much more?
ReplyDelete"State prisons have a revolving door, according to a report based on the largest study ever conducted of the relapse into criminal behavior in the United States... [67] percent of former inmates released from state prison in 1994 were charged with at least one serious new crime within the following three years, the U.S. Justice Department report shows..." . Therefore according to the datum above, we may conclude (by contradiction) that if prison is not a deterrent therefore death penalty is. Also during the classroom debate, I believe (if I remember correctly) that many points pointed out was about cost. Well the reason why death penalty is costly is highly due to the lifespan of each case; however if the lifespan of each case is decrease or any of the many other factors(number of trials, isolation, appeals, amount of juries, etc) is change will result in a major decrease in cost.
ReplyDeleteIt depends on the Institutions available within a given State. In the US, the State has provided a legal system which can be exploited in such a way that could rack up excessive costs. And given the subjective nature of the value people place upon their lives, the people within the Institution have an incentive to partake in non-efficient spending in order to keep their life. Therefore, the presence of a death-penalty within American jurisprudence inevitably creates large inefficiencies from an economic standpoint since costs people take to merely avoid death will require far too many resources and spending than the benefits permit.
ReplyDeleteHowever, a different State structure could very well encourage the use of the death penalty.
i believed that death penalty should be abolished. it cost a lot of money to put someone in death penalty because we have a court trial which is costly high hire a lawyer. instead of putting death penalty, we can increase the probability of apprehension and also increase level of severity. we can reduce the crime because of those actions therefore, it is more efficiency rather than using death penalty.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I think that the death penalty for capital punishment should be scrapped due to the fact that it does not provide efficiency in using scarce resources in the criminal justice system in particular and for society as a whole. Although capital punishment seems to have a good magnitude of deterrent effect on murder crimes, the process of which it is carried out takes such a long time, and thus is costly with regards to the use of resources (time, money to keep the criminals in jail, trials, etc.) Also when capital punishment is performed, society has to go through social loss considering the fact that it loses the production power from the criminals being executed (assuming that they can contribute to the work force of the economy). Overall the death penalty is a costly method of punishment, in which not only it does not achieve any efficiency but it also causes more social loss to society.
ReplyDeleteBinh.
Brandon has a point; institutions matter. If the system makes money through the death penalty process then it will be very difficult to observe and report on the true costs & benefits or the real deterrent effect.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the death penalty is inefficient when looked at economically. It is not a very good deterrent of criminal acts based on the facts presented in class. Also, the cost of condemning someone to death is too costly, and those resources could be of better use elsewhere. With cost of one execution, a whole fleet of policemen could be trained and hired and put on salary for a year. This would increase the chance of apprehension which would be a very effective deterrent to future murders. Or, the money could be used to provide funding to research and development organizations that may try to find better ways to improve conviction rates in murders through DNA, ballistic, or other methods. With a higher chance of apprehension and higher conviction rates, people would think more rationally before committing heinous acts on another person. The purpose of capital punishment is to be a deterrent for people not to commit violent crimes, and if people are not deterred from committing them, the punishment needs to be re-evaluated or restructured in a way to be less costly on the taxpayers.
ReplyDelete**From Brandon Chapman**
ReplyDeleteFrom an efficiency standpoint it seems that capital punishment should indeed be scrapped. Due to the relatively inconclusive data that there is a significant deterrent effect from the use of capital punishment, it becomes hard to justify its large cost per execution. The lack of speediness and all the added costs of the appeals and lawyers really builds for the case against capital punishment. The resources used in this drawn out process can very well be used in much more efficient ways. From expanding police forces or training inmates to learn skilled jobs that we can then extract their labor from while imprisoned. So unless the process can be implemented much faster there seems to be no real need to spend the extra resources on capital punishment, when a punishment of life without parole can be implemented.--Brandon Chapman
I believe that the death penalty is not efficient and it should be scrapped. Instead of sentence them to death row they should just spend their life in prison. It cost more to execute a prisoner then to keep them in prison for life. They have to go through appeals and getting lawyers to hear their case AGAIN. We as American citizens are paying for the appeals and our money can go to other resources in society.
ReplyDeleteI think the death penalty as it currently exists is very inefficient and should be done away with. The lack of solid empirical evidence that can survive repeated tests fails to justify the huge costs associated with capital punishment. The uncertainty of punishment also plays a big role in its inefficiency; if the process were somehow streamlined so that the threat of being executed for committing a crime was more real then I think it would certainly deter more people from committing that crime. I think another interesting issue is the presence of rationality in people who murder others. At least for those who murder out of passion, are they acting rationally - carefully considering the costs and benefits of their actions - at that moment?
ReplyDeleteI believe that with the structure that it is under now, the death penalty should be abolished. It currently wastes many valuable resources that could be used for other things that directly benefit society. The slight deterrent effect that does occur is not enough to counteract the wasted resources. On top that, life in prison could serve just as much of a deterrent. It seems that if some aspects of it were changed, such as the amount of time that it takes for someone to actually be executed, it might be more efficient. Also, if people were actually executed much more quickly than they are now, it might even increase the deterrent effect. Right now, many probably don’t think that much about the consequences because they know that if it was ever to happen, it wouldn’t occur for many many years, so they probably aren’t thinking about it as much before they commit the crime.
ReplyDeleteSome of the research I did had differing/conflicting arguments and data supporting whether the death penalty was a deterrent or not. The process of enforcing the death penalty is very long and drains obvious resources (time, money, effort, etc). From an efficiency standpoint, it should be scrapped. An economic point of view would suggest that life in prison would be more efficient and drain the taxpayers money even less then it already does. From a personal standpoint, I believe it should be kept just because it seems logical and fair to put the most violent and dangerous criminals to death. Overall, this is an economic class so to keep it simple, the death penalty should be scrapped. Someone who spends life in prison will ultimately die of old age and or die at the hands of another inmate. The current system allows the states to basically premeditate the murder of these criminals (in sense, even though it is not necessarily the same ). I don’t believe many criminals think about how many crimes they can commit, or how severe of a crime they can commit without getting the death penalty or basically keeping track of how many crimes they can commit before being considered for capital punishment. A lot of these murders and brutal crimes are done out of passion or anger, drug use, etc . So it may be the case that the person is not thinking logically at the time, and are a detriment to themselves and everyone in their path. I know other people have covered similar points, but these are all relevant arguments. In the realm of Economics though? SCRAP it.
ReplyDelete-Mychal
I believe the death penalty should be abolished. Not only is it cheaper to implement life without parole for the punishment of sever crimes than it is to execute an inmate but evidence shows that the death penalty does not works as a deterrent effect. There are also moral implications about what it says about American Society that even though this policy is inefficient, we are going to peruse the justification of murder of members of society by a designated group of individuals for punishment of the murder (or in some cases, a combination of lesser crimes depending on state) by a different member of society. The act of murder is violent; what ever content it falls in.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that the inmates on life with out parole can serve as a potential source of revenue to the victims in the form of reparations if they are able to generate revenue while in prison. This can be from regulated(not in violation of humyn rights or prisoner rights working conditions)work opportunities to inmates or by working in some other way to produce a reparation to the victim.
The economic approach to capital punishment cannot be determined by explicit costs alone. The explicit costs of conviction, imprisonment, appeal, and execution are easy to calculate, and would infer that capital punishment is inefficient and wasteful. However, the costs to the victims is not as easy to assess. Additionally, it should be investigated whether the death of an offender is equal to the harm caused to the victim's families. What will the cost be for vengeance? Using Becker's model, it might be more efficient to allow the offender to work inside of incarceration and pay restitution to the families. This may have an impact on vengeance. Ultimately, capital punishment may need to be addressed by more than just the economic discipline.
ReplyDeleteBefore this class I was not clear on how the death penalty really worked and if or not it served as a deterrent to future crimes. During the in class discussion it made sense to me that the death penalty was not efficient and the statistics showed that it was not a good deterrent. To start off the cost alone is enormous having to pay around 2 million dollars just for the lawyers and appeals and then another 90,000 dollars just to put them to death. On the other hand it only takes 20,000 per year for someone to serve a life sentence without parole. In addition, the rational criminal would rather have the death penalty then to have to sit in a cell for the rest of his life. With that said it is simply not fulfilling the deterrent part everyone expected. It is not efficient because 1 out of every 200 prisoners on death row actually gets executed. It doesn't even make sense to keep the death penalty going if it doesn't do its job in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt, in rational individuals, that the greatest personal injury one can suffer is the loss of his or her own life. Now, if someone killed one of our loved ones like our brother, sister, mother, father, grandpa/grandma etc., without a doubt, we would suffer greatly (assuming we care for them). So, as individuals would we really make the situation better by doing the same thing to the individual who killed our loved one by killing them in return? My answer is going to be, that for that moment in which we resent that individual we will answer, yes. Anyways, an eye for an eye as they say, no? Well, the death penalty serves two purposes. The first purpose it serves is to “try and repair the injury”, and the second is to prevent further “evils in the future,” (Mill). In class, we have concluded that there is no deterrent effect associated with the death penalty in our current state and time. It hasn’t been proven to prevent “evils in the future,” and more than that, it is too costly. So for that matter, I would say we should abolish the death penalty. Now, if it was up to me, and someone murdered someone, the best way to prevent further “evils in the future” would be to torture them alive. I wouldn’t mind burning them alive, hitting them, kicking them or doing to them any torture one can think of. Furthermore, I would permit the family members affected to perform these acts, since they are the ones that need the reparation. On top of this, they would probably do it for free and some wouldn’t hesitate doing it. I think that by doing this, future murders (rational ones) would think a little bit more about committing a murder before doing it, but at least the affected family would get a little more satisfaction than just watching the state killing him/her with love, a needle! In the end, this is my belief, but I know that this would be unconstitutional.
ReplyDeleteBy considering all the evidence generated in states were capital punishment is allowed, the deterrent effect of capital punishment does not shows much change in criminals behavior. There is not concrete evidence that shows that the deterrent effect is efficient while talking about capital punishment. In all of those states, the rate of crimes has remained the same even though capital punishment is implemented. Criminals do not suffer and pay the equivalent damage that they generate to society while committing a crime. The humans who suffer are the victim's and criminal's family. It is also not efficient because the state loses much money in the process. That money could be designated to other departments and generate more efficiency to society in other aspects. The death penalty should be scrapped as a punishment and life imprisonment should be implemented for those criminals.
ReplyDelete