Is the Death Penalty a Deterrent to Crime? Essay Example

us? Where is the justice in that?

Executing these criminals is making our streets safer, at least by not having the murderers and rapists themselves around. When it comes to the deterrence argument, it is very difficult to obtain statistics on how many people were deterred from committing a crime due to knowing that the death penalty would be their destination in the end. Poet Hyman Barshay puts it best when he compares the death penalty to a lighthouse. He says: “The death penalty is a warning, just like a lighthouse throwing its beams out to sea. We hear about shipwrecks, but we do not hear about the ships the lighthouse guides safely on their way.

We do not have proof of the number of ships it saves, but we do not tear the lighthouse down. ” (Hall, 2001) Similarly, one can never truly know how many people have been deterred by the death penalty, but society can be reasonably certain that someone, somewhere, did not commit a crime due to this reprimand being in place. Regardless of the answer to that, political science professor John McAdams of Marquette University feels the death penalty argument is an easy one to decide on when he says: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers.

If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call. " (Bedau, 1983) As Mr. McAdams states, the killing of criminals in

order to save innocent lives should be an easy decision for society. There is no room for the likes of these criminals in the civilized world. The death penalty certainly takes care of that. In contrast, most people are in fact opposed to the death penalty. Capital Punishment, 2001) With the exception of the United States of America, no first world country continues to execute criminals in order to pay for their crimes (Drehle, 2008). This practice has been abolished in over 100 countries for several decades now; and for good reason. The practice in itself is barbaric and morally wrong. How do you allow anyone to legally take the life of another? What message does that send to people? Don’t kill anyone, but if they so decide, your government is allowed to do it. This is hypocrisy at its best.

Not only does it not act as a deterrent, it actually has the opposite effect. In 2006, Amnesty International conducted a survey in the United States which looked at the murder rates in states which enforce the death penalty and compared them to those that don’t, the results are staggering. The murder rates in executing states are at least double those in non-death penalty states. And this figure applies across the board; and in some cases, it is more than six times the murder rate (Spagnoli, 2008). This brings up a very obvious and easy question: how could this be?

How can the states with no government executions have a significantly lower murder rate? Well, one explanation might point towards the fact that in the executing states, violence is more widely accepted. It is a part

of everyday life. A conflict ending in serious violence or even murder is not as uncommon as maybe it should be. This, unfortunately, leads to the sad reality that the death penalty does not deter criminals. The last thing they are thinking of in the heat of the moment is ending up strapped to a chair many years later. This also brings up another point; criminals on eath row in the United States are, on average, in prison for 15 years before they are executed. In 2009, out of the 3713 death row inmates, 113 of them had been there for more than 29 years. (Guernsey, 2009)This cannot be something that a civilized society can truly stand behind. Mentally torturing a person for 15 years in solitary before you execute him or her is cruel and is ethically catastrophic. This brutal ritual needs to stop immediately. Can a real and accurate decision be made on whether the death penalty truly deters crime? Probably not. The data that needs to be gathered is near impossible to obtain.

So the focus must shift on other issues; issues dealing with human justice, morality, and ethics. One might argue that it is only fair to execute a murder; that they committed this crime, and should therefore receive it in return. But would you rape a rapist? Would you molest a pedophile? This concept of retribution and revenge is primitive in nature and should not be a part of modern society. Every religion in the world preaches peace and forgiveness, though the Catholic Church does not disallow it, they do not approve of it as a means of revenge, but a

means of prevention.

In a 1995 letter titled Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II suggested that capital punishment should be avoided unless it is the only way to defend society from the offender in question. He said that governments "ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent. " (Mulligan, 2006) When would this situation arise?

When is there such a threat to society that it cannot be defended? War? Terrorism? Perhaps, but in both cases, the death penalty is a mere thought, if that, somewhere in the distance. But in regular circumstances of daily life, the organized sanctioned killing of humans is simply ridiculous. The death penalty is no more a deterrent to killing than the nicotine patch is to smoking. It might work for some, but not others. Civilization is built around a set of universal laws that each human being knows very well: do not kill, do not steal, do not rape, etc… Granted, some people have no problems breaking these laws.

In fact, many don’t. However, it still remains morally wrong to have governments allowing organized executions of criminals. If the objective is deterrence and prevention, put them in jail. Prison doesn’t exactly have a reputation of being a place one would want to be in. And the reality of prison life is actually very harsh. Why is it that this form of punishment is not enough? Why does society need to

take it further and promote legalized executions? It would be nice to think that society thinks better of itself than this.

It might be a utopian view, but we need to try hard to make our civilization move forward. We need to let go of certain traditions that have been going on for a long time. Just because something is old, does not make it right or true. The same goes for the death penalty. Just because it has been around for a while, and just because our society is really desensitized to death and murder, it does not mean that a barbaric practice such as capital punishment should continue to happen. As previously mentioned, not only does it not deter but it could in fact have a reverse effect.