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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxi!houxm!houxu!welsch
From: welsch@houxu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Capital punishment
Message-ID: <212@houxu.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Oct-83 11:21:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: houxu.212
Posted: Mon Oct  3 11:21:12 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Oct-83 00:18:12 EDT
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 44

This to the following request.

	I would sure love for one of you to explain to me
	how and why capital punishment increases the
	incidence of murder and other violent crimes. One
	of my high school teachers had a very simplistic
	argument in favor of capital punishment (and
	stiffer jail sentences, and so forth) that I have
	never been able to quite forget: If you keep a
	violent criminal off the streets, then he/she is
	never going to commit violent crimes again
	(against the general population).

There is a fairly straight forward explanation. Capital
punishment is correlated to the degree of violences in a
society. The more violent the society the greater the number of
crimes whose penalty is death and also the more violent a
society is the more frequently death is given as a penalty.  I
use the term "correlated" because while unlikely it is possible
to have a non-violent society that has capital punishment and it
possible to have a violent society that does not have capital
punishment.  

Now for the tricky part, that is capital punishment and
the degree to which it is used is a factor in the degree of
violence in society.  Given two societies which are of "equal"
degrees of violence, if capital punishment is introduced into
one and not the other then the society  which has capital
punishment will become more violent than the one without.  The
reason is that the members of society with capital punishment
will come to value life less than the members of society
without.   As the value of life decreases people are more likely
to murder each other.

The difficulty with your teacher's simple response is that he is
taking a microscopic view of the world versus taking a macroscopic
view. He sees that by eliminating a murderer society has one
less murderer, but he fails to see that the elimination process
makes all members of society murderers and hence each member is
more likely to murder than if the original murderer was not
eliminated.

						Larry Welsch
						houxu!welsch