Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?
Many pro-death penalty enthusiasts commonly insist that the death penalty MUST exist in order to effectively lower crime rates. They note that one of the major purposes of the death penalty is to deter crime, but what they fail to acknowledge is that this argument is one of the least factually based of all possible pro-death penalty rebuttals. Granted it has not been shown that the death penalty fails to deter crime, it certainly has never shown the contrary, that it does deter crime. At any rate, the only reliable way to test the deterrence factor of capital punishment is to compare jurisdictions which allow the death penalty to those which have abolished this lethal act of state killing. When doing so, one will find great inconsistencies in the data. Some studies have shown that the death penalty deters crime, while many others have shown that it does not, but never has there been a study that has conclusively found that the death penalty deters or does not deter crime to any great e
