Does the death penalty reduce crime rates?
I debated the death penalty in college (30 years ago). I learned just about all there was to read about it at the time. The biggest justification given for the death penalty has always been that it serves as a deterrent to crime. But this has never been actually shown by statistics. In fact, the statistics prove the opposite. When the death penalty was temporarily banned in the 1970s the murder rate in the US went down. When it was re-instated the states that picked it up again, their murder rates went up! Not consistently, but the statistics support this picture more than the opposite. Around the time of the first President Bush, pro death penalty conservatives began admitting it wasn’t about deterrence, it was about ‘just desserts’. But a few years later the pro argument was once again all about deterrence. Google ‘death penalty deterrence’ or ‘capital punishment deterrence’ and you’ll see pages that show statistics in various ways. (A lot depends on how you look at the statistics, a
