Should the death penalty ever be used?

Vladimir Illich · Feb 12, 2020

DrRainbow said: ↑

Is Peter Sutcliffe the fault of the Government, the judiciary and Probation Service?
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No, he died in prison - rightly so.

DrRainbow · Feb 12, 2020

At more than £300,000 a year, the cost of his detention to the taxpayer is at least five times that of keeping him in a prison cell. If taken across his 31 years in Broadmoor, the sum would equal almost £10 million in today’s money.
Peter Sutcliffe has cost £10m and is getting an eye check-up on the NHS | Daily Mail Online

Vladimir Illich said: ↑

No, he died in prison - rightly so.
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Vladimir Illich · Feb 12, 2020

DrRainbow said: ↑

At more than £300,000 a year, the cost of his detention to the taxpayer is at least five times that of keeping him in a prison cell. If taken across his 31 years in Broadmoor, the sum would equal almost £10 million in today’s money.
Peter Sutcliffe has cost £10m and is getting an eye check-up on the NHS | Daily Mail Online
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Oh so its not a question of guilt or innocence but a question of finance. Perhaps you should change your avatar name to Shylock.

DrRainbow · Feb 12, 2020

Vladimir Illich said: ↑

Oh so its not a question of guilt or innocence but a question of finance. Perhaps you should change your avatar name to Shylock.
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lol

everything bagel · Feb 12, 2020

Dax said: ↑

How many killers are tried found not guilty? How many muders remain unsolved?
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That has nothing to do with the death penalty tho. Conviction rates aren't going to change due to the presence or abolishment for the death penalty.

soulcompromise · Feb 12, 2020

This is an excerpt from 8.7 End-of-Chapter Material – Social Problems: Continuity and Change

it's from the textbook for Social Problems, a sociology course, at my school

8.7 End-of-Chapter Material
Summary

Crime is a major concern for many Americans. More than one-third fear walking alone at night in their neighborhoods, and even larger percentages worry about specific types of crimes. News media coverage of crime contributes to these fears. The media overdramatize crime by covering so much of it and by giving especially heavy attention to violent crime even though most crime is not violent. In other problems, the news media disproportionately depict young people and people of color as offenders and whites as victims.

The nation’s major source of crime statistics is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Because many people do not tell the police about crimes they have experienced, the UCR underestimates the actual level of crime in the United States. It is also subject to changes in police reporting practices and in particular to deliberate efforts by police to downplay the amount of crime. To help correct these problems, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) measures crime every year in a national survey that asks residents to report their criminal victimization. The NCVS is thought to yield a more accurate estimate of crime than the UCR, and it also provides much information on the circumstances under which victimization occurs. Self-report surveys, typically given to adolescents, are a final form of crime measurement and provide much information on the adolescents’ social backgrounds and thus on the context of their offending.

The major categories of crime are violent crime, property crime, white-collar crime, and consensual crime. Much violent crime is relatively spontaneous and emotional, and a surprising amount involves victims and offenders who knew each other before the violent act occurred. Despite popular perceptions, most violent crime is also intraracial. A major distinction in the understanding of property crime is that between professional thieves, who are very skilled and steal valuable possessions or large sums of money, and amateur thieves, who are unskilled and whose theft is petty by comparison. Corporate crime and other kinds of white-collar crime arguably cost the nation more than street crime in economic loss, health problems, and death; corporate violence involves unsafe working conditions, unsafe products, and environmental pollution. Consensual crime, such as illegal drug use and prostitution, raises two important questions: (1) Which consensual but potentially harmful behaviors should the state ban and which should it not ban, and (2) does banning such behaviors do more harm than good or more good than harm?

Crime is socially patterned. Males commit more serious crimes than females. African Americans and Latinos have higher crime rates than whites, poor people have higher crime rates than the wealthy, and youths in their teens and early twenties have higher crime rates than older people. In addition, crime is higher in urban areas than in rural areas.

Many sociological theories of criminal behavior exist. Social structure theories highlight poverty and weakened social institutions as important factors underlying crime. Social process theories stress the importance of peer relationships, social bonding, and social reaction. Conflict theories call attention to the possible use of the legal system to punish behavior by subordinate groups, while feminist theories examine gender differences in criminality, the victimization of women by rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, and the experiences of women professionals and offenders in the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system costs tens of billions of dollars annually, yet scholars question the potential of this system to reduce crime. How police are deployed seems a more important factor regarding their potential for crime reduction than the actual numbers of police. The surge in imprisonment of the last few decades may have accounted for a relatively small drop in crime, but whatever reduction it has achieved has not been cost-effective, and hundreds of thousands of prison inmates are now returning every year to their communities. Several problems also exist in the criminal justice system itself. Police corruption and brutality remain serious concerns, while indigent defendants receive inadequate legal representation or none at all. Despite public perceptions, prisons and jails are squalid places, and rape and other violence are daily concerns.

The United States is the only Western democracy to use the death penalty for common criminals. Social science evidence finds that the death penalty does not deter homicide, is racially discriminatory, may involve wrongful convictions, and costs considerably more than life imprisonment.

Many proposals for reducing crime derive from sociological evidence. These proposals aim to reduce poverty and improve neighborhood living conditions; to change male socialization patterns; to expand early childhood intervention programs and nutrition services; to improve the nation’s schools and schooling; and to reduce the number of prison inmates by placing nonviolent property and drug offenders in community corrections. The funds saved by this last proposal could be used to improve prison and jail rehabilitation programming.

Using What You Know

Suppose you are the Democratic Party Governor of a midsized state and that you are up for reelection in two years. You were a political science major in college but had a sociology minor with a focus in criminal justice. The crime rate in your state has risen slightly since you took office, and there is growing sentiment in the state’s major newspapers and from the Republican Party opposition in the state legislature to lengthen prison terms for serious crime and to build two more prisons for the greater number of prisoners that will be expected. Because of your studies in college, you are skeptical that this approach will reduce crime, and you recognize it will cost millions of dollars. But you also realize that your opponents and some members of the news media are beginning to say that you are soft on crime. What do you do?

What You Can Do
To help deal with the problem of crime, you may wish to do any of the following:

Volunteer at an agency that helps troubled teenagers.

Volunteer with an organization that helps ex-offenders.

Work for an organization that provides early childhood intervention services for at-risk children.

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also... 8.6 Reducing Crime – Social Problems: Continuity and Change

8.6 Reducing Crime
Learning Objective

Describe five strategies that criminologists have proposed to reduce crime.

During the last few decades, the United States has used a get-tough approach to fight crime. This approach has involved longer prison terms and the building of many more prisons and jails. As noted earlier, scholars doubt that this surge in imprisonment has achieved significant crime reduction at an affordable cost, and they worry that it may be leading to greater problems in the future as hundreds of thousands of prison inmates are released back into their communities every year.

Many of these scholars favor an approach to crime borrowed from the field of public health. In the areas of health and medicine, a public health approach tries to treat people who are already ill, but it especially focuses on preventing disease and illness before they begin. While physicians try to help people who already have cancer, medical researchers constantly search for the causes of cancer so that they can try to prevent it before it affects anyone. This model is increasingly being applied to criminal behavior, and criminologists have advanced several ideas that, if implemented with sufficient funds and serious purpose, hold great potential for achieving significant, cost-effective reductions in crime (Barlow & Decker, 2010; Frost, Freilich, & Clear, 2010; Lab, 2010). Many of their strategies rest on the huge body of theory and research on the factors underlying crime in the United States, which we had space only to touch on earlier, while other proposals call for criminal justice reforms. We highlight some of these many strategies here.

Applying Social Research
“Three Strikes” Laws Strike Out

The get-tough approach highlighted in the text has involved, among other things, mandatory minimum sentencing, in which judges are required to give convicted offenders a minimum prison term, often several years long, rather than a shorter sentence or probation.

Beginning in the 1990s, one of the most publicized types of mandatory sentencing has been the “three strikes and you’re out” policy that mandates an extremely long sentence—at least twenty-five years—and sometimes life imprisonment for offenders convicted of a third (or, in some states, a second) felony. The intent of these laws, enacted by about half the states and the federal government, is to reduce crime by keeping dangerous offenders behind bars for many years and by deterring potential offenders from committing crime (general deterrence). Sufficient time since the first three strikes laws were passed has elapsed to enable criminologists to assess whether they have, in fact, reduced crime.

Studies of this issue find that three strikes laws do not reduce serious crime and, in fact, may even increase the number of homicides. Several studies have focused on California, where tens of thousands of offenders have been sentenced under the state’s three strikes law passed in 1994. Almost all these studies conclude that California’s law did not reduce subsequent crime or did so by only a negligible amount. A few studies also have examined nationwide samples of city and state crime rates in the states that adopted three strikes laws and in the states that did not do so. These studies also fail to find that three strikes laws have reduced crime. As one of these studies, by three criminologists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, concludes, “Consistent with other studies, ours finds no credible statistical evidence that passage of three strikes laws reduces crime by deterring potential criminals or incapacitating repeat offenders.” The national studies even find that three strikes laws have increased the number of homicides. This latter finding is certainly an unintended consequence of these laws and may stem from decisions by felons facing a third strike to kill witnesses so as to avoid life imprisonment.

In retrospect, it is not very surprising that three strikes laws do not work as intended. Many criminals simply do not think they will get caught and thus are not likely to be deterred by increased penalties. Many are also under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol at the time of their offense, making it even less likely they will worry about being caught. In addition, many three strikes offenders tend to be older (because they are being sentenced for their third felony, not just their first) and thus are already “aging out” beyond the high-crime age group, 15–25. Thus three strikes laws target offenders whose criminality is already declining because they are getting older.

In addition to the increase in homicides, research has identified other problems produced by three strikes laws. Because three strikes defendants do not want a life term, some choose a jury trial instead of pleading guilty. Jury trials are expensive and slow compared to guilty pleas and thus cost the prosecution both money and time. In another problem, the additional years that three strikes offenders spend in prison are costing the states millions of dollars in yearly imprisonment costs and in health-care costs as these offenders reach their elderly years.

As should be clear, the body of three strikes research has important policy implications, as noted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham scholars: “(P)olicy makers should reconsider the costs and benefits associated with three strikes laws” (p. 235). Three strikes laws do not lower crime and in fact increase homicides, and they have forced the states to spend large sums of money on courts and prisons. The three strikes research strongly suggests that three strikes laws should be eliminated.

Sources: Kovandzic, Sloan, & Vieraitis, 2004; Walker, 2011

A first strategy involves serious national efforts to reduce poverty and to improve neighborhood living conditions. It is true that most poor people do not commit crime, but it is also true that most street crime is committed by the poor or near poor for reasons discussed earlier. Efforts that create decent-paying jobs for the poor, enhance their vocational and educational opportunities, and improve their neighborhood living conditions should all help reduce poverty and its attendant problems and thus to reduce crime (Currie, 2011).

A second strategy involves changes in how American parents raise their boys. To the extent that the large gender difference in serious crime stems from male socialization patterns, changes in male socialization should help reduce crime (Collier, 2004). This will certainly not happen any time soon, but if American parents can begin to raise their boys to be less aggressive and less dominating, they will help reduce the nation’s crime rate. As two feminist criminologists have noted, “A large price is paid for structures of male domination and for the very qualities that drive men to be successful, to control others, and to wield uncompromising power.…Gender differences in crime suggest that crime may not be so normal after all. Such differences challenge us to see that in the lives of women, men have a great deal more to learn” (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988, p. 527).

Lessons from Other Societies
Preventing Crime and Treating Prisoners in Western Europe

The text suggests the get-tough approach that the United States has been using to reduce crime has not worked in a cost-effective manner and has led to other problems, including a flood of inmates returning to their communities every year. In fighting crime, the United States has much to learn from Western Europe. In contrast to the US get-tough approach, Western European nations tend to use a public health model that comprises two components. The first is a focus on crime prevention that uses early childhood intervention programs and other preventive measures to address the roots of crime and other childhood and family problems. The second is a criminal justice policy that involves sentencing defendants and treating prisoners in a manner more likely to rehabilitate offenders and reduce their repeat offending than the more punitive approach in the United States.

The overall Western European approach to offenders is guided by the belief that imprisonment should be reserved for the most dangerous violent offenders, and that probation, community service, and other forms of community corrections should be used for other offenders. Because violent offenders comprise only a small proportion of all offenders, the Western European approach saves a great deal of money while still protecting public safety.

The experience of Denmark and the Netherlands is illustrative. Like the United States, Denmark had to deal with rapidly growing crime rates during the 1960s. Whereas the United States responded with the get-tough approach involving longer and more certain prison terms and the construction of more and more prisons, Denmark took the opposite approach: It adopted shorter prison terms for violent offenders and used the funds saved from the reduced prison costs to expand community corrections for property offenders. Finland and the Netherlands have also adopted a similar approach that favors community corrections and relatively short prison terms for violent offenders over the get-tough approach the United States adopted.

All these nations save great sums of money in prison costs and other criminal justice expenses because they chose not to adopt the US get-tough approach, yet their rates of serious violent crime lag behind the US rates. Although these nations obviously differ from the United States, the advantages of their approach should be kept in mind as the United States evaluates its get-tough policies. There may be much to learn from their less punitive approach to crime: While the United States got tough, perhaps they got sensible.

Sources: Dammer & Albanese, 2011; Waller & Welsh, 2007

A third and very important strategy involves expansion of early childhood intervention (ECI) programs and nutrition services for poor mothers and their children, as the Note 8.28 “Children and Our Future” box discussed earlier. ECI programs generally involve visits by social workers, nurses, or other professionals to young, poor mothers shortly after they give birth, as these mother’s children are often at high risk for later behavioral problems (Welsh & Farrington, 2007). These visits may be daily or weekly and last for several months, and they involve parenting instruction and training in other life skills. These programs have been shown to be very successful in reducing childhood and adolescent misbehavior in a cost-effective manner (Greenwood, 2006). In the same vein, nutrition services would also reduce the risk of neurological impairment among newborns and young children and thus their likelihood of developing later behavioral problems.

A fourth strategy calls for a national effort to improve the nation’s schools and schooling. This effort would involve replacing large, older, and dilapidated schoolhouses with smaller, nicer, and better equipped ones. For many reasons, this effort should help improve student academic achievement and school commitment and thus lower delinquent and later criminal behavior.

A final set of strategies involves changes in the criminal justice system that should help reduce repeat offending and save much money that could be used to fund the ECI programs and other efforts just outlined. Placing nonviolent property and drug offenders in community corrections (e.g., probation, daytime supervision) would reduce the number of prison and jail inmates by hundreds of thousands annually without endangering Americans’ safety and save billions of dollars in prison costs (Jacobson, 2006). These funds could also be used to improve prison and jail vocational and educational programming and drug and alcohol services, all of which are seriously underfunded. If properly funded, such programs and services hold great promise for rehabilitating many inmates (Cullen, 2007). Elimination of the death penalty would also save much money while also eliminating the possibility of wrongful executions.

This is not a complete list of strategies, but it does suggest the kinds of efforts that would help address the roots of crime and, in the long run, help to reduce it. Although the United States may not be interested in pursuing this crime-prevention approach, strategies like the ones just mentioned would in the long run be more likely than our current get-tough approach to create a safer society and at the same time save us billions of dollars annually.

Note that none of these proposals addresses white-collar crime, which should not be neglected in a discussion of reducing the nation’s crime problem. One reason white-collar crime is so common is that the laws against it are weakly enforced; more consistent enforcement of these laws should help reduce white-collar crime, as would the greater use of imprisonment for convicted white-collar criminals (Rosoff et al., 2010).

Key Takeaways

The get-tough approach has not been shown to reduce crime in an effective and cost-efficient manner. A sociological explanation of crime thus suggests the need to focus more resources on the social roots of crime in order to prevent crime from happening in the first place.

Strategies suggested by criminologists to reduce crime include (a) reducing poverty and improving neighborhood living conditions, (b) changing male socialization patterns, (c) expanding early childhood intervention programs, (d) improving schools and schooling, and (e) reducing the use of incarceration for drug and property offenders.

For Your Review

The text notes that social science research has not shown the get-tough approach to be effective or cost-efficient. If this is true, why do you think this approach has been so popular in the United States since the 1970s?

Of the five strategies outlined in the text to reduce crime, which one strategy do you think would be most effective if it were implemented with adequate funding? Explain your answer.

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I tend to agree that for the death penalty to work as a deterrent, you'd need very swift justice. Often, a trial can take awhile and so the sentencing is pushed back.

I oppose the death penalty not only because it doesn't work though. I think that you can make a pretty terrible punishment out of life in prison, even though our system goes relatively easy on its prisoners. Some prisons are even more lenient in that way; they let people have TVs and stuff like that. I wonder if they have the internet now...

Regardless, I think life is enough. And I'm for giving life in prison to rapists. You absolutely must know better than that!

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

Absolutely,. No punishment is the reason our society is the way it is.. death penalty for murderers, child molesters and serial rapists. And do it quickly. No 30 years appeals process

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman543 said: ↑

Absolutely,. No punishment is the reason our society is the way it is.. death penalty for murderers, child molesters and serial rapists. And do it quickly. No 30 years appeals process
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I do actually agree with you.
OMG I have gone into politics!
I blame you. lol

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

earthmother said: ↑

Anyone who can say someone should die for a committing a crime is a hippocrite.
How is it not a crime to kill a human for ANY reason? Does killing them teach them anything? Will it make them change their ways and start over fresh? Will it jumpstart their conscience and keep them from committing any further crimes? Is killing someone even a punishment? Once you are dead you are dead. How is that punishing anyone except the criminal's family members who are left behind?
Anyone who is so screwed up that they commit SERIOUS crimes is probably either mentally ill and needs medical assistance, or so messed up by a bad life they need some compassion and new input. How does death help that?
Until we can ALL see that killing someone as punishment for wrongdoing IS wrongdoing, we are just the blind leading the blind. It's obvious and stupid
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Candy Gal said: ↑

I do actually agree with you.
OMG I have gone into politics!
I blame you. lol
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If you want to keep friends, don't discuss religion or politics but I swear I could fix this countries crime rate in a week if I was the big boss

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman543 said: ↑

If you want to keep friends, don't discuss religion or politics but I swear I could fix this countries crime rate in a week if I was the big boss
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That is true. You forgot sex.

So how can we really solve these heinous crimes?

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

Candy Gal said: ↑

That is true. You forgot sex.

So how can we really solve these heinous crimes?
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If a judge kept a .45 under his desk and shot those guilty of heinous crimes right after sentencing people would get the message and stop doing it. Either that or go back to public hangings where citizens can watch and see what happens when you do things are arent supposed to do

Vladimir Illich · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman543 said: ↑

Absolutely,. No punishment is the reason our society is the way it is.. death penalty for murderers, child molesters and serial rapists. And do it quickly. No 30 years appeals process
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ABSOLUTELY NOT !!! The criminal justice system is too imperfect to allow death sentences !!!

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman543 said: ↑

If a judge kept a .45 under his desk and shot those guilty of heinous crimes right after sentencing people would get the message and stop doing it. Either that or go back to public hangings where citizens can watch and see what happens when you do things are arent supposed to do
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Oh no. We need to be above that. We need a humane way to deal with them.

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

I've personally advocate turning criminals over to victims families in certain situations. To do with however they see fit

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Vladimir Illich said: ↑

ABSOLUTELY NOT !!! The criminal justice system is too imperfect to allow death sentences !!!
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Oh, I just saw this is quite an old thread.
I must add that I watched several programmes on TV about those on Death Row in America. NONE were sorry for what they did!

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

Candy Gal said: ↑

Oh no. We need to be above that. We need a humane way to deal with them.
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Humane is what has made people not fear the death penalty. It needs to be painful. Thier victims didn't get a humane death

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

Vladimir Illich said: ↑

ABSOLUTELY NOT !!! The criminal justice system is too imperfect to allow death sentences !!!
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I think it's a perfect system. If with today's technology they can prove motive, means, and the fact that you were there through dna then idc if you did it or not . You shouldn't have been there at the time of death

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman543 said: ↑

I've personally advocate turning criminals over to victims families in certain situations. To do with however they see fit
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There was a system where the victims forgave the perp for certain crimes.

Candy Gal · Oct 12, 2020

Fireman, firstly welcome to HIP.
Secondly, I feel this is something personal to you.
I am feeling your pain.

Fireman543 · Oct 12, 2020

Candy Gal said: ↑

There was a system where the victims forgave the perp for certain crimes.
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And that will be the victims choice . Then the state should step in, give minimum sentence and then move on maybe a family could have the option to allow state sentence or third own

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