Leading criminologists' views on capital punishment deterrence

Criminology

Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates?

In the article Do executions lower homicide rates?: The views of leading criminologists (Radelet & Lacock 2009) look at the issue of whether there is a deterrence effect with the death penalty. Over the years there has been extensive agreement among criminologists that the death penalty could not be warranted on deterrence grounds. In 1996 a study was conducted by Radelet & Lacock that surveyed sixty-seven leading American criminologists regarding their opinion about the empirical research on deterrence and found that the vast majority of the experts agreed that the death penalty never has been and never will be superior to long-term prison sentences as a deterrent to criminal violence. The research in this article was designed to update the 1996 study and evaluate if any recent deterrence studies have modified the beliefs of the world's leading criminologists.

Question

The question being looked at is whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment. This issue has been debated for decades or longer by scholars, policy makers, and the general public. There is one side that is for the death penalty that wants to argue that the punishment of death works to deter future crime from happening. The other side argues that the punishment of long-term imprisonment is just as effective as the death penalty in preventing future crimes. The argument is that life in prison is cheaper on society than executing those who commit bad crimes.

Findings

The results of this study indicated that only a small minority of top criminologists, ten percent or less, depending on how the question was asked, believes that there is any justification for the use of the death penalty. Leading Criminologists do not feel that the death penalty deters crime any more than long-term imprisonment does.

Authors Success

The authors set out to update the study that they did back in 1996. In the end I believe that the authors were successful in doing this. In 1996 they found that the feeling of the leading Criminologists was that the death penalty never has been and never could be superior to long prison sentences as a deterrent to criminal violence. The present study found that the current consensus among Criminologists is that the death penalty does not have any more deterrence affect that long-term imprisonment does.

Since such a long amount of time had passed and so many other articles had been published on this topic the authors wanted to see if their original results from back in 1996 were still good. What they found is that basically nothing has changed. Criminologists still agree as a whole that the death penalty does no more to deter crime that does long-term imprisonment.

Evaluation

This paper was very informative. It read very easily and was easy to understand. The authors were very good at making the point that they wanted to make. They gave a brief background of the issue and explained the study that they had done before. They then set down how this study was the same and how it was different from the one that they conducted before. They also gave a brief background and results of some other studies that have been done since they last conducted their study. This help to justify why they felt there was a need to run their study again.

The one thing that the authors did not address in their discussion of their findings was anything about the next steps. There was no discussion on what the significance of their study was other than it showed exactly what their first study did. It seems pointless to continue to do studies that test the feelings of what people think about a subject if there is not follow up on what to do in the future. It was obvious from the findings that the Criminologists don't agree with the Economists, so what can be done to bring the two sides closer together in the lines of thinking? It would have been nice to know how the authors thought that their results could be used to advance public policy in the future. They adequately addressed what the results of their study were but did not follow through with what could be done with them, if anything. It is possible that there is nothing more that can be done with these results but they should have conveyed that. Otherwise it seems that the study was basically pointless when it comes to future research.