RangerGress wrote:
Death penalty, the way we do it, wouldn't do any good. It's been shown, over and over again, that the way we implement the death penalty doesn't have more deterrent value then just throwing the miscreant in prison.
In order for a punishment to have deterrent value, it must be relative "sure". That is to say....if you get convicted, it happens. But the # of folks on death row that actually get their penalty carried out is pretty small. We have 15ish thousand murders per year, about 2/3rds result in a conviction, but we only execute a 3-5 dozen murderers each year.
In order for a punishment to have deterrent value it must seem "real". You want a punishment to seem real, you need to have seen it yourself or at least seen a video of it. I know that seems pretty gruesome, but that's the hard choice of weighing of "desire to avoid gruesome" vs. "desire to deter". The culture decides which is more important, and obviously we've chosen.
It's human nature to perceive one's values are pretty "absolute". So we imagine that public executions are an "absolute" bad. When in reality the idea that the "public" element of the execution is "bad" is a really new idea when judged against the last 100k yrs or so. Human nature was just the same in centuries past, as it is now. We're the same folks, just with better personal hygiene.
In Biblical times the murder rate was astronomically higher. Despite swift, brutal, and often incorrectly carried out death penalty punishments.
But now, worldwide, murder rates are significantly lower despite the decline in its usage.
People will do it anyway.
The greatest drivers of murder rates are poor education and poverty. But I love how the first thing we do is say "we're going to kill more people back for killing people" when it's proven to NOT work.
We're always more focused on a punishment than an actual solution.