Spygon said:
The reason people still do these crimes in these places is it either being killed by the government or watching yourself and family starve to death.Or because the law over there is a joke who are either totally corrupt or so scared of the gangs that they dont get involved.
So which of those accounts for the fact that the top five most homicidal states all have the death penalty [http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state] and that of the top twenty most homicidal states only a single state doesn't have the death penalty? The choice between murder or watching one's family starve, or the corrupt law? What accounts for the fact that, and I quote, "For 2009, the average Murder Rate of Death Penalty States was 4.9 [per 100,000 people], while the average Murder Rate of States without the Death Penalty was 2.8 [per 100,000 people]".
The argument that 'death penalty reduces severe crimes' is just utter tripe and easily shown to be false with the most basic research. The fact of the matter (to borrow an argument from Prof. Agnes Heller) is that crimes fall into three categories:
1) Crimes of Passion
2) Crimes of Profit
3) Crimes of Compulsion
If you hate your teacher enough that you take a Mac-10 to class tomorrow and shoot him then you've already chosen to act against your best interests, to throw away your life and to commit the crime. The death penalty does nothing to address this because for almost everyone (or so Mill postulated in his argument in favour of the death penalty) it is more pleasant to be dead than to be ceaselessly suffering, if that weren't the case then Dignitas wouldn't exist, so if the worse punishment of life imprisonment seems worth the death of your teacher then a lesser punishment certainly won't deter you. This side argument is more or less irrelevant anyway because no rationally minded person would way up a cost-benefit calculation of 'killing one person' vs 'losing my life (be it in prison or death)' and agree that this is a good idea: crimes of passion are irrational and the perpetrator has convinced themselves that anything is worth the death of the victim so no punishment will work. This problem is further compounded when we consider that crimes of passion aren't always premeditated as with the above example, taking rationality even further out of the picture.
I guarantee you that somewhere in the world, right now, a person is knowingly breaking the law for profit. Crimes of profit occur, even in countries with very strict police and high rates of conviction, because the perpetrator has convinced him/herself that he/she will never be caught. So strong is their belief in their own ability (or disbelief in the authority's) that though they know the consequences, they believe those consequences will never be visited upon them. This makes the consequences irrelevant. If criminals rationally weighed up risks versus costs there'd be no profit-driven crime: they always mentally skew the odds in their favour.
Lastly, we have crimes of compulsion. These are your paedophiles, rapists, serial killers, torturers etc. These people do not commit their heinous crimes because they think it'll be a bit of a laugh, they do so because they are driven to commit their crimes by a variety of internal mechanisms both physiological and psychological. There is simply no way to prevent these people from committing their crimes unless we can get to grips with what the cause is and that's still incredibly poorly understood (there's still no functional psychological theory of rape, the two most popular, mate deprivation and malfunctioning sexuality, cannot account for numerous facets such as the rape of the elderly).
It's this last group that people usually say should be the victims of the death penalty but this is still illogical because:
1) Circular death penalty - If the murder of innocents is the requirement for a death penalty then as soon as one innocent person is accidentally put to death by society, society is required to submit to the death penalty.
2) No redemption - One of the best facets of prolonged punishment is that the criminal gets a chance to repay his/her debt to society. Sure, almost none of them do, but there have been criminals who've made significant contributions to society from behind bars (Tookie Williams, obviously, but cracked has a humorous list [http://www.cracked.com/article_18422_5-people-who-changed-world-from-inside-prison.html] of others). Furthermore, if someone is later found to be innocent they can be freed, but only if they're still alive to free. Want to hear something shocking? Around 40% of rape accusations in Indiana over a nine year period were found to be false, not merely dismissed, but shown to be actually fabricated(
Kanin EJ. Arch Sex Behav. 1994 Feb;23(1):81-92 False rape allegations). Still think rapists should see the chair? People want to believe that the law is much, much better than it is in order to feel safe, but the truth is that lawmen (and women) are just as uselessly human as us.
3) Murder is the worst crime - If we all accept that there is no afterlife and that upon death you will simply cease to be as the 'you' that we all recognise is merely a properly functioning organ powered by an interconnected organ system, then we accept that death is the end. If we accept that death is the antithesis of life and that we, as living organisms, are antithetical to death then it follows that anything within the realm of life is less antithetical to our nature than anything in the realm of death and, ergo, even the worst life is better than death. It really, really needs to be recognised that there are no shades of death. People like to characterise death e.g. 'honourable' or 'dignified'. This is foolish. The process of dying can have these organic qualities, but not death. A dead murderer and a dead baby are the exact same as one another, one isn't going to go to the happy home of the invisible sky-daddy and the other to an equally fictitious land of torment, they'll both just decompose as insufficient new materials are invested into their bodies to replenish broken bonds; they're both ethical equals the second they die and their driving organ no longer makes ethical decisions. This is the paradox of death, it's both the worst punishment and the best, because a murdered criminal doesn't have to bear the brunt of society's ire. So we gain nothing from killing the murderer. We're already safe from him/her. All we stand to lose is whatever contributions he/she might have made from within prison.
In short, I'm against the death penalty.
MagicMouse said:
For higher crimes and repeat offenders, I don't believe in jail as a punishment. I just want criminals to be taken out of our society so that they can do no more harm. I don't care that they suffer in jail, that shit's expensive. Just shoot them in the head and be done with it.
It's ten times more expensive to kill them than to keep them alive [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/]. Unless you want a situation where the state can just walk up to someone and shoot them in the face on the pretext of having committed a crime (that worked so nicely for the North Koreans and Stalinist Russia) then we need all the appeal checks in place, and that makes the death penalty insanely expensive. The linked article lists it as almost $5m per death.
