aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Death penalty deterrent: let’s test it
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. [...]
The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and flawed methodologies.
The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,â€Â� they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”
Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”
But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types - not simply the quantitative evidence - has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.â€Â�
You know, I dislike and oppose the death penalty but I equally dislike life imprisonment. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key seems more inhumane - particularly with the way we treat prisoners - than a quick, painless death. Death is cheaper, too, if we do away with all those pesky procedural safeguards.
So let’s test it. Sex offenders already have de facto life sentences. We can start with them. Murderers next. The list is endless. Why not “three strikes, your dead?” Let’s go ahead and give in to the vengeance we feel to gather the quantitative evidence we need.
Thomas Cahill on Bill Moyers Journal last week:
THOMAS CAHILL: I think that there are many things within the human soul or within the human character that we ignore. There’s a tendency to violence in all of us. There’s even, I believe, a prehistoric desire for human sacrifice. We see it in all ancient cultures… Why have there been so many movies about Romans sitting in the Coliseum going like that? We get a kick out of it. The real evil in the world, it seems to me, is cruelty. That’s-- to me the word evil equals cruelty. It’s human cruelty that is evil. And you-- we all have to deal with that. We all have a tendency to that that we’re not willing - we’re not willing to acknowledge that this is inside of us. It’s there.
Cass Sunstein is quoted in the NYTimes piece, “The evidence...seems sufficiently plausible that the moral issue becomes a difficult one. I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified.”
Meanwhile he was featured last week on TPM’s Table for One where, in an entirely different context for entirely different reasons, he pointed to an experiment involving jury behavior:
That experiment, conducted by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade and me, can be found here and in shorter form in Cass R. Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (University of Chicago Press, 2003). The suggestion is that the experiment has implications for certain uses of the Internet, above all because it helps explain the dynamics of outrage.
To understanding the experiment, we have to begin with an earlier one, involving individuals, not groups (this study, also done with Kahneman and Schkade, can be found in the Punitive Damages book as well)… People are intuitive retributivists, and their punishment judgments are rooted in outrage. (Deterrence is secondary.) And if certain scales are used, outrage turns out to be stunningly uniform across demographic groups (at least in personal injury cases involving corporate wrongdoing).
Emphasis mine: If his finding that “punishment judgments rooted in outrage” have implications for the Internet don’t you guess they’d have death penalty implications as well? I’m no economist, or academic researcher, I’m a lay citizen admirer of both. My lay experience and intuition tell me that economics is no way to make these decisions.
And if those decisions are to be informed by economics, then it should be behavioral economics and the libertarian paternalist economics researched and favored by Sunstein himself.
I understand that these are deep, impenetrable problems with no easy or clear solution. But I expect that the research reported in today’s NYTimes piece (and this WSJ’s piece, too) will be understood by lay people - citizens, who are, like me, overwhelmed by the problem - as reason to give in to their Roman retributive proclivities and justify the pro-death penalty position.
I think that’s sad tragic.
