Capital Punishment Deterrence

Capital punishment or better known as the death penalty is an ancient common practice that used to be implemented by many nations to punish people from the crimes they had committed by taking away their lives. As the years progress, the UN adopted the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights In 1948, it stated “the Declaration proclaims the right of every individual to protection from deprivation of life. It states that no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment. The death penalty violates both of these fundamental rights.”(Amnesty

International). According to Carsten Anckar in his article “why countries choose the death penalty?” the abolitionist movement did not have much force until many international treaties were drafted in

Out of the 58, China, Iran, Iraq, and

United States have the highest execution rates. Does death penalty serve as an effective deterrence tool for crime? Why so many nations prefer to abolished it? Is it better for death penalty to be completely abolished? The positive and negative aspects of death penalty will be discuss to estimate the effectiveness of the practice.

Many nations in favor of death penalty would argue that death penalty is an effective deterrence tool. Deterrence uses punishment to stop an offender from committing crime again.

Deterrence can be divided into two categories: general and specific. General deterrence refers to punish a person to serve as an example to inflict fear to others and stop them from committing a future transgression, while specific is to stop one individual from reoffending. Death penalty would fit under general and specific deterrence. Those in favor believe that death penalty is the best way to protect society of the most dangerous criminals, “Imposing a severe punishment allows society to express moral outrage at the offender’s breach and simultaneously helps reinforce a shared sense of commitment to the violated norm.” (Acker, 2003, pg. 173). How

It was found that the United States prison population increases for the 6 crimes and the drug offenses had the most increase from 1980-2001. (2011, pg. 85).

Also incarceration data recorded worldwide from years 1992 to 2009 of 8 countries including the

U.S except for two had demonstrated to have an increase in prison population, “U.S and Russia , far exceeded all the other nations with rates of 723 per hundred thousand for the U.S…”(2011, pg. 87). The United States has the highest number of prison population worldwide, having more than China, which has the largest population in the world. The prison populations in the united stated had drastically increase in a short period of time. It may have to do with the broken windows policy put in place around that time that targeted minorities. Anyways the prison population should had lower by now. Is the death penalty doing an effective job deterring people from committing crime? Also there have been some studies to find out if death penalty really deters people from committing crime. In the article “Deterrence and the death penalty. Why the statistics should be ignored”, Daniel Nagin discusses how many statistics showing that death penalty works as a deterrence disregard many important aspects in how to calculate