Check out this article at the NYT on capital punishment and deterrence. The bulk of studies suggest executing one inmate prevents anywhere from three to 18 deaths. However, confidence in these results is tenuous at best--for many of the same statistical lessons my tuition check pays for.
The bottom line is we really don’t execute that many people in a given year, so we don’t have a lot of data to work from. We certainly don’t execute at random, so it’s not exactly clear what the counterfactual is (It brings a whole new meaning to “treatment-on-the-treated”). And it’s near impossible to disentangle exogenous crime trends from real deterrence. Wolfers, an economist at Penn, suggests (tongue-in-cheek) overcoming the statistical problems with the following experiment.
“If I was allowed 1,000 executions and 1,000 exonerations, and I was allowed to do it in a random, focused way,” he said, “I could probably give you an answer.”
I think he might have some trouble getting participants for his study. Maybe a natural experiment would be more appropriate…didn’t everyone but Harrison Ford die on that bus??
**Some additional food for thought: Geneticists are rapidly decoding the human genome and it is conceivable that they will identify the “homicidal” gene in the near future. What do we do with infants who we know will pose a real threat to society once they reach adulthood? This throws a bit of a wrench in the moral argument, regardless of your beliefs. I hope we can at least agree to get rid of this guy!
2 comments:
I think we need to do a high point/low point analysis of this article:
-High point: “You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.” Responding to the new studies, he said, “is like learning to waltz with a cloud.”
-Low point: The remainder of the article. Is discussing a moral issue in economic terms really worthwhile? And even if it were, I think we owe it to those we'd execute to find or create reliable studies instead.
Yes, we need reliable studies. But choosing to ignore the economics in the moral debate is no debate at all. Pure opposition to the death penalty is a valid position so long as you recognize that protecting the life of a living, breathing inmate may be associated with sacraficing the life of nameless, faceless innocent(s).
High point: Discussing a moral argument with eyes open.
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