Capital Punishment

8 Pages 1965 Words

Unlike popular belief, the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to criminals. As stated by Alfred Blumstein, author of “The Criminal Career Paradigm,” “Expert after expert and study after study has shown the lack of correlation between the treatment of the death penalty and the occurrence of violent crimes.” (Blumstein 68) Isaac Ehrlich's study on the limiting effects of capital punishment in America reveals this to the public. The study spans twenty-five years, from 1957 to 1982, and shows that in the first year the study was conducted, there were 8060 murders and 6 executions. However, in the last year of the study there were 22,520 murders committed and only 1 execution performed. (Blumstein 54) This clearly suggests that many violent criminals are not afraid of capital punishment.
Abolitionists, people against capital punishment, believe the offenders should be required to compensate the victim's family with the offender's own income from employment or community service. There is no doubt that someone can do more alive than dead. By working, the criminal inadvertently “pays back” society and also their victim and/or victim's family. There is no reason for the criminal to receive any compensation for the work they do, because money doesn’t take the place of jail time. This could be considered a form of slavery to some, but it is no different from the days of being sent to the "yard" to break stone.
One of the most well known examples of the criminal contributing to the betterment of society is the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They were nineteen years old when they committed “The Crime of the 20th Century.” In 1924, they kidnapped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy just to see how it would feel to kill someone. They were both spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Together, while in prison, their accomplishments included working in hospitals, teaching the illiterate ho...