re: Biden stopped the executions of 37 men. Trump's DOJ wants to punish them

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Just because you are taking a class where this is declared to be true does not make it so.

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Condescension noted but there are no criminology classes offered at my university. I've worked within the system for years and have done plenty of my own research. I finished my coursework last year anyway.

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By people who are determined to manipulate the data, you yourself have noted that departments only want papers they agree with.

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Of course, but this isn't a new discovery. Cesare Beccaria proposed this in the 1700s.

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You can look at the same data through a different statistical method and declare the opposite.

Once we stopped executing people in the 60s, murders went way up.

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The period when the Supreme Court paused executions (early 1970s) did coincide with rising crime, but that rise also happened in many places that still legally had death penalties. It also happened alongside major social changes, demographic shifts, drug epidemics, policing changes, economic shifts, and cultural turmoil which researchers see as much more plausible drivers of homicide trends than execution policy alone.


Content Warning: This abstract is written in all caps.

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IN 1963, WHEN DECEASED CRIMINOLOGIST HANS MATTICK WROTE 'THE UNEXAMINED DEATH', BOTH THE MURDER AND THE EXECUTION RATES HAD BEEN DECLINING FOR 30 YEARS. SOON THEREAFTER, MURDER RATES SOARED WHILE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CEASED. THIS, OF COURSE, LED TO SERIOUS REEXAMINATION OF THE CONTENTION THAT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT HAD NO DETERRENT EFFECT ON THE MURDER RATE. STUDIES ON CRIMINAL HOMICIDE PATTERNS SHIFTED FROM SIMPLE COMPARISONS OF CAPITAL CRIME RATES IN JURISDICTIONS WITH AND WITHOUT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT TO MORE COMPLEX RESEARCH WHICH EMPHASIZED A VARIETY OF FACTORS. ALTHOUGH STUDIES SUCH AS EHRLICH'S 1975 REPORT SUPPORTED THE POSITION THAT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT DID HAVE A DETERRENT EFFECT, ARGUMENTS WERE RAISED THAT FAULTY STATISTICAL PROCEDURES WERE BEING USED. FURTHER STUDIES, SUCH AS FORST (1977), SHOWED THAT THE UPSURGE IN HOMICIDE RATES WAS CONCENTRATED IN A SMALL SEGMENT OF THE POPULATION, THAT EXECUTIONS NEVER OCCURED IN MORE THAN A MINUTE FRACTION OF MURDERS, AND THAT THE INCREASE IN MURDERS WAS GREATER IN STATES THAT DID NOT EXECUTE ANYONE THAN IN THOSE THAT DIMINISHED USE OF THE DEATH PENALTY DURING THE 1960'S. AVAILABLE EVIDENCE, ALTHOUGH NOT AS SYSTEMATICALLY AND THOROUGHLY GATHERED AS IS DESIRABLE, INDICATES THAT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BOTH REDUCES THE CERTAINTY OF MURDERERS BEING CONVICTED FOR THEIR CRIMES, AND INCREASES THE PROSPECT THAT PLEA BARGAINING WILL CAUSE PERSONS TO BE CONVICTED OF MURDERS THEY DID NOT COMMIT. THERE IS EVEN EVIDENCE THAT SOME PERSONS ARE PROMPTED TO KILL WHEN EXECUTIONS ARE PUBLICIZED. THUS THE DEATH PENALTY SEEMS TO PRODUCE LESS DETERRENCE THAN THE MORE CERTAIN PENALTY OF IMPRISONMENT. FOOTNOTES AND STATISTICAL TABLES ARE INCLUDED. (KCP)

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LINK

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...of trying to justify your insane conclusion based on a moral high ground that you don't even believe.

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You're saying I don't believe humans possess God-given human dignity?

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I accuse you of not caring about victims by your relative lack of posts expressing concern for victims vs. your concern for the punishment of violent criminals. It's clear. You can't run from your post history.

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You're saying that a lack of evidence of me posting memorials to crime victims is actually evidence that I don't care about any crime victims?

You must not care about babies born addicted to drugs. Or pesticides in drinking water. Or any number of things that I haven't seen you explicitly post about. You can't be serious.

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then why do you care about a person doing hard time for the rest of their life vs. not so hard time for the rest of their life. Why do you care about a person getting the death penalty vs. doing a life sentence? All of those outcomes result in the same number of future victims (zero). So, with that in mind, why do you care?

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I don't believe the government should have the authority to execute its own citizens. i believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.

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Be careful how you answer that. It's going to reveal your true intentions and show that your motivation has nothing to do with the victims.

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OK...

Dignity!

I say release all your prisoners in your yard. Make your children play in said yard

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That's an insanely simplistic review that very much shows how shallow your logical approach is to the subject.

Of course certainty of punishment also deters crime. You've taken that logical statement and falsely concluded that harshness of punishment does not.

To use your insane example, if the chances of getting caught speeding were 5 times as likely, but the punishment for getting caught speeding was a 1 dollar fine with no insurance repercussions, you'd get a ton more speeding. Or, if the chances of getting caught was the same but the cost was $2K fine and a loss of your drivers license for six months, you'd get a lot less speeding.

Is this over-simplistic analysis really the basis of your opinion? Is it really that shallow?

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You’re arguing against a position I haven’t taken.

I am not claiming that punishment severity is irrelevant at the margins or that a $1 fine for speeding would be effective. That’s a straw man. Every serious criminologist acknowledges there is a baseline level of punishment required for a law to have meaning.

The claim (supported by hundreds of years of research) is that once that baseline is met, increasing harshness yields rapidly diminishing returns, especially for serious crimes. At that point, certainty of detection and enforcement are the meaningful deterrents.

Your speeding example actually reinforces this. Most people already know speeding carries fines, insurance consequences, and potential license loss, yet we still speed routinely. What changes behavior is visible enforcement, not legislatures quietly increasing penalties. Troopers on the road, speed traps, and cameras change behaviors. Not laws. That’s why behavior changes immediately when enforcement presence increases, even though the penalties haven’t changed at all.

More importantly, you’re using a minor regulatory offense analogy in a discussion about violent crime, where the decision-making context is completely different. Murder, assault, and robbery are not crimes where people sit down and do a rational cost-benefit analysis of sentence length. Most offenders do not expect to be caught, do not know the exact penalty, and are acting under emotional, situational, or impaired conditions (which is exactly why harsher sentencing is an ineffective deterrent).

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I didn't know you were pro-life and against abortion at any stage.

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People operate off of tons of baseless assumptions here, so I'm not surprised.

She is a phony.

Haven't figured it out yet?

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You’re arguing against a position I haven’t taken.

I am not claiming that punishment severity is irrelevant at the margins

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Your first sentence of the OP...

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We already know, conclusively, that harsher punishments do not deter crime

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She is not. She's definitely sincere.

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She knows her shite is phony, it's why she ignores posts that punch holes in her horseshite.

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The current criminal justice system is an abject failure, PRIMARILY due to insane, woke policies. The main problem is the lack of sufficient incarceration of known repeat violent criminals due to “racism”. Democrat activist DAs and judges intentionally put known animals back on the street over and over again, directly imperiling the public.

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Liberals like 4cub do not care about real victims.

The only victims are the incarcerated in 4dummies world.