"One man with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson
|
|
"One man with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson |
|
|
The Enormous Cost of Crime The Deterrent Effect of Capital
Punishment Capital Punishment Versus Life Without
Parole Crime
in New Zealand- The Staggering Increase |
|
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 1, 2002 GOVERNMENT can make no better use of tax revenues than to adequately fund the criminal-justice system. In recent years we have seen stricter law enforcement lead to diminished rates of violent crime. When we consider the huge financial burden that crime inflicts on society, it becomes clear that expenditures for extra policing and prison construction are very good investments. A useful guideline for the calculation of crime’s financial toll is provided by a 1996 Department of Justice (DOJ) study titled "Victim Costs and Consequences," one of the most comprehensive assessments ever made of the costs associated with personal and property crime. The research team, headed by Vanderbilt University professor Mark Cohen, reports that in recent years the total monetary value of property losses and immediate medical expenses incurred by crime victims has hovered around $18 billion annually. But after additionally factoring in long-term medical and mental health care costs, legal fees, lost earnings due to work time missed, and the cost of public victim-assistance programs, this $18 billion figure swells to $105 billion. In other words, the real, tangible costs of violent and personal crimes are about 5.83 times higher than the bare-bones figure. But even this figure tells only a portion of the story, for it does not consider the values of pain, suffering, and diminished quality of life that criminals inflict upon their victims. To quantify the values of these variables, the research team analyzed jury awards given in recent years to survivors of violent crimes. The punitive damage portions of these awards were ignored, making the sole consideration the dollar amount designated to "compensate" the victims for their suffering and lost quality of life. With regard to fatal crimes, the researchers found no reliable figures estimating medical costs specifically for homicide victims, and thus based their calculations on the average medical costs associated with fatal workers’ compensation cases. They then faced the cold and difficult task of assigning a monetary value to what would have been the remaining portions of the lives prematurely terminated by crime. In an exhaustive review of the literature on this subject, the DOJ team took the average of nearly fifty previously published values – which were adjusted for the expected life spans of the deceased people involved – and arrived at a figure of $2.7 million per life. After adding these quality-of-life and premature-death considerations to the mix, the DOJ study estimates that the aggregate costs resulting from crime in America rise by another $345 billion, to $450 billion annually. But the DOJ report does not go far enough, for it does not consider such variables as: (a) white-collar crimes like theft, fraud, and embezzlement; (b) the cost of operating the criminal-justice system; (c) preventive expenditures and actions taken to reduce the risk of victimization; (d) the wasted potential productivity of incarcerated criminals; (e) the lost productivity of injured or traumatized victims; and (f) "victimless" crimes such as drug abuse, gambling, and prostitution. To truly appreciate the heavy financial burden with which crime saddles our nation, we must factor these variables into the equation. Let us briefly consider some of them individually. The aggregate value of all property and money stolen or obtained through fraud is $603 billion annually. This is probably a conservative estimate of victims’ losses, as it does not account for the value of assets whose theft is unreported. In 1997, the cost of operating the criminal-justice system (police, prisons, and courts) was $129.8 billion. Moreover, the Justice Department’s crime-fighting expenditures are complemented by $23.38 billion per year from thirty separate government agencies that devote additional resources to law enforcement. Above and beyond even these expenditures, an additional $160.6 billion is devoted to anti-drug trafficking programs. Americans also allocate huge sums to the purchase of goods and services whose express purpose is to prevent or deter crime. For example, each year they spend $4.3 billion for locks and safes, $1.5 billion for surveillance cameras, another $1.5 billion for safety lighting, $1.1 billion for protective fences and gates, $6.5 billion for alarm systems, and $17.9 billion for private security guards. This is only a very partial list. In the absence of crime, of course, the time and money spent on these protection measures could have been used for other purposes. Simply put, $1,000 spent on a home alarm system is $1,000 that cannot be spent on groceries. In a 1999 Journal of Law and Economics study, Centre College professor David Anderson quantifies what he calls crime’s "opportunity costs;" i.e., the value of potential opportunities for productivity lost to criminal activity. Because criminals are sitting idly behind bars rather than being productive members of the economy, society is deprived of the goods and services they could otherwise have produced in the time they devoted to crime and its planning. Anderson calculates that the lost workdays that all inmates spend executing their crimes and serving their prison sentences cost society $39.206 billion annually. Another opportunity cost imposed by crime is based on the National Crime Victimization Survey’s estimate that each year 1.8 million victims lose a combined 6.1 million workdays because of crime, which result in lost wages of $876 million per year. Additionally, a similar formula estimates that the "lost opportunity" value of the hours people devote every year to our nation’s 20,000 Neighborhood Watch programs is $655 million; in other words, the 100,000 person-hours dedicated to these programs each day represent time that otherwise could have been spent on business pursuits or similarly valued leisure activities. Adding together all the aforementioned costs of criminal activity (including also those quantified by the DOJ study), Anderson calculates that the total aggregate financial burden of crime in America is $1.705 trillion per year – a monumental figure. Thus, if stricter law enforcement is successful at diminishing crime rates, it must be embraced as a worthwhile investment – regardless of whether it has a "disparate impact" on people of any particular race, ethnicity, gender, or age group. |
|
The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment From Wesley Low's
Pro Death Penalty Web Page Others say that states which do have the death penalty have higher crime rates than those that don't, that a more severe punishment only inspires more severe crimes. I must point out that every state in the union is different. These differences include the populations, number of cities, and yes, the crime rates. Strongly urbanized states are more likely to have higher crime rates than states that are more rural, such as those that lack capital punishment. The states that have capital punishment have it because of their high crime rate, not the other way around. In 1985, a study was published by economist Stephen K. Layson at the University of North Carolina that showed that every execution of a murderer deters, on average, 18 murders. The study also showed that raising the number of death sentences by one percent would prevent 105 murders. However, only 38 percent of all murder cases result in a death sentence, and of those, only 0.1 percent are actually executed. On occasion, circumstances have led to meaningful statistical evaluations of the death penalty's deterrent effect. In Utah, for example, there have been five executions since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976: Gary Gilmore faced a firing squad at the Utah State Prison on January 17,
1977. There had been 55 murders in that state during 1976. During 1977, in the
wake of the Gilmore execution, there were 44 murders, a 20 percent decrease.
Arthur Gary Bishop, who sodomized and killed a number of young boys, was executed on June 10, 1988. For all of 1988, there were 47 murders. During January-June, there were 26; for July-December, the tally was 21, a 19 percent difference. In the wake of those three Utah executions, there have been notable decreases
in both the number and the rate of murders within the state. The figures are
there but abolitionists have chosen to ignore them. "While some [death penalty] abolitionists try to face down the results of their disastrous experiment and still argue to the contrary, the...[data] concludes that a substantial deterrent effect has been observed...In six months, more Americans are murdered than have killed by execution in this entire century...Until we begin to fight crime in earnest [by using the death penalty], every person who dies at a criminal's hands is a victim of our inaction." And more recently, there have been 56 executions in the USA in 1995, more in
one year since executions resumed in 1976, and there has been a 12 percent drop
in the murder rate nationwide. Also, in the 1920s and 30s, Death penalty advocates were known to refer to England as a means of proving capital punishment's deterrent effect. Back then, at least 120 murderers were executed every year in the US and sometimes the number reached 200. Even then, England used the death penalty far more consistently than we did and their overall murder rate was smaller than any one of our major cities at the time. Now, since England abolished capital punishment about thirty years ago, the murder rate has subsequently doubled there and 75 English citizens have been murdered by released killers! The Honorable B. Rey Shauer, Justice of the Supreme Court of California, has said: "That the ever present potentiality in California of the death penalty, for murder in the commission of armed robbery, each year saves the lives of scores, if not hundreds of victims of such crimes, I cannot think, reasonably be doubted by any judge who has had substantial experience at the trial court level with the handling of such persons. I know that during my own trial court experience...included some four to five years (1930-1934) in a department of the superior court exclusively engaged in handling felony cases, I repeatedly heard from the lips of robbers...substantially the same story: 'I used a toy gun [or a simulated gun or a gun in which the firing pin or hammer had been extracted or damaged] because I didn't want my neck stretched.' (The penalty, at the time referred to, was hanging.)" What's more, in my state of New York, the death penalty is now in effect and
there are many death penalty cases in progress, and the murder rate continues to
drop faster than ever. South Africa may have the highest incidence of reported rape in the world-120.6 rapes for every 100,000 women in 1997, compared with 71 in the US in 1996. One reason for the increase in attacks on young children is that the rapists
think they are less likely to have AIDS since they know that AIDS itself has
skyrocketed in Nelson Mandela's "earthly paradise." Think about that. Those
rapists are less likely to attack grown women because they fear the lethal
consequences of AIDS. This demonstrates that violent criminals are indeed
capable of being deterred by lethal consequences for their actions if only on a
sub-conscious level. If the death penalty were just as consistent, lethal, and
as unstoppable as the AIDS virus, criminals would actually have reason to back
down. Given the evidence, there is no logical reason to believe otherwise.
"Had the death penalty been a real possibility in the minds of...murderers, they might well have stayed their hand. They might have shown moral awareness before their victims died...Consider the tragic death of Rosa Velez, who happened to be home when a man named Luis Vera burglarized her apartment in Brooklyn. "Yeah, I shot her," Vera admitted. "...and I knew I wouldn't go to the chair." Abolitionists will claim that most studies show that the death penalty has no
effect on the murder rate at all. But that's only because those studies have
been focused on inconsistent executions. Capital punishment, like all other
applications, must be used consistently in order to be effective. However, the
death penalty hasn't been used consistently in the USA for decades, so
abolitionists have been able to establish the delusion that it doesn't deter at
all to rationalize their fallacious arguments. But the evidence shows that
whenever capital punishment is applied consistently or against a small murder
rate it has always been followed by a decrease in murder. I have yet to see an
example on how the death penalty has failed to reduce the murder rate under
those conditions. HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF DETERRENCE: In the 1800s, in English occupied India, there was one of the worst gangs of murdering thieves the world has ever known, the Indian hoodlum band known as the Thuggees. Through the course of their existence, dating back to the 1550s, the Thuggees were credited with murdering more than 2,000,000 people, mostly wealthy travelers. The killer secret society plagued India for more than 350 years. The Thuggees traveled in gangs, sometimes disguised as poor beggars or religious mendicants. Sometimes they wore the garb of rich merchants to get closer to unsuspecting victims. One of their principles was never to spill blood, so they always strangled their victims. Each member was required to kill at least once a year in order to maintain membership in the cult. But they killed in the name of religion. The deaths were conceived of as human sacrifices to Kali, the bloodthirsty Hindustani goddess of destruction. It came to pass that the Thuggees began to kill using pickaxes and knives. According to legend, the Thuggees believed that Kali devoured the bodies of their victims. The story goes that once a member of the society hid behind a tree in order to spy on the goddess. The angry goddess punished the Thuggees by making them bury their victims from then on. The ruling British government worked very hard to stop the Thuggee religion and its murderous practices. Between 1829 and 1848, the British managed to suppress the Thuggees by means of mass arrests and speedy executions. Indeed, rows and rows of Thuggees were left hanging from the gallows along the roads by the dozens. This not only established a zero recidivism rate, but it also greatly discouraged new membership into the cult. The most lethal practitioner of the cult of Thuggee was Buhram. At his trial it was established that he had murdered 931 people between 1790 and 1840. All had been strangled with his waistcloth. Burham was executed in 1840. Appropriately enough, he was hanged until he strangled. In 1882, the British government deemed the problem solved with the hanging death of the last known Thuggee. Good riddance. Back then, the British weren't as morally confused as they are now. Not only had they the insight to tell the difference between crime and punishment, but they also respected their moral responsibility to defend public safety by diligently countering barbarism, even in their colonies. If the British were anything back then like they are now, they would have been content to sit around on their hands reveling on how "civilized" they are to allow such and evil cult like the Thuggees to exist and terrorize the public. -gladly sacrificing public safety and social tranquility for some self-absorbed sense of delicacy. Most likely, the Thuggees would still be around today and for many centuries more to plague India. The Indians have a lot to be thankful for since the British eliminated that scourge over a century ago. They wouldn't have the nerve to effectively counter such barbarism these days. |
|
Capital Punishment Versus Life Without Parole From Wesley Low's Pro Death Penalty Web Page
Another flaw is that life imprisonment tends to deteriorate with the passing of time. Take the Moore case in New York State for example. In 1962, James Moore raped and strangled 14-year-old Pamela Moss. Her parents decided to spare Moore the death penalty on the condition that he be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Later on, thanks to a change in sentencing laws in 1982, James Moore is eligible for parole every two years! If Pamela's parents knew that they couldn't trust the state, Moore could have been executed long ago and they could have put the whole horrible incident behind them forever. Instead they have a nightmare to deal with biannually. I'll bet not a day goes by that they don't kick themselves for being foolish enough to trust the liberal sham that is life imprisonment and rehabilitation. (According to the US Department of Justice, the average prison sentence served for murder is five years and eleven months.) Putting a murderer away for life just isn't good enough. Laws change, so do parole boards, and people forget the past. Those are things that cause life imprisonment to weather away. As long as the murderer lives, there is always a chance, no matter how small, that he will strike again. And there are people who run the criminal justice system who are naive enough to allow him to repeat his crime. Kenneth McDuff, for instance, was convicted of the 1966 shooting deaths of two boys and the vicious rape-strangulation of their 16-year-old female companion. A Fort Worth jury ruled that McDuff should die in the electric chair, a sentence commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as then imposed. In 1989, with Texas prisons overflowing and state officials under fire from the federal judiciary, McDuff was quietly turned loose on an unsuspecting citizenry. Within days, a naked body of a woman turned up. Prostitute Sarafia Parker, 31, had been beaten, strangled and dumped in a field near Temple. McDuff's freedom in 1989 was interrupted briefly. Jailed after a minor racial incident, he slithered through the system and was out again in 1990. In early 1991, McDuff enrolled at Texas State Technical College in Waco. Soon, Central Texas prostitutes began disappearing. One, Valencia Joshua, 22, was last seen alive Feb. 24, 1991. Her naked, decomposed body later was discovered in a shallow grave in woods behind the college. Another of the missing women, Regenia Moore, was last seen kicking and screaming in the cab of McDuff's pickup truck. During the Christmas holidays of 1991, Colleen Reed disappeared from an Austin car wash. Witnesses reported hearing a woman scream that night and seeing two men speeding away in a yellow or tan Thunderbird. Little more than two months later, on March 1, 1992, Melissa Northrup, pregnant with a third child, vanished from the Waco convenience store where she worked. McDuff's beige Thunderbird, broken down, was discovered a block from the store. Fifty-seven days later, a fisherman found the young woman's nearly nude body floating in a gravel pit in Dallas County, 90 miles north of Waco. By then, McDuff was the target of a nationwide manhunt. Just days after Mrs. Northrup's funeral, McDuff was recognized on television's "America's Most Wanted'' and arrested May 4 in Kansas City. In 1993, a Houston jury ordered him executed for the kidnap-slaying of 22-year-old Melissa Northrup, a Waco mother of two. In 1994, a Seguin jury assessed him the death penalty for the abduction-rape-murder of 28-year-old Colleen Reed, an Austin accountant. Pamplin's son Larry, the current sheriff of Falls County, appeared at McDuff's Houston trial for the 1992 abduction and murder of Melissa Northrup. "Kenneth McDuff is absolutely the most vicious and savage individual I
know,'' he told reporters. "He has absolutely no conscience, and I think he
enjoys killing.'' His riegn of terror finally ended on November 17, 1998 when Kenneth McDuff was put to death by the state of Texas by Lethal Injection. May his victims rest in peace. There has also been major political hay made out of a nasty scandal involving a prisoner named Willie Horton and Massachusetts' controversial "Prison Furlough Program." Massachussets governor Mike Dukakis was genuinely committed to the program, and had worked hard to bolster it, despite serious public concerns. In 1976, he'd actually vetoed legislation that would have banned furloughs for first-degree murderers, defending the practice as an essential "management tool." Thus, a decade later, in June of 1986, there was nothing in the law to deny convicted murderer Horton what was supposed to be a routine 48-hour leave. Predictably, Horton didn't play by the rules. He fled, eventually arriving in Maryland, where, in April of 1987, he had pistol-whipped and knifed Clifford Barnes, then bound and gagged him and twice raped his fiancee, Angela. When the story of the furlough became known, Horton's brutality created a public uproar. The Maryland judge who subsequently sentenced Horton to two consecutive life terms refused to extradite him to Massachusetts. "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed . . . This man should never draw a breath of free air again," said the judge. The scandal heated to a rolling boil. In April of 1988, embattled Massachusetts legislators finally killed the 16-year-old program -- without further resistance from Dukakis. Thank God! This is why for people who truly value public safety, there is no substitute for the best in its defense which is capital punishment. It not only forever bars the murderer from killing again, it also prevents parole boards and criminal rights activists from giving him the chance to repeat his crime. CLICHED ARGUMENTS AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: Another cliched argument is the phrase: "Violence doesn't solve anything." Thus labeling capital punishment as a form of violence in order to rationalize that short-sighted clichÚ that has no foundation in the real world. I like the way a quote from Robert A. Heinlien's Starship Troopers puts it: "The idea that "violence doesn't solve anything" is a historically untrue and immoral doctrine. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. People that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms." Another cliched argument is the question: "Why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" That two wrongs do not make a right, therefore, executions are equivalent to murder. First of all, the term murder is specifically defined in any dictionary as the UNLAWFUL killing of a person with malice and aforethought. So logically, the word murder cannot be used to describe executions since the death penalty is the law. To do so is an obvious abuse of semantics. Second of all, comparing executions to murders is like comparing incarcerating people to kidnapping or charging taxes and fines to extortion. There is a difference between violent crime and punishment. Is there a contradiction in a policeman speeding after a speeder to enforce speeding laws? One displays a serious lack of moral judgment to believe that just because two practices share a physical similarity means that they are morally identical. Law enforcement officials act well within the law when they punish criminals whether it be by charging fines, incarcerating them, or conducting executions, thereby, defending public safety. Nineteenth-century English philosopher and reformer John Stuart Mill, stated: "Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable it is to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary...our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall." What separates crime from punishment, good from evil are not their physical
aspects but rather their moral aspects. And moral aspects examine the reasons
and motivations behind one's actions. Abolitionists tend to focus on the death
penalty's physical aspects to demonstrate that it is the same as murder while
completely ignoring its moral aspects involved, therefore, demonstrating their
total lack of moral coherence. Syndicated columnist Charley Reese made an interesting analogy while criticizing the way abolitionists typically behave when he wrote: When I think of all the sweet, innocent people who suffer extreme pain and who die every day in this country, then the outpouring of sympathy for cold-blooded killers enrages me. Where is your (expletive deleted) sympathy for the good, the kind and the innocent? This fixation on murderers is a sickness, a putrefaction of the soul. It's the equivalent of someone spending all day mooning and cooing over a handful of human feces. Sick and abnormal. Personally, I think abolitionists have a lot of gall claiming that they are
motivated to oppose the death penalty by their "reverence for human life" when
the only people that they are interested in preserving are those who display the
least of it...the very least reverence for human life. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
