The recent call by Australia's Prime Minister to consider reinstatement of the death penalty for serious crime has of course enlivened debate on the issue here in Australia. An Australian reader writes:
Michael Duffy also notes that elite and media attitudes to capital punishment differ markedly from popular opinion.
Back in 1975 Isaac Ehrlich published a pioneer study "The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment -- A Question of Life and Death" that highlighted the crime prevention benefits of capital punishment. His paper is online here (PDF).
Ehrlich's views have been summarised in more digestible form by Slate columnist Steven Landsburg: "Increase the number of executions by 1 percent (which amounts to increasing the severity of the average punishment) and (again to a very rough approximation) the murder rate falls by about half a percent."
Landsburg is at pains to point out that Ehrlich sees increasing the probability of convictions as the best deterrent against crime: "That's not to say that punishments don't matter. Executions may be a less-effective deterrent than convictions, but they are nevertheless an extremely powerful deterrent; according to Ehrlich's numbers, one additional execution ...could well have prevented over 20 murders."
On a similar theme economist Steven Levitt, a rising star in the economics world, has provided a statistical model that reinforces the common sense belief that hiring more police reduces crime, something a large chunk of our intellectual class dispute: "Each additional police officer is estimated to eliminate eight to ten serious crimes. Existing estimates of the costs of crime suggest that the social benefit of reduced crime is approximately $100,000 per officer per year, implying that the current number of police is below the optimal level." See here.
When it comes to capital punishment, of course the perspective of economists and social scientists is different from that of theologians and priests. This evangelical Christian site says:
"..capital punishment (was) never specifically removed or replaced in the Bible. While some would argue that the New Testament ethic replaces the Old Testament ethic, there is no instance in which a replacement ethic is introduced. As we have already seen, Jesus and the disciples never disturb the Old Testament standard of capital punishment. The Apostle Paul teaches that we are to live by grace with one another, but also teaches that we are to obey human government that bears the sword. Capital punishment is taught in both the Old Testament and the New Testament."
So of course most Australian churches oppose it!”
As I have long made clear (PDF), I personally oppose the death penalty purely because I think our police are too crooked for us to have enough confidence in a guilty verdict. Most Australian States seem to have police in jail at the moment as a result of corruption convictions and some notorious cases of police fabrication of evidence appear never to have been punished (e.g. the Mannix case - PDF).
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FROM BROOKES NEWS:
Australian protectionist shoots himself in the head. A socialist ideologue resorts to abuse and gross misrepresentations to defend his protectionist ideology.
The Bush strategy that beat bin Laden and destroyed Saddam. The Democrats, i.e., the Copperhead Party, and their media friends are deliberately undermining the Bush strategy that destroyed the Taliban, bin Laden and the vile Saddam, by trying to turn the American people against the war. Their actions border on treason.
Phillip Adams and the moral bankruptcy of the left. Phillip Adams pathological attacks on Prime Minister Howard, particularly over the toppling of Saddam, serve to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of the left.
Details here
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