According to Jay Johansen in the following viewpoint, the death penalty has a positive correlation to the homicide rate. As the number of executions declines, the homicide rate increases, and as the number of executions rises, the homicide rate falls. Therefore, Johansen concludes, the death penalty deters violent crime. Johansen is a freelance writer in Ohio.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, what was the homicide rate throughout the 1950s, as cited by Johansen?
2. What happened in 1967, and how did this event affect the homicide rate, according to the author?
3. In Johansen's view, why did the Supreme Court once again permit executions to take place?

Advocates of capital punishment routinely argue that statistics prove that it deters crime. Opponents of capital punishment just as routinely argue that statistics prove that it does not.

I suppose a naive person might find this disagreement puzzling. Even if we cannot agree on moral questions, surely we could at least agree on basic facts. I mean, it would be understandable if an anti-capital punishment person said that, yes, it does deter crime, but it is still wrong because it is cruel and barbaric; or if a pro-capital punishment person said, okay, it doesn't deter crime any more than life imprisonment or some other punishment, but it is still right because it is just. But can't we at least agree on the underlying facts?

Statistics

But as I'm sure we're all aware these days, you can twist statistics to prove almost anything. Statisticians have developed many sophisticated techniques to carefully analyze data. People with a point to prove can abuse these techniques to distort the data.

But I'm a simple guy, so I decided to look at the simple statistics. Let's just look at the raw numbers: no clever analysis, no involved mathematical manipulation, just look at the numbers.

So, using statistics from the United States Department of Justice March 1998 website, here's my graph number 1: The homicide rate for each year since 1950. The rate is given as the number of homicides for every million people.

A casual glance at this graph clearly shows that homicide rates increased sharply beginning about 1965 or 1966, they took a steep dive from 1980 to 1985, started back up again until 1991-1992, and now appear to be inching down.

Surely a reasonable, concerned person could ask if there is any apparent cause for the sudden sharp increase in the late 60's. And surely we could look with hope at the drop in the early 80's, and ask if there was not something that was happening then that we could reproduce.

So let's look at another graph. Graph number 2 shows the homicide rate, just as above, and on top of this I show the number of cases where capital punishment was imposed.

Note the interesting correlations. The number of executions plummeted from 47 in 1962 to 2 in 1967 to zero in 1968. The homicide rate, which had been holding steady around 50 throughout the 50's, started up in 1965, just two years after executions began their plummet. The biggest increase in one year came in 1967, the same year that the last person was executed.

So okay, maybe this was simply a coincidence. Capital punishment was reinstated a decade later. What happened then?

In 1976 the Supreme Court issued several decisions in which they basically backtracked and again allowed capital punishment. (They didn't quite say that they were changing their minds or admitting error, but rather that the flaws which they had discovered in the previous capital punishment laws had now been corrected.) The first person was actually executed in 1977. In the very year of these Supreme Court decisions, the homicide rate plummeted. But no more than two people were actually executed in any one year through 1982, and so perhaps criminals concluded that the danger of execution was remote, and the homicide rate crawled back up. Then the number of executions suddenly went up in 1983, and in that year the homicide rate showed its biggest one-year drop. With the sudden surge in executions in 1996, the homicide rate again fell.

A Mirror Image

Indeed, just looking at this graph we can see that the homicide rate is almost the mirror image of the number of executions. Consistently when the number of executions goes down, the homicide rate goes up, and when the number of executions goes up, the homicide rate goes down. The only major exception to this is the fall in homicides in 1976, which came before executions re-started. But this is easily explainable by the fact that the court decisions allowing executions to resume came a year or two before executions actually did resume. Criminals may have been responding to press reports that capital punishment was once again going to take place, in advance of it actually happening.

I'm sure that opponents of capital punishment will say that my analysis here is too simplistic; that I have failed to take other factors into account; that this correlation between execution rates and homicide rates is pure coincidence, and that other factors explain why homicide rates went up and down at these times that had nothing to do with the number of executions.

To which I reply, Well, maybe, but I think you have an awfully hard sell. If there was just one point of correlation, it might be explained by coincidence. That is, if the homicide rate had gone up when capital punishment was abolished, but when capital punishment was re-instated the homicide rate had remained unchanged, or had gone up further, one might reasonably say that the first correlation was simply coincidence. But when we can clearly see that the two numbers mirror each other, consistently over a period of almost fifty years, attributing this to coincidence gets pretty hard to believe.

The obvious conclusion from looking at the statistics, without any fancy "analysis" or "factoring out of other factors," is that capital punishment does deter murder.

FURTHER READINGS

Books

• William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio Jr., and John P. Walters. Body Count: Moral Poverty ... and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
• William J. Bratton with Peter Knobler. Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic. New York: Random House, 1998.
• Steven R. Donziger, ed. The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.
• Mansfield B. Frazier. From Behind the Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate. New York: Paragon House, 1995.
• James Gilligan. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1996.
• Dennis A. Henigan, E. Bruce Nicholson, and David Hemenway. Guns and the Constitution: The Myth of Second Amendment Protection for Firearms in America. Northampton, MA: Alethia Press, 1995.
• Edward Humes. No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
• Wendy Kaminer. It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
• Don B. Kates and Gary Kleck. The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1997.
• George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996.
• Randall Kennedy. Race, Crime, and the Law. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
• David J. Krajicek. Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• John R. Lott Jr. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Edwin Meese III and Robert E. Moffit, eds. Making America Safer: What Citizens and Their State and Local Officials Can Do to Combat Crime. Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1997.
• Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld. Crime and the American Dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997.
• Katheryn K. Russell. The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
• Michael Tonry. Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Ved Varma, ed. Violence in Children and Adolescents. Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1997.
• Willie L. Williams with Bruce B. Henderson. Taking Back Our Streets: Fighting Crime in America. New York: Scribner, 1996.
• James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia, eds. Crime. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1995.
• Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Periodicals

• Walter Berns. "Crime in the Public Mind," Society, March/April 1997.
• Barry Lee Coyne. "For Those Who Cringe at Crime," Christian Social Action, December 1997. Available from 100 Maryland Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20002.
• John J. DiIulio Jr. "Arresting Ideas," Policy Review, Fall 1995.
• Craig Donegan. "Preventing Juvenile Crime," CQ Researcher, March 15, 1996. Available from 1414 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC 20037.
• David R. Francis. "Just Proven: Prisons Do Keep Down Crime," Christian Science Monitor, January 19, 1996.
• Bob Herbert. "The Keys to Cutting Crime," Liberal Opinion, October 13, 1997. Available from PO Box 880, Vinton, IA 52349-0880.
• Shari Huffman. "Taking Back Their Neighborhoods," Christian Social Action, May 1997.
• Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan. "Crackdown on Kids," Progressive, February 1996.
• Edmund F. McGarrell. "Cutting Crime Through Police-Citizen Cooperation," Outlook, Spring 1998. Available from 5395 Emerson Way, Indianapolis, IN 46226.
• Eugene H. Methvin. "Mugged by Reality," Policy Review, July/August 1997.
• George E. Pataki. "Death Penalty Is a Deterrent," USA Today, March 1997.
• Charley Reese. "Crime Problem Has Simple Solution," Conservative Chronicle, December 9, 1998. Available from PO Box 37077, Boone, IA 50037-0077.
• Robert Warburton. "'Lock' Em Up and Leave 'Em There!'" Christian Social Action, October 1997.
• Robert L. Woodson. "Reclaiming the Lives of Young People," USA Today, September 1997.

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