Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012) / Chapter Skim
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3 Determining the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Key Issues
3 Determining the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Key Issues
Pages 27-46
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From page 27... ...
This chapter provides an overview of the difficulties of empirical analysis of the potential deterrent effect. The difficulties arise both from conceptual issues about how the death penalty might deter and from statistical issues that must be successfully overcome to measure the size of that effect, if any.
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From page 28... ...
These issues include data limitations, factors beyond the death penalty that contribute to large differences in murder rates across place and over time, possible feedback effects by which homicide rates might affect the administration of the death penalty, how sanction risks are perceived, and the concept of a sanction regime. There is also a literature that examines the argument that executions may actually exacerbate homicide rates through a brutalization effect.
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From page 29... ...
Thus, another key concept in deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. Many of the studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment attempt to estimate whether homicide rates seem to be affected by variation in various measures of the likelihood of execution beyond the likelihood of apprehension and conviction.
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From page 30... ...
Given these possible and unknown underlying mechanisms, in the remainder of this report we discuss empirical estimates of the effects of the death on the homicide rate, not "deterrent" effects. Even more important than this point of nomenclature are the implications of alternative possible mechanisms for using empirical findings on the death penalty effects to predict effects on the crime rate of alternative sanction regimes.
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From page 31... ...
The remainder of this chapter lays out key challenges to estimating the causal effect of capital punishment on murder rates. Many of these challenges stem from the necessity of using nonexperimental data to estimate this effect.
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From page 32... ...
The legal status of the death penalty in the jurisdiction is one relevant dimension of a sanction regime. States with and without the death penalty have clearly defined differences in their sanction regimes.
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From page 33... ...
However, if deterrence is predicated on the perception of the risk of execution, short-term or even longer term variations in the rate of executions may not produce changes in the homicide rate, even if the death penalty is a deterrent. If such temporal variation in the actual rate of administration is perceived as confirming stable perceptions about this probability, rather than signaling change in the probability, such variations will not be associated with changes in the homicide rate even though the intensity of the use of capital punishment does deter.
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From page 34... ...
compared trends in homicide rates between states with and without capital punishment from 1960 to 2000, a period that spans the 1972 Furman decision that stopped use of the death penalty and 1976 Gregg decision that reinstated it. The time-series data for the two states closely track each other, with no obvious perturbations at the time of the Furman and Gregg decisions.
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From page 35... ...
The other is that the near absence of executions in the decade prior to Furman resulted in people's stable perceptions in both abolitionist and nonabolitionist states that there was no realistic chance of the death penalty being imposed. With such perceptions there would be no possibility of a deterrent effect even if would-be murderers would otherwise be deterred by the threat of execution.
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From page 36... ...
If, for example, capital punishment jurisdictions tended also to impose more severe imprisonment sanctions than noncapital jurisdictions, a reduced level of homicide in such jurisdictions may be attributable to these other features of their sanction regime and not to the death penalty. Or, if capital punishment jurisdictions are otherwise
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From page 37... ...
From 1974 to the early 1990s, the rate rose, then fell, then rose again, and then began declining steadily until leveling off in the early 2000s. As we emphasize throughout this report, these variations are important to making a valid determination of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, because if other influences on the murder rate are correlated with the use of the death penalty, the estimated deterrent effect may be contaminated by the effect of these other influences on the homicide rates.
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From page 38... ...
. However, these commentaries provide very limited guidance on how to account for other possible sources of change in homicide rates in a statistical analysis of the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
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From page 39... ...
The death penalty has been an available sentencing option in California for the entire post-1976 period, but the frequency of executions in California is low in comparison with Texas -- from 1976 to 2009, California executed 13 people, and Texas executed 447. Both states, however, sentenced sizable numbers of people to death.
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From page 40... ...
The three states were purposely selected to illustrate the importance of accounting for variations, across time and place, in factors that influence murder rates other than the use of capital punishment. If informal comparisons of data from a few selfselected jurisdictions were sufficient to settle the question of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, the reviews of the panel studies in Chapter 4 and the of time-series studies in Chapter 5, which are based on application of 3 In New York, the legal authority for the death penalty was available only from 1995 to 2007.
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From page 41... ...
Informal inferences based on visual inspection of long-term homicide rates and death penalty sanction trends cannot provide the basis for detecting such relationships: in Chapter 5 we apply the formal statistical methods that can detect those relationship. More generally, if valid inferences about the effect of the death penalty on homicide rates could be drawn from superficial analysis of data plots like those in Figure 3-3, the question of its effect would have been settled long ago.
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From page 42... ...
The presence of reciprocal effects also complicates the interpretation of findings on the deterrent effect of the death penalty even if based on plausible identification restrictions. For example, suppose that a state changes its death penalty sanction regime by expanding the types of murders that are eligible for the death penalty and that this change has the desired deterrent effect, which is estimated, based on plausible identification restrictions, to
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From page 43... ...
This kind of feedback is still another reason that throughout this report we describe empirical estimates of the effects of the death penalty as effects on the homicide rate, not as deterrent effects. SUMMARY In this and the preceding chapter we lay out some of the key challenges to using data from the studies reviewed in the next two chapters to infer the causal effect of the death penalty on the homicide rate.
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From page 44... ...
. The deterrent effect of death penalty eligibility: Evi dence from the adoption of child murder eligibility factors.
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From page 45... ...
Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
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