Death penalty research paper

essays against the death penalty

It is customary to assert that although the statistical proof of this belief is wanting, nevertheless no one has proved that capital punishment is not more deterrent than extended incarceration. Some retentionists, more attuned to social science epistemology than others, will observe correctly that not all the variables that bear on the utility of capital punishment are susceptible of quantification. But the argument usually is compressed into a sequence of simplifications of this nature: (a) Everyone knows that human beings fear death more than any other eventuality. (b) Therefore, the fear of death is the ultimate deterrent. (c) Although the fear of long-term incarceration is also a deterrent, there is a margin of increased deterrence presented by the threat of the death penalty.

death penalty research paper

Many such comparisons have been made by Professor Thorsten Sellin, for many years and still a preeminent criminologist. For me, his most telling comparison was based on the homicide rates in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. Michigan has not enjoyed the benefits of capital punishment since 1846, but Ohio and Indiana have consistently used the death penalty throughout their histories. The Penalty of Death, presents the comparison. It will be seen that the homicide rates in Michigan from 1920 to 1964 were approximately the same as those in Ohio and Indiana. From 1964 to 1974 the rates rose substantially in Michigan, while the rates in Ohio and Indiana made much more modest gains.

research paper on death penalty

Knowing so little about the dimensions of the population of deterrables, whose attitudes and inclinations must vary widely with regard to the items in the catalog of crimes, I contend that there is no evidence at all that capital punishment is needed in making deterrence more effective. What is much more important is that criminals must be apprehended, booked, and prosecuted and that the penalties for crime should be predictable. Everyone, including the criminal population, knows that only a small minority of all the felonies committed are punishable by death, even supposing that the death penalty were more rigorously applied than has ever been the case in this country.

research papers on the death penalty

We must fix our attention on those crimes that might be deterred by the death penalty. The most lucrative crimes, those that can be and sometimes are committed by bankers and corporation officers, are not and should not be subject to the death penalty. The street crimes that are open to the underclass citizen—robbery, burglary, auto theft, and various other kinds of larceny—are lucrative to varying degrees. I am not aware of any authoritative study of the comparative economic returns from these forms of enterprise, but observation and common sense lead me to the conclusion that robbery is the least remunerative.

essay on tv violence

A follow-up of Eron's earlier study of 8-year olds, aged 18-19 at the time of this later research. The more violent the program preferences of boys at age 8-9, the more aggressive their behavior at that age and especially at age 18-19. Preference for violence and heavy viewing at age 19 also corresponded with belief that violent programs were realistic and that violent methods are appropriate in real life. Viewing of TV violence was not proposed as a single influencing factor, but it explained more variance than any other single factor analyzed.

essay on ukraine genocide

Essentially, this dictionary definition is based on the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, although that agreement speaks more broadly of the intent to destroy a group "in whole or in part". An effort to eradicate a portion of a people thus qualifies as genocide insofar as international law is concerned. An act of genocide need not entail a bid to murder every man, woman, and child in any group. However, the term has usually been applied to grisly episodes of wholesale butchery. Genocide is a new word in the English language, having been coined toward the end of World War II in response to Adolph Hitler's demonic policies aimed at annihilating Jews.

causes of world war 1 essay

What happened during World War I in the civil liberties area was a new and disturbingly different development in American history. The utilization of the federal government as an active instrument for social control was itself a twentieth century phenomenon, one identified with the Progressive movement, which advocated a newly centralized, paternalistic regulation of the nation's public policy. But now government was recruited as an instrument for rationalizing and carrying forward desirable social policies which private power groups could no longer successfully effectuate independently, thereby achieving a type of modernization which involved new relations between citizens and government.

essay on war and violence

Finally, the anti—Vietnam war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced further studies reevaluating the anti war movement of the World War I period and the frequent violation of the rights of those involved in it. Here the works of Charles Chatfield. Roland Marchand and Blanche Wiesen Cook 36. explored aspects of World War I in which pacifists and antipreparedness types suffered the sting of civil liberties deprivation. This study makes no pretense of covering the previously plowed ground of the civil liberties story. Rather, it addresses certain basic but significant questions about these developments.

world war 1 essay

It afforded some evidence to civil libertarians that some concerned Americans would publicly protest flagrant vigilantism. But it also provided evidence that in the context of World War I, civil libertarians could not develop a widely inclusive mass movement that would ignore the war and focus on the threatening overtones of the new government-to-citizen relationship for civil liberties which now was woven into the nation's structure. It was a clear signal to Baldwin to move quickly to other tactics. The bureau never again attempted to hold a mass meeting during the war period.

an essay about world war i

For those middle-class citizens who, in their naïveté, worked for the protection and expansion of civil liberties, in the wartime period and after, their actions were meaningless gestures made to assuage their guilty middle-class consciences. As such, civil liberties violations in World War I were not unusual or any departure from the norm. The war merely called forth the kind of overt repression which the "establishment" was prepared to use anytime its power or authority was challenged. Such a new-left view of civil liberties was possibly carried to its logical extreme in a 1963 article in which Marc Schleifer argued that the only thing of any significance that the New Deal did was to enact the Smith Act.