Legal murder: does it help lower the crime rate?
One of the common arguments for instituting the death penalty is that
it helps keep the crime rate down. In the mid-nineties when there was a
vociferous call for the implementation of the death penalty in Sri
Lanka, the advocates of this practice vigorously waved crime statistics
pertaining to the period after the last hanging (in 1976, if I remember
right).
They had a point. The crime rate had indeed shot up after that last
legal murder. On the other hand, to draw a consequent-line from
non-execution to rising crime assumes that all other factors that lend
to criminality remained constant in the relevant period. This is wrong.
The entire eighties was a period of systematic dismantling of
democratic structures. The so-called freeing of the economy was heralded
by its principal architect, J.R. Jayewardene by the famous verbal
license to thieve: ‘let the robber barons come!’ A predilection by the
then regime to circumvent the law and ridicule the judiciary cannot be
dismissed as irrelevant to the matter at hand. A horrendous look-askance
in July 1983 when ruling party thugs (most affiliated with its trade
union) orchestrated attacks on the lives and properties of Tamils and
the deliberate cultivation of the underworld also ‘helped’.
Culture of violence
Attacks on students, trade union busting, harassment of the
Opposition and ill-informed and counter-productive measures unleashed to
counter the growing threat of terrorism, all led to the development of a
culture of violence, dependency on the coercive aspects of the state
apparatus and a readiness on the part of certain disgruntled elements in
society to mimic the violence of the perceived oppressor, all
contributed.
Still, it is not possible to determine whether or not the
non-implementation of capital punishment added to the crime rate. The
data for notorious and racist criminal justice systems where the death
penalty exist, sheds a lot of light. In the USA, not all states have the
death penalty. The crime data across all states does not indicate that
capital punishment has contributed to lowering the crime rate. Indeed,
the crime rate in states that do not have it are lower than those who
do.
In contrast Saudi Arabia, where crime is responded to with gruesome
methods of punishment and where capital punishment is practiced, there
is a significantly lower crime rate than in many country which don’t
have or have abolished the death penalty. This is why advocates of
capital punishment frequently cite the Saudi Arabian example.
Interestingly, however, it has been found that not all crimes get report
or make it official data sets in that country.
Movement restriction
Certain actions, which would be deemed criminal in other countries,
do not register in enumerations. Saudi Arabia is a destination point to
workers from other countries who, on account of endemic poverty, subject
themselves to conditions such as involuntary servitude, non-receipt of
wages, confinement, withholding of passports and movement restriction.
It is also a destination for children trafficked from other Middle
Eastern countries.
The global data, in any event, does not show a positive correlation
between capital punishment and crime rate, especially when it comes to
violent crimes such as homicide, which I pointed out in an earlier
article are passion-crimes where the perpetrator does not ponder over
consequences and/or absolves him/herself of moral guilt before
committing murder.
Crime is a problem. Criminality is a problem. Systems are necessary
both to prevent and deter. Systems need to be re-fashioned to remove the
conditions that give rise to crime. Some claim that poverty breeds
criminals, but impoverishment is an inadequate plea for clemency in the
event of a crime being committed.
White-collar crime
It must be recognized that corporate criminality on the whole
produces more loot in terms of volume than petty crimes. Such
criminality is not recognized by the law as infringement and some are
forgiven and forgotten due to the nexus between politician and corporate
criminal. The death penalty (being imposed or being non-existent) has no
impact in such transgression.
In societies with huge disparities and horrendous terms of exchange,
both produced largely on account of theft of something at some point, it
would be naive to think that use and abuse of laws (essentially set up
to perpetuate a system of value extraction) would cease if hanging was
reintroduced.
White-collar crime is system-insulated and is more often than not
politically insured. Capital punishment has not stopped that kind of
crime anywhere in the world.
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