Frank's Musings

Statistical Punishment

The negative correlation of the number of executions nationally with the number of murders in the country over the past 15 years is a fact that conservative technicians Roy Adler and Michael Summers tout as proving the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to capital crime. This conclusion demonstrates the need to temper reliance on statistical wizardry with solid appreciation of underlying social realities.

To name just two concerns I have with their OpEd in the November 2, 2007, Wall Street Journal, it would be helpful if they had analyzed whether the increase in executions and the decline in murders nationwide might result from a common cause, like improved economic conditions or the rise of conservative values in public thinking. As people became weary with the nostrums of the New Deal, they demanded even the economically disadvantaged behave responsibly and act with self-reliance. They consequently insisted on severe sanctions on those who failed to meet that expectation.

But even more basic a concern has to do with the use of national statistics to analyze what is essentially a local phenomenon. Conditions and attitudes vary regionally. Most murders are prosecuted state-by-state, not by the federal government. And the related executions are authorized and performed by the governments of those states. The deterrence effect of capital punishment, therefore, must be analyzed within the context of those states and cannot be evaluated nationally. What is more, only 37 states even impose the death penalty, and each of them has individual characteristics for carrying it out.

It’s often said that you can prove anything with statistics. Not only is a narrowly ideological dedication of statistical methods to the argument in favor of taking the life of a fellow human being as a deterrent to murder an unworthy distortion of a respected academic discipline. It is a pathetic justification for relying on the judgment of our rational but not infallible system of justice to administer irreversible punishments for the always uncertainly determined commitment of crime.