Our “common sense” tells us that the more severely we punish criminals, the less crime we’ll have and the better off society will be. Experience, though, tells us otherwise. Because severe punishment both seems like it ought to act as a deterrent and gratifies our desire for vengeance, it’s a popular public policy ploy. It becomes an institutionalized form of anger.

But it doesn’t work. We just end up with a whole new set of problems. You end up with the disaster that is the California penal system. Their “Three strikes and you’re out” policy was exactly the kind of “get tough on crime” measure that was supposed to get all the bad elements out of society. It has turned into an unsustainable nightmare. Carry this logic to its extreme and you get Arizona’s Sheriff Joe or Joe Stalin.

@Harp I must apologise as i am from the UK and should have made that clear in my question and i’m woefully not very well imformed about the American penal system. But i firmly believe that if we had the death penalty restored here in the UK then it might be a better form of deterrent than the slap on the wrists that lets them reoffend time after time. At least if they’re dead there isn’t the worry that they’ll repeat their despicable crimes again!
And i thank you for your response.

@Stargater I suspected you were a Brit (no “offence”)

I understand why that appeals, but consider the very counter-intuitive example of Finland, which until the 70s had a draconian soviet-style penal system. They then radically reformed the way they penalize crime, going to arguably the “softest” penal system in the Western world. Read about it here.

We’re outraged at the thought of criminals “getting off easy” and thumbing their noses at us law-abiding citizens, so we want to make them suffer. I get that. It just feels right to know they’re miserable. And yes, I get the concept of deterrence, but all of this works much better in our heads than out in the real world. Whenever we yield to the temptation to crack down, we always seam to end up worse off it.

But no politician will ever get elected with a platform of reforming the penal system to make it less punitive even if that might actually improve the situation, because the electorate always instinctively wants to tighten, not loosen, the screw. Let the populace have their way, and you get lynchings.

@Harp Thankyou, i found that very ineresting to read and although it mentioned a drink driver and a habitual offender and a ‘gangster wannabe’ it made no mention of the more ‘hardcore’ offenders ie chld abusers! Maybe i am just so disiilusioned with the justice system per se, that i see no way forward to have a justice system that actually stops and shocks offenders into wanting to be law abiding members of society again.

As you may know, here in the States each state sets its own policy with regard to capital punishment. One would expect that states which not only have, but frequently exercise the death penalty would have lower murder rates, but that’s not at all what we see. In 2007 the murder rate of states with the death penalty was 41% higher than in states without it.