Until now I haven't felt inclined to sign the restore capital punishment petition, but as I sit here wondering how the hell we set about cleansing our system of the generation of sub-human thugs and morons we have managed to create by 50 years of politically correct bullshit passing as education and crime policy, I begin to feel that the shock of seeing their mates strung up for murder might be the only way of making any impact on the problem in anything less than another 50 years.
The trouble is, bringing it back just for child and police killers completely misses the point. It isn't child and police killing that has exploded since abolition; it is killing for kicks and for money and for power that has exploded, and topping just a few child and cop killers will have absolutely no effect on that. So come on Guido; start a new petition calling for restoration of the death penalty for all killing, and I'll be the first to sign.
Going to have to disagree with you on this one, I'm afraid. If there was any truth in the suggestion that capital punishment serves as a deterent then we ought to see a marked difference in murder rates between the UK and the USA. Intersetingly we do, but not in the way you might expect. Average murder rates per 100,000 population in the USA for the last 11 years have been about 5.6, and that is pretty consistent figure year on year, despite the fact that execution rates have been falling over the same period, and a number of states have imposed maratoria on the detah penalty.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, in the UK, the average figure over the same period has been 1.6, with the figure markedly lower at a consistent 1.28 for the past 3 years.
To be fair, the actual execution rate in the USA since the reinstatement of capital punishment is only about 1 per 325 convictions for murder.
Perhaps China would be a more appropriate case study, with a murder rate over the last 11 years very similar to our own, but a capital punishment system that considers crimes such as poaching to be worthy of death. Perhaps this is proof that the death penalty works?
I doubt it, because that would suggest that more lawless societies without the strict approach of China should have higher murder rates irrespective of whether they use capital punishment. But this is not the case. Algeria, for example, has a lower average murder rate over the same period than both China and the UK, in fact one of the lowest in the world, depsite an effective moratorium on CP since 1993. Meanwhile, St Kitts & Nevis averages over 30 murders per 100,000 population year on year, despite having an active policy of executing murderers.
I think the reality is that there is a frightening increasing in the emotional disconnect displayed by increasing numbers of young people, and it is not helped by the judicial system being seen to be impotent and jail often regarded as preferrable to slumming it in a bedsit or a squat.
If you want to get these people to think about their actions, then I would recommend two things: firstly, an imposed sentence should be served in its entirety, and that sentence should be harsh (bugger what bleeding hearts say about "rights" - they abrogate their rights when they choose to trample on everyone elses); secondly bring back national service - a friend of mine recently pointed out that in years gone by, most of the young rioters would have been canon fodder in one war or another, and simply would not have been around to create such mayhem, and if they had survived, they might have learned something about duty, responsibility and service.
I'm not sure I care too much how our murder rate compares with the USA or any other country. The only comparison that interests me is between murder rates in the UK before abolition and after abolition. Have you researched that?
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