Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> seanno at ksu.edu wrote:
>
> >A local newspaper columnist is claiming that the U.S. is the homicide
> >"capital of the world" thus the U.S. needs to use the death sentence more
> >often. Beside the leap in logic I'm pretty sure the empirical claim is
> >false but I'm having trouble hunting down the data. Can anyone help me
> >locate cross national data on homicide rates?
>
> The UN Development Program(me)'s Human Development Report 1998 has a table,
> no. 36, called "Social stress and social change," which covers only the
> "industrial" countries. It reports "intentional homicides by men per
> 100,000 people, 1985-90." The average for all "high human development"
> countries is 4.8; the US is 12.4, the highest by far. Next is Finland, at
> 4.1. Canada, 2.7. UK, 1.6. Japan, 0.9. Among the next tier, the "medium
> human development," Russia leads the pack at 9.0.
>
> The U.S. murder rate has fallen pretty sharply since those numbers were
> collected, but I doubt it's hit Finnish levels. Russia may now be #1.
>
> There's not much good data from other sources, as far as I know, though I
> do remember hearing a claim that Brazil has a higher homicide rate than the
> U.S.
>
> Doug