In my work in violence prevention, I have yet to see research that supports a deterrent effect from the death penalty. Even if there is a deterrent effect, the potential for it to actually reduce homicide rates is so low that it becomes trivial.
Jeff
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 1999 11:39 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: cross national homicide rate query
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