Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

Although the risks of policing cannot be eliminated, police officers undertake a variety of measures to reduce the dangers: they wear bullet-proof vests, develop special procedures for approaching stopped cars, and in some situations officers wait for backup even when this increases the probability that a suspect will escape.

Officers undertake all these measures as a natural human reaction to the risk of death—the riskier an activity, the more a person will usually avoid it or take steps to make the activity safer. This rule applies to violent criminals just like anyone else. And the risk that a violent criminal faces from execution is much greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005, there were almost 16,700 murders in the United States and sixty executions.58 That translates to one execution for every 278 murders. In other words, a murderer is twenty times more likely to be executed than a police officer is to be deliberately or accidentally killed on duty.59

Those who argue that the death penalty has no effect on violent crime assume that the risk of execution in no way deters criminals from committing capital crimes. “It is hard to believe that fear of execution would be a driving force in a rational criminal’s calculus in modern America,” writes Steven Levitt.60 While criminals, just like police officers, are naturally less adverse to danger than, say, school teachers or accountants, the notion that it is irrational for them to take into account such an enormous additional risk runs contrary to human nature.61

There is widespread public debate over the effectiveness of the death penalty. Sadly, this has included some misleading reporting in the popular press. Take a widely publicized New York Times study that compared murder rates in 1998 in states with and without the death penalty.62 The Times concluded that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that “10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average . . . while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average.”

This simple comparison really doesn’t prove anything. The twelve states without the death penalty have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates due to factors unrelated to capital punishment.63 When the death penalty was suspended nationwide from 1968 to 1976, the murder rate in these twelve states was still lower than in most other states. What is much more important is that the states that reinstituted the death penalty had about a 38 percent larger drop in murder rates by 1998.64

There were no executions in the United States between 1968 and 1976, a time when murder rates skyrocketed.65 Various theories were put forward in the 1970s to explain the jump in violent crime. Some claimed that the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision—mandating that suspects be read their rights during arrest—reduced criminal confessions and otherwise hindered convictions. Others blamed softer criminal penalties or lower arrest rates.66 Back in the 1970s these studies were generally inconclusive, however, due to the lack of data available at the time.67

Economists began to study the death penalty intently after its re-imposition in 1976. Isaac Ehrlich, then a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, conducted path-breaking research showing that each execution deterred as many as twenty to twenty-four murders. 68 His findings, however, were anathema in liberal academia. His conclusions were roundly condemned, and Ehrlich was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even became too controversial to find work at most universities. However, his contentious findings sparked a good deal of new research into the effectiveness of capital punishment, including a special panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences. The panel came to the curious conclusion that greater penalties generally fail to deter criminals.69

Murder Rates v. Execution Rates in the United States from 1950 to 2005

Although many states immediately re-approved the death penalty after the Supreme Court lifted the ban in 1976, executions were relatively rare until the 1990s, when execution rates spiked dramatically. This elicited a flood of new research on capital punishment. Moreover, the new studies drew upon much more extensive data than had previously been available, allowing researchers to study crime rates over many years and across every state.

This research was conducted as violent crime rates were plummeting while executions were rising sharply. Between 1991 and 2000, there were 9,114 fewer murders per year, while the number of executions per year rose by seventy-one. The fresh studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusions that the death penalty greatly deters murder. The vast majority of recent scholarly research confirms this deterrent effect.70 Generally, the studies found that each execution saved the lives of roughly fifteen to eighteen potential murder victims.71 Overall, the rise in executions during the 1990s accounts for about 12 to 14 percent of the overall drop in murders.

Research by Economists since the Mid-1990s on the Death Penalty

Despite the generally beneficial effect of capital punishment on crime, there are exceptions. One particular kind of crime where the death penalty shows no significant deterrent effect is multiple victim public shootings. This was the conclusion of a study I performed with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago.72 This exception stems from the unique circumstances of these kinds of crimes: the vast majority of these killers either commit suicide or are killed at the scene of the crime. The threat of legal punishment, including the death penalty, doesn’t really affect their actions since so many of these criminals expect to die in the course of their crime.

The death penalty has a beneficial effect even beyond deterring murders. Because capital punishment can be imposed if a victim dies in the commission of a rape, robbery, or aggravated assault, statistics show the death penalty also acts as a deterrent to these crimes as well.73 This, however, doesn’t mean that the death penalty should be applied directly to these crimes. There is such a thing as “too much” deterrence. For example, utilizing the