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Does Capital Punishment Serve as a Deterrent to Crime?

Aired May 13, 2001 - 17:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: Whether capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime has been hotly debated for decades, actually centuries. And some new studies are adding to this discussion.

So, joining us for our own talk on this issue now are David Anderson, an associate professor of economics at Centre College, who says, his recent study proves the death penalty is not a deterrent.

Also, Paul Rubin, professor of economics and law at Emory University, who says his study proves just the opposite.

And Dr. Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatric, who has done extensive research on character analysis and who has witnessed several executions.

Welcome, all of you and thanks for joining us today.

Professor Anderson, let's turn to you first; because it looks to me as if you talked to criminals in your study. Can you tell us how you did that, and what they said.

DAVID ANDERSON, CENTRE COLLEGE: That is correct. There is this school of thought within economics, founded by Gary Becker at Chicago, that believes that when the price of committing a crime goes up, when the punishment is harsher than criminals will respond in the same way that consumers do when the price for consumer goods goes up. They will commit fewer crimes.

In order for them to respond to harsher punishments by committing fewer crimes, they need to know what the punishment is and think about when they are committing the crime. They need to think that they might get caught, and think about that, when they are deciding whether or not to commit the crime.

FRAZIER: You are projecting now the same kind of rationality that economists assume in talking about market activity; right?

ANDERSON: That's right. That's what the Chicago school believes. We at Centre college wanted to look at those four requirements for responding to harsher punishments, and see whether indeed the criminals satisfied these four requirements.

We found in interviews with 278 criminals that they did not. The overwhelming majority felt invincible. They were on drugs, they were in the heat of the moment, they were enraged and irrational. For all these reasons, they could not respond as we would expect rational, calculating, and informed individuals to in response to these harsher punishments.

FRAZIER: I think your numbers were staggering. You said 89 percent didn't even think about getting caught.

ANDERSON: That's correct. And we have evidence of that today in Texas where they execute 35 people a year, and yet, they have some of the highest crime rates. And 200 years ago in Regency, England, when picking pockets was a capital offense, pick pockets would work the crowds at the hangings of other pick pockets.

It is that natural sense that it won't happen to us. That guy got caught, but it won't happen to us.

FRAZIER: In fact, you made that the title of your study, because --rather than being a deterrent to crime, a hanging became an opportunity for more crime.

ANDERSON: Indeed.

FRAZIER: All right, let's turn to Professor Rubin.

Professor, you did something very technical and complicated. I guess it's called regression analysis. You dealt with the numbers, rather than with answers; is that right?

PAUL RUBIN, EMORY UNIVERSITY: Yes, we did. Generally, economists are much happier looking at responses to prices and the changes in behavior, rather than asking people as to causes. So we got data for all 3,000 counties in the United States for a 20-year period, and we looked at factors associated with crime -- and especially with homicide in those counties.

Number of people, number of other crimes committed, age, and also arrests and sentences and executions. And using that method, which is the most detailed data that has been applied to crime problems, we found that each execution on average deterred 18 homicides and that was highly statistically significant.

FRAZIER: I want to ask you, what new techniques you were employing to do this, Professor? Because you yourselves wrote in the abstract to your study that this has been studied as far back -- you cited one study that was in 1764. But I know you were employing new methodology; what was that?

RUBIN: First of all, we had new data. We had the county-level data, which has not been available, and we had it for a longer time period -- we had a 20-year time period. We used the technique called panel regression analysis, that enables us to adjust for unobserved characteristics of counties. And also to adjust for time periods. And so, it was a much more sophisticated regression analysis than other people have been able to employ.

The other studies of capital punishment used national time series data or state cross section data, but did not have as fine-grained data as we had.

FRAZIER: I don't want to obscure that staggering result you came up with. Each execution resulted in, in your belief, 18 fewer crimes.

RUBIN: 18 fewer. And that was statistically significant. We were 95 percent confidence (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in between 10 and 28, which means we're 95 percent sure that at least 10 murders were deterred by each execution.

FRAZIER: We are going in a moment to a break, but I want to weave in Professor Morrison here to this debate, before we take a little pause and come back. That's because, Professor Morrison, you actually do work right on the ground, rather than dealing from an economic or a legal point of view.

HELEN MORRISON, FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST: Right, I do.

FRAZIER: Would you discredit an economic analysis of these numbers?

MORRISON: Well, I think once you are dealing with a cost benefit analysis of, you know, what does a crime cost? What do we get out of executing someone? You are leaving out two very important factors.

One is the mind of the criminal, and two, the mind of the individuals who see others who receive capital punishment, and their reactions to that.

FRAZIER: We did hear Professor Anderson say he got into the mind of the criminal, and found out that the mind was not focused on the penalty?

MORRISON: Well, don't forget the population he studied included drug addicts, included a number of people who were primarily nonviolent criminals, and he also, though, did point out that rational thinking is not a major part of most criminals' actions. But we are talking about the more severe homicidal repetitive criminal.

FRAZIER: Let's take a break here, and I want you all to think about the fact we have not mentioned at all to our viewers, we are not at all discussing any kind of ethical component to the death penalty. We are talking here in an utilitarian way about its effectiveness.

First, this break and we will be right back with our guests.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FRAZIER: As we were saying before the break, the idea of the death penalty and whether it was a deterrent to the future crime of other subjects. It's an issue that has inspired a lot of serious work by some very thoughtful people.

We are joined by Professors David Anderson, Paul Rubin and Professor Morrison.

Dr. Morrison, let me turn back to you first, if I may. If we don't want to study the numbers, maybe you could help us understand how to explain somebody like Timothy McVeigh. Can you do any kind of analysis of his childhood or his upbringing, and get a fix on him?

MORRISON: Timothy McVeigh was an extremely and is an extremely rageful and vengeful individual. The early childhood issue that probably precipitated a lot of anger was the fact that his mother abandoned the family when he was ten years old. The father worked extremely hard to try to maintain the family, but they had to be split up, because the youngest sister went to live with an aunt; the father could not manage both kids.

He had multiple disappointments. He saw himself as a very strong individual. He wanted to be a Red Beret in the military. They wouldn't allow him in, even though he had done fairly well in the military, because he'd had a knee injury. When he finally left the military, he began to develop even more of an interest in explosives and guns that he had in high school.

He was known to have exploded multiple issued ammunition and guns during high school. He had a fascination with weapons. But what he seemed to do was to focus this rage and this anger on the military, the government. Seeing that they were not taking care of people, seeing that money was being collected that wasn't being used to care for the people who he felt needed it.

FRAZIER: Taxes.

MORRISON: Taxes. So he developed a real anger, a real rage and he began to focus. And he began to take that and go against the government at a place where no one ever expected that anything bad would ever happen.

And he thought -- his only thought was to get revenge. He didn't really care who was there, who wasn't there. He knew what the punishment was for his crime. But he also knew he needed to get his message across.

FRAZIER: Now I think you are leading us back to Professor Anderson, who did cite revenge or psychosis or even the use of drugs.

Professor Anderson, in blanking them to the deterrent effect of losing their life, if they are caught.

ANDERSON: That's right. I suspect that Timothy McVeigh felt invincible. He's the type of person that wouldn't have committed this, I suspect, if he had known he might get caught. He wasn't thinking about getting caught; he thought he was smarter than that; he was above the system.

FRAZIER: We are talking to somebody now who has committed a crime, and I think that Professor Rubin may be talking about the larger implications of the death penalty in the community at large. Some people who may be considering it and are in fact deterred?

RUBIN: That's right. The problem with a study liked Professor Anderson's is, he only asks people who have committed a crime, so all those who may have been deterred, he doesn't measure.

Second of all, his study he asked people only about the crime they actually committed, so that, for example, if there was an armed robber in his sample who decided not to shoot a victim because of fear of the death penalty or fear of increased probability of incarceration, that crime would not be covered in his study, since he only dealt with the actual crimes that the people committed.

And even so, he says himself that his study makes it clear that this does not refute the idea that harsher punishments would deter some crimes; we don't claim in our results that they would deter all crimes, we just claim that the death penalty deters a very significant number of crimes, which is not inconsistent with his agreement that there might be some deterrents from harsher punishments.

FRAZIER: Tell me if I'm reading your study correctly, Professor Rubin. The tests show that results are not driven by tough sentencing law. So, short of the death penalty, is there no deterrent effect by other harsh sentencing?

RUBIN: No, we were saying that it was in addition to any harsh sentencing. There is some evidence that -- for example, the three strikes laws do have a very significant deterrent. One of my coauthors has just written a paper showing the three strikes law also have a significant deterrent effect. So, we are not saying that at all, we're just saying that our result goes through even with harsh sentencing.

FRAZIER: While we have you, Professor Rubin, let me ask you to take the first of the final comments. We're each getting in there very brief; all of us.

RUBIN: Well, again, I just want to emphasize that our study is very detailed in terms of data, and we find a very significant deterrent effect. Many more homicides are deferred, 18 homicides are deterred for each execution.

FRAZIER: Professor Anderson?

ANDERSON: Well, it's correct as you both said, that I'm not looking at whether or not our current punishments deter any crimes, but I'm looking at what should we do in order to get rid of some of the crimes that are occurring now? I'm talking about active criminals and trying to look at whether increased punishments would decrease crime rates. And I find that they would not.

In terms of the econometric studies that Paul Rubin has performed, as you say, they are very complex. Economists like to point out that the word "con" is part of econometrics because it's a very complicated process. It involves all sorts of decisions about model specification, functional form, data, lags, proxies. There's a complex recipe, and people have been doing this for 25 years. Dozens of economists have come out with dozens of different results.

That's why I don't think that it can serve as the basis of life or death decisions. Paul Rubin is one of the best economists out there, and his paper is the best of its type. But I still think if ten other economists learn from his contribution to the literature, and ran their own variation on the study, we'd get 10 different results. Some of which -- in the past, and some of the future -- say, the death penalty actually increases the number of murders.

FRAZIER: Well, Professor Morrison, you will get the last word -- and I have to ask, because you are the one of us here who has actually witnessed executions -- any last-minute changes there?

MORRISON: I think once you watch an execution, you never leave that room thinking that it was wonderful thing to to do. However, I do know, as also a child psychiatrist, if you do not punish something that is that wrong, that individual will continue to go on, feeling that there is absolutely no reason for them to follow the law.

FRAZIER: Well, thank you all for joining us. We could spend much, much more time on this. Clearly, you have spent entire careers on this and we are grateful for your brief looks into your collective insights evening.

Dr. Morrison, Dr. Rubin, Dr. Anderson, thank you all.

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