Criminal Punishment & Deterrence Problem

The idea of deterrence is perhaps currently the more widely held of these beliefs as Gorecki (1979, p. 25) notes: ôcriminal punishment should be severe enough to arouse effective fear - either exactly severe enough or harsher than that.ö

However, while it might be obvious that a punishment as harsh as execution should deter criminals from committing acts punishable by death, this has not generally been found to be the case for a variety of possible reasons, as Nathanson (1987, pp. 17-19) argues:

The common sense argument that death is the best deterrent rests on the [false] belief that people fear death more than they fear anything elseà.

If the death penalty were properly administered and potential murders faced the certainty of their own deaths rather than a minimal risk of dying, then they would refrain from killing.

The problem with this objection is that we cannot guarantee that all murderers will be executed.

The second major argument in favor of the death penalty is simply its appropriateness to the crime at hand. That is the argument made in this paper, one summarized eloquently by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (cited in Zimring and Hawkins, 1973, p. 16):

Even if a Civil Society resolved to dissolve

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erÆs premises. But the most useful of these conceptual frameworks is the labeling theory because it provides a holistic and well-developed perspective for creating an integrated criminal justice system. While the severity and irreversibility of capital punishment tend to make people single it out for discussion and examination, it is in fact simply one part of the justice process, which is in turn simply one aspect of society. Labeling Theory Sociologist Howard Becker, in his classic 1963 study Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance defines how the process of labeling works and what are some of the implications of this process. Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of the rules and sanctions to an ôoffenderö. (cited in Williams and McShane, 1993, p. 172, emphasis in the original) Initially, this theory seems to imply that society as a whole should be tolerant of deviant behavior since it is subjectively defined (i.e. based on collective opinion rather than de
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Approximate Word count = 1794
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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