tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post5489876991744036059..comments2024-01-23T17:14:04.067-05:00Comments on Jaltcoh: Does the death penalty save lives? (part 3)John Althouse Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-914182343040789882009-04-14T14:26:00.000-04:002009-04-14T14:26:00.000-04:00If you define life as the biologists do - carrying...<I>If you define life as the biologists do - carrying on 8 or 10 functions, such as respiration, reproduction, etc - you are logically forced to value prions, AIDS virii, Yersinia pestis, etc. You should find yourself first eschewing antibiotics; and second, refusing to operate an immune system: suicide. Take a shit into a modern sewer and you are condemning 10s of trillions of lives to death by chlorine intoxication, their version of mustard gas. Which is absurd. </I><BR><A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation" REL="nofollow">Fallacy of equivocation.</A> When I say "lives," I'm using it as shorthand for "the lives of those who have moral standing," which in my opinion includes all humans. We could debate about whether it includes non-human animals or what kinds of animals or if it even includes life forms other than animals -- those might be interesting debates for another blog post, but it's not what I was referring to.John Althouse Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-46931953455777875412009-04-14T09:00:00.000-04:002009-04-14T09:00:00.000-04:00"we should value the lives of even the worst offen..."we should value the lives of even the worst offenders"<br /><br />If you define life as the biologists do - carrying on 8 or 10 functions, such as respiration, reproduction, etc - you are logically forced to value prions, AIDS virii, Yersinia pestis, etc. You should find yourself first eschewing antibiotics; and second, refusing to operate an immune system: suicide. Take a shit into a modern sewer and you are condemning 10s of trillions of lives to death by chlorine intoxication, their version of mustard gas. Which is absurd. <br /><br />It has always seemed to me that the intrinsic value of lives comes not from their biologic functionality, but from their concatenation of choices through time. By age you are closer to it than I, so you may recall, and when you breed will discover, that respecting the choices of children turns them into valuable adults. Obviate their consequences, rob them of their development. <br /><br />So it seems to me that genuinely valuing the lives (the actual, not the merely biological lives) of even the worst offenders means you should be willing to serve on their firing squads. I am.Simon Kentonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03569879198630338210noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-19369102907393696422009-04-13T09:32:00.000-04:002009-04-13T09:32:00.000-04:00Simon: Excellent points, thanks. I certainly agree...Simon: Excellent points, thanks. I certainly agree that we should take prison escapes and prison homicide into account, and that these are too often absent from the debate. <BR/><BR/>Of course, it would be blatantly inconsistent for opponents of the death penalty to ignore the prison-homicide factor, since their premise (and one I agree with) is that we should value the lives of even the worst offenders.John Althouse Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-41736473252373896722009-04-13T00:34:00.000-04:002009-04-13T00:34:00.000-04:00The question as phrased is whether the death penal...The question as phrased is whether the death penalty saves lives. The question as discussed seems to have been whether it has a deterrent effect. I don't speak to the deterrence question - everyone else has, somewhat diffusely. I do want to bring a perspective on the life-saving, original question. There are a couple of implicit assumptions that seem to be made here - that prisons are non-porous, and that they are homicide-safe. A little reflection and research will point out that murderers escaping is not uncommon even in relatively recent times. Their record while fleeing has been spotty. A bunch of them escaped in New Mexico 20+ years ago, and in responding the governor covered himself with a fatuity so rich and deep that it was unusual even for New Mexico. He'd commuted their sentences, thus putting them in the position to get away. When they did, he called plaintively and publicly upon them to give themselves up and return to custody, because as long as they stayed at large, it would change the whole tenor of the debate on the death penalty. I award him 7 Dave Barry "you-can't-make-this-shit-up points" with an Oak-leaf cluster. With regard to the imperviousness of prisons and the trustworthiness of their escapees, I'd suggest you not bet much on it.<BR/><BR/>More to the point, google Terrible Tommy Silverstein. Here's a result:<BR/><BR/>http://www.streetgangs.com/topics/2005/020405ab.html<BR/><BR/>A friend of mine was at one point responsible for keeping Silverstein in a federal prison, and knew some of the guards he killed. If I remember right, he got to take the death notice to their families. Tommy killed first, as I recall, at 12 - grandparents. He's sworn to kill anyone in his presence who raises their hands above their shoulders, and has done so. Check out how many serial life sentences Terrible Tommy has amassed. Last I heard, law students at the University of Denver were contemplating bringing an action to get him released from 23-hour lockdown. I don't suppose that if they succeed they will be planning to take any necessary death sentences to families around Florence, CO. <BR/><BR/>You might also look at the Aryan Brotherhood, 1/10 of 1% of the prison population and responsible for 18 - 25% of the homicides in the federal system. Do these lives - other inmates particularly of other races, and guards - matter? I don't see much evidence in 'the studies' that they do. We just seem to figure that if we stick these unfortunate criminal persons in the slammer, that'll ... do it. They'll be OK in there. We'll be OK out here. In an acridly cynical sense the assumption is true. Most of these scrotes don't get out so lives on the outside are safe from them. But it's not true at all for lives inside the walls. Would it have saved these all these intramural lives to have snuffed the leaders of the AB? I'd say that these are far clearer instances where a death penalty would have saved lives. But the discussion after your posts would suggest that the actual lives taken in these prisons are valued less - at least for purposes of argument - than hypothetical extramural lives. I don't see that they are even thought of, when it is their lives that are more likely to be saved than ours. <BR/><BR/>Reading all this is giving me a bit of the Whitman reaction in "When I heard the learn'd astronomer...."Simon Kentonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03569879198630338210noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-11531584943382526052008-05-23T11:34:00.000-04:002008-05-23T11:34:00.000-04:00John (or do you prefer being called JAC? Mr. Cohen...John (or do you prefer being called JAC? Mr. Cohen?),<BR/><BR/>as I said, they find no deterrent effect even when they include Texas. Calling for sensitivity analyses, however, is not unreasonable: This is standard practice in econometrics; you want to make sure your findings are robust to excluding some data points, especially extreme data points - you don't want your results to be driven by just a few numbers of cases.<BR/><BR/>Having said that, it may be exactly wrong to exclude Texas because only there is the death penalty used at some notable frequency. It is entirely possible that there is some threshold. Searching for threshold effects, however, is a tricky business - it reeks of data massaging. If only you try out enough things, sooner or later you're going to find a statistically significant effect.<BR/><BR/>What I'd really like to see is a dataset from a country in which some regions execute one percent of convicted murderers, others fifty percent, and yet others are in between. I don't think such a dataset exists.LemmusLemmushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00917054221547240969noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-39430404616570111062008-05-23T10:50:00.000-04:002008-05-23T10:50:00.000-04:00I should add that I will have to go look at the da...I should add that I will have to go look at the data points you mention (no time for that now, though), and I appreciate your pointing them out.John Althouse Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-25160163409603727662008-05-23T10:46:00.000-04:002008-05-23T10:46:00.000-04:00LemmusLemmus:I'm hesitant to say anything at all a...LemmusLemmus:<BR/><BR/>I'm hesitant to say anything at all about their charts, since I'm so unqualified to interpret them, and I know that drawing conclusions about causation can be very tricky.<BR/><BR/>I went back and searched for all references to Texas in the Donohue & Wolfers article -- in the main text, not in the tables or graphs. It seems to me that what they want to do with Texas is remove it to show how "sensitive" the data are. They cite Joanna Shepherd's findings in this context (the same ones I blogged about). They seem to think that her findings actually undermine the deterrent theory. (I detect some subtle snideness in their summary of her position that low-death-penalty states aren't executing "enough" people.)<BR/><BR/>Even though I've made clear that I'm not qualified to interpret their raw data, I think that if they really do have a good argument, they have the responsibility to state it concisely and persuasively in the text. From what I've seen and understood in the article, they seem to be thinking about the data wrong. The researchers who have found the death penalty to be a deterrent -- Shepherd, Sunstein, Vermeule -- seem to be reasoning about the situation much more lucidly.John Althouse Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-85453156997539511732008-05-23T10:33:00.000-04:002008-05-23T10:33:00.000-04:00"I have to give Donohue & Wolfers some credit: the..."I have to give Donohue & Wolfers some credit: they do acknowledge the finding that strong-death-penalty states are the ones with a deterrent effect. But then they utterly dismiss it! They say that if you take Texas -- which has executed far more people than any other state -- out of the equation, the deterrent effect pretty much goes away."<BR/><BR/>You then go on to quote Sunstein and Vermeule who say that Texas shouldn't be excluded on the basis of being an outlier (a concept they seem to misunderstand*).<BR/><BR/>That's an unfair representation of the D&W paper. In fact, they say (p. 815):<BR/><BR/>"The implication of our Table 5, however, is not that Texas is an outlier (indeed, given the constancy of the coefficient, it probably lies along the regression line), but rather that in its<BR/>absence, there is just too little variation in executions to discern an effect with any confidence."<BR/><BR/>Although they do estimate one specification with Texas excluded (table 5, column 3), they then go on to estimate further specifications that <I>include Texas</I> (columns 4-6) and find no significant deterrent effect. (My preferred specification, and theirs, if I read them correctly, is column 6, which uses the number of executions relative to the number of homicides as the independent variable.)<BR/><BR/>*Just performing more executions than other states doesn't make Texas an outlier. An outlier is a data point in which the relationship between the two variables is untypical. That's what D&W allude to when they say that given "the constancy of the coefficient, it probably lies along the regression line". As an example, in <A HREF="http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/WindowsLiveWriter/image_28.png" REL="nofollow">this graph</A>, the data point in the top right hand corner is an outlier.LemmusLemmushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00917054221547240969noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-17953915127357010662008-05-21T22:52:00.000-04:002008-05-21T22:52:00.000-04:00I would guess that there is a threshold level of e...I would guess that there is a threshold level of executions because it is not so difficult for someone to not even be aware that they live in a death penalty state.<BR/><BR/>Wouldn't most of the people that are likely to end up as murderers not be people who pay close attention to the news?<BR/><BR/>If I didn't read the paper or watch the local TV news, how else would I know I live in a death penalty state? It is only when an execution takes place that the subject might actually acquire enough buzz for people to be talking about it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-65112807754806215622008-05-21T11:38:00.000-04:002008-05-21T11:38:00.000-04:00Joanna Shepherd says she's controlled for lots of ...Joanna Shepherd says she's controlled for lots of factors -- demographics, different communities' attitudes toward crime, etc. She seems to say that law review articles finding no deterrence (which are typically not peer-reviewed) fail to control for these variables. I hope to post on this in the future.John Althouse Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11703450281424023177noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4464222071440015933.post-17608624873850611772008-05-21T10:25:00.000-04:002008-05-21T10:25:00.000-04:00I'm not sure that all this shows that the death pe...I'm not sure that all this shows that the death penalty is a deterrent. I do believe that it likely is--I'm just not sure that what we have here is a sufficient argument. <BR/><BR/>Isn't it the case that the states least likely to apply the death penalty are the most liberal states? And we know that the most liberal states are the most urban states. Whereas the conservative states that are likely to apply the death penalty regularly also tend to be more rural. <BR/><BR/>I wonder if differences in murder rates are better explained by the idea that there is simply more violence in urban areas than in rural ones. Thus, the differences in homicide rates might be explained by demographics alone without any deterrent effect.Ken Stalterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07987670380813504380noreply@blogger.com