To what extent does the death penalty contribute to a rise in the crime rate?
The death penalty is one of the most questionable punishments; many claim that, disregarding the crimes that have been committed, it is highly unethical and simply wrong to kill another human. Even though the vast majority of the population appears to be against this punishment, it may be interesting to analyse the death penalty simply form the point of view of its effectiveness. In doing so, it is useful to examine capital punishment from different perspectives, here its impact will be examined from the psychological and historical point of view; it is also useful to look at the research data on the effectiveness of capital punishment.
First of all, when one takes the psychological impact that death penalty has on potential criminals it may be noticed that the fact of death penalty being enforced may have very little to do with whether a person will commit a crime or not. This is due to the fact that, what really determines the proclivity for violence is the social background, the way in which the person has been brought up and people who influenced him or her have played the biggest part in who this person will grow up to be. Due to those factors, some people are more prone to committing crimes than others. Besides this, a tendency to commit a crime may also result from some kind of mental illness, which makes people suffering from it not aware of their misdoings or unafraid of their consequences. What is more, death penalty is a punishment for only the most serious crimes committed, and those are often crimes of passion so the person committing them do not necessarily have the punishment in mind. Better still, many people committing serious crimes simply do not think that they will ever be held responsible for it.
