One Execution Deters Three to 18 Murders, Studies Say
About a dozen recent studies by economists conclude that the death penalty deters murders.
The studies have found that for each person who is executed, three to 18 murders are prevented, the New York Times reports.
Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1992, told the Times the evidence isn’t decisive, but it is “enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”
The studies attempt to eliminate the effect of factors such as crime and conviction rates. But critics say it’s impossible to factor out extraneous factors that influence the murder rate and fail to take into account variables such as the different types of homicides.
They point to a different statistic—the fact that murder rates in the U.S. and Canada have been roughly the same since 1962, when Canada stopped executions.
