NCJ Number
186231
Date Published
1999
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This chapter considers the impact of the death penalty as a general deterrent to crime, a controversial issue that figures prominently in the homicide literature.
Abstract
An overview of the capital punishment and homicide literature organizes studies according to their focus on one or more of the four dimensions of punishment that are central to the deterrence thesis: severity, certainty, celerity, and publicity. Also addressed as separate topics are deterrence investigations that have considered specific types of murder. To examine the possible deterrent and "brutalization" effect of capital punishment for female homicide offending, the authors extend the methodology used in recent investigations (Bailey, 1990; Peterson and Bailey, 1991). The dependent variable of this analysis is the overall monthly female homicide offending rate, measured as the number of female homicides per 100,000 female population. The authors conducted a national monthly time-series analysis of female homicide for 1976 to 1991. They used 1976 as a baseline year, because the first execution in the United States since 1967 occurred in January 1977. The significant deterrence finding for felony murder, brutalization results for argument-related killings, and the null findings for the other types of female homicide cannot be compared with the results of previous investigations. The authors are thus hesitant to draw any firm conclusions from their analysis. Based on their overall analysis of the literature, the authors conclude that the deterrence hypothesis for capital punishment remains unsupported. At the same time, however, tenuous support was found for the competing hypotheses of a "brutalization effect," which holds that capital punishment increases the incidence of homicide. 2 tables and 86 references