Are the death penalty and imprisonment effective ways to prevent crime?

Source background
In "Where the death penalty still lives," Emily Bazelon, the author, talks about Judge's insistent decision on James Rhodes' death penalty for murdering Shelby Farah and its implication on revising the rules that determine the culprit's life. The history and validated statistics show that the execution was racial biased and has killed innocent people. Despite the failed attempts to eradicate death sentence, the numbers of execution continue to decline in the past decade and many people such as Justice Stephen Beyer has been working on abolition of such cruel punishment. In this case, Angela Corey with history of giving debatably racist sentence insisted on death penalty although the victim's family after knowing the background of Rhodes decided not to pursue this case. (2016)

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My Yes/No question is:
Are the death penalty and imprisonment effective ways to prevent crime? 

My answer is:
No, they are not effective.

I feel safe in my home. I feel safe in my country because I know the government will make sure that criminals will be locked up in the jail, or be executed. However, is that justify for them? Can this antediluvian method really live up to what it promises? To evaluate the effectiveness of death sentence and incarceration, we have to examine two important points: the history of punishment and factors that govern people’s decision making.

Punishment such as execution, torturing, and jailing started from obsession of power. The leader uses power to control other people through political and military means. For instance, communists use military to control citizens, while liberalists engage in political war to gain people’s favors. It is impossible to gain everyone’s approval in such a big population; thus, laws were introduced. Communist uses law to control people's action. Democratism promises to make law. Laws were made for people to follow. Laws were invented so people stay in the line. However laws do not guarantee that everyone will comply. What should the leader do if people did not follow the law? The simplest solution is to terrify those who commit crime and to forewarn innocent citizens so that they will avoid breaking the law. Scoundrels’ heads were impaled by wooden poles, exhibited outside the village for everyone to see, for everyone to fear the law. This fear brings power to the leader. Our current model of legal system follows the similar idea: using fear to control people. However, the outdated punishments and tortures have been considered as inhumane in our current society. Therefore, we invented imprisonment as an alternative which is worse than the old punishments. This will become a bigger problem when we consider how people associate their decision-making with a sense of gain and loss.

People make their decision based off of interests, and benefit that they will get from performing certain action. For instance, we would go to restaurant because we don’t want to cook the food ourselves, not because we want to pay our money. We put our benefit not our loss in consideration. This theory becomes more believable after a statistical study showed in a book called Race to Incarcerate. The number of crimes gradually increased during 1970s despite efforts by US president to continuously increase severity of the penalty.  This phenomena was the result of depression after World War II. In such a dire straits, stealing is an appealing option. It showed us that the benefit of stealing, bribing, and other offences far outweigh the punishment that they will receive. People would steal money so they don’t starve without thinking what would happen to them afterward. To a shocking extent, in the book there are examples of men who were jailed for life without parole just for committing a relatively small offence of possessing illegal drugs. (Mauern, M., 1999) To be jailed for the entire life and stripped away the basic rights that every human should have is debatably worse than being executed. The exponentially more severe punishment and persistently increasing number of crime led to overpopulation of inmate. In spite of this obviously ineffective punishments, the government held on to this idea. They continue the same punishment, but with a little twist. They have included death penalty to get rid of excessive prisoners. The result follows the same trend. Death penalty makes people fear the law, but it does not stop them from committing crimes.

Imprisonment and execution are not an effective way to prevent criminal. If we consider that the root of the problem comes from unemployment and poverty, isn’t it better to improve the living quality of those people as a way of reducing criminals? Isn’t it better to provide free health care, food stamps, cheap education, government-funded project for jobless citizens? We are wasting our human resources on imprisonment and execution while those people, with proper guiding, can turn into good citizens that can contribute to the society. People don’t steal because they want to be rich. They steal out of necessity, and they could become good citizens if we gave them a chance.

In the end, I know that in my false sense of security that our current law provides there exist fear of being punished, fear of falling into such a state that I have to steal money to get a meal, fear of being abandoned without any support from the government. Penalty is shown to be ineffective throughout the history. Using fear as a way to control people has never been a good idea. I think that it should be the time we move on from the obsolete jurisdiction system to a society where we support each other.


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Reference

Bazelon E. (2016, August 23). Where the death penalty still lives. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/where-the-death-penalty-still-lives.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Mauer, M. (1999). Race to incarcerate. New York: New Press.