Another excellent challenge to the principles of least possible necessary aggression...
The Associated Press has an excellent story, via Yahoo, on the thankful decline in the murder rate last year, a 40 year low...
Murder rate hits 40-year-low...
It's great news, of course, for anyone concerned with murder and serious violent crime...rapes, unfortunately are up...though the thirty year trend is downward, thankfully...as are the report rates for rapes...
The biggest drops occurred in two cities, in particular...Chicago...by 150 murders...and Washington, D.C...by 50 murders...
"Of 19 large cities with more than 100 murders apiece in 2003, 13 had declines in 2004 while six recorded increases, Blumstein said."
Blumstein being Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh...
Local trends, argues, Professor Blumstein, have driven the decreases...rather than national trends...
Professor Blumstein outlines many important local trends...including an ingenious effort in Chicago to infiltrate known gangs with ex-offenders to gain intelligence on current activities...
But there is one very important national and local/state trend, in Chicago and Washington D.C., that is parallel to a national trend...
Illinois and Washington D.C. have no death penalty...Illinois just recently abolished their death penalty...I am still researching how recently Washington D.C. eliminated the death penalty...and nationally, the use of the death penalty has also decreased...
Bureau of Justice statistics...capital punishment...
The long-term correlation between 40 year low murder rate and the decrease in the use of death penalty in the last three years would seem both positive trends to death penalty opponents...
But the overall statistical picture is much more complicated than that...
I've always consulted the numbers reported by death penalty opponents like myself (since this is one issue that I've felt a particularly strong moral cause in, as much and sometimes more than as a policy matter...a good reason to doubt my feelings on the matter, frankly, as a policy matter...though the moral reasons I think are pretty compelling, obviously)...
That states without the death penalty had lower murder rates than states with the death penalty...
Deathpenaltyinfo.com
(Just an aside...if there were ever a case for federalism on any matter of criminal justice...death penalty seems to be that case)
But then I came across these numbers...
Bureau of Justice Statistics...death row...
The absolute number of murders, for instance was lowest in 1999, with an overal number of murders at 15,522...which also happens to be the year of the highest number of executions, at 95...a number that seems to support the case for the death penalty decreasing the number of murders...as do the numbers for the following three years after 1999, when the murder rate increased, as the use of the death penalty increased...similarly, the number of death sentences decreased between 2000 and 2002...the overall numbers for the last thirty years are all over the place...though the 30 year trend is murders down...death sentences up...the use of the death penalty up -- and since this is the most significant challenge to these ideas...as well as the cases for gun and drug control indirectly alluded to by the Chicago officials and academics cited in the article...
"Chicago officials and academics have credited that city's murder decline to police targeting of gangs, drugs and guns."
Since this case -- that the death penalty, gun laws and enforcement and drug laws and enforcement are responsible for the decrease in the murder rate and violent crime rate, other than rape, in the last 30 years -- is one of the strongest cases against the principles of least possible necessary aggression -- since they would use aggression/force when I, at least, would not predict them to be most useful -- this is a case that I want to spend a lot of time with...
Now...to leave room for the many critics and detractors of these principles or variations and/or applications thereof by folks I've encountered since I've started working on them...
There are many permutations on that case that could still serve as pretty convincing proof that I am wrong...
The death penalty alone could serve as a case against these principles...as could gun laws...as could drug laws...as could variations between them...gun laws and drug laws, but not the death penalty...the death penalty and drug laws, for conservatives who support drug laws, but not gun laws...the death penalty and gun laws, for liberals who favor the death penalty, but not drug laws...gun laws and drug laws, for various death penalty opponents, but not the death penalty...and a million variations of a million other laws that might have significant influence on the rate of murders and/or violent crime...
So...there is a very good case to be made that I am wrong...
And goddamnit...I am bound and determined to make that case...
Isn't science great?:):)...
Facts are more important than opinions:):):)...
That's why I love it:):):)...
I'll keep working on it:):)...
Maybe others might work on it, too?:):):)...
Had a great day, again, by the way:):)...I love this job, on the whole:):):)...much more freedom and independence to use my own judgment (tempered by the experience of the folks I work for and with, of course) and do my job:):):)...
But it may turn out to just be my own fetish for freedom...or maybe, and much more likely, if I turn out to be wrong...something I'm still not seeing altogether:):):)...
Have a great day, everyone:):):)...
Love,
Ben
