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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
George W. Bush and Al Gore both believe capital punishment deters violent crime. They're wrong.
Oct 20, 2000 | Steve Allen used to play a game with his kids called Find the Lie: He'd hand them a newspaper story and tell them to get busy. Today's question: Can you Find the Lie in the final presidential debate? Was it George W. Bush's specious claim that Al Gore's budget will bust taxpayers' wallets? Gore's flamboyant evasion of a question about parental responsibility in schools?
No, the whopper Tuesday night was entirely bipartisan. It came when audience member Leo Anderson pointed out how, in the previous week's debate, Bush seemed to "overly enjoy" invoking the death penalty. "Are you really, really proud of the fact that Texas is No. 1 in executions?"
Well, no, replied the Texas governor. "If you think I was proud of it, I think you misread me." But then he added: "I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people's lives." Gore, not one to be outdone in the law-and-order department, chimed in with the same assertion: "It's a deterrence."
It's no news that both Gore and Bush support the death penalty; capital punishment was Republican currency for years until Clinton and Gore claimed it as their own. But that little exchange reveals much about both candidates' carelessness with facts when it suits their politics.
In fact, whatever the rationales for capital punishment, deterring crime isn't among them -- a fact well known to the nation's top law-enforcement officials. Attorney General Janet Reno, a death-penalty supporter whose Justice Department has helped pass laws making it far harder for death-row inmates to appeal their sentences, put it this way a few months ago: "I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point."
Scholars of crime agree with her. The academic journal Crime and Delinquency last year examined more than a decade of executions in George W. Bush's Texas, and found "no evidence of a deterrent effect." Other research has reached the same conclusion, most notably a 1997 study of crime in over 500 counties nationwide. Cops agree with Reno too: A 1995 poll by Hart Research Associates found that just 1 percent of police chiefs believe the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides. Even one of the country's most conservative, pro-death-penalty judges, Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has acknowledged that little evidence backs up the deterrence argument.
The cops know the death penalty doesn't deter crime, the attorney general knows it, the scholars know it -- but not Bush and Gore. Indeed, their persistence in playing the death penalty card in the last two debates reveals much about each candidate.
For Bush, his aggressive promotion of execution reveals a habit of factual distortion at least as damning as the lies for which his rival has been soundly condemned. Last night, for instance, Bush declared his capital-punishment apparatus part of a successful crime-fighting machine: "I'm proud of the fact that violent crime is down in the state of Texas. I'm proud of the fact that we hold people accountable."
That successful crime-fighting strategy, unfortunately, is a figment of the governor's imagination. According to figures in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports released just this week, while crime is declining in cities nationwide, it is up in the large cities of Texas. (A fact initially reported only by the enterprising criminal-justice Web site APBNews.com.) The only other state to defy the national crime drop is Florida, governed by Bush's brother and the only state to rival Texas in the pace of executions. New York, which has not executed anyone in decades, leads the nation's most populous states in driving crime downward. The FBI's figures confirm a study earlier this fall by the Justice Police Institute, which found crime falling more slowly in Bush's Texas than in any comparable state.
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