A discursive essay

The death penalty and hard sentences

Over the last 50 years, more than 8,000 people have been sentenced to die under the death penalty, and
1,500 of them were ultimately executed. Today, the death penalty has fallen out of favour. But do death
penalty and harder sentences work to deter crime?

Many people feel that harder sentences should be brought back. According to ground-breaking research,
tougher prison sentences reduce crime, particularly burglary. When a judge hands a sentence to someone
who’s about to go to jail, there are four main factors that go into the decision. There’s retribution,
rehabilitation, safety and deterrence. Some people – mostly criminal prosecutors, especially in countries like
the US – believe that a long prison sentence checks all these boxes. Moreover, advocates for tougher
sentences say that long terms are more fitting punishments. They believe that it gives prisoners time to
think about what they’ve done wrong, and that the thought of going back into prison is a motivator to stay
on the straight and narrow.

There are argument against harder sentences and capital punishment. For example, having prisoners serve
long sentences can overcrowd prisons. It’s also extremely costly to taxpayers. Research shows that long
prison sentences don’t work on several fronts. In addition to being somewhat arbitrary, there’s not a lot of
evidence to suggest that the threat of prison time deters ex-prisoners from committing crimes.
Furthermore, most of the studies that have been conducted have concluded that the severity of
punishments doesn't have a lot to do with the overall level of crime. And studies have shown that if capital
punishment has any deterrent effect at all, it may be too small to be detected.

To sum up, the threat of a long prison sentence does not deter criminals from a criminal lifestyle. A
Government Accountability Office report in 2005 found that the biggest reasons for the drop in crime were
increased employment, increased police presence, and an ageing of the population. In my opinion, the
death penalty and harder sentences don’t work to deter crime.