Another difficult issue for me is the Death Penalty. Could you show me your views please?
Probably not. No sources on stats are reliable because they're stats.
Death is already legislated and there a nutload of murderers, so I think it doesn't do a damn thing to prevent future crime.
The victims should own the murderer, not an irrational agent (i.e., our enemy, the State).
Finally, it's important to note that the State can potentially render the death penalty for anything (not just capital crimes) because force is used against those who evade arrest and that force can result in death.
If death penalty does not deter crime, the same goes for imprisonment. Then, why do not stop imprison criminals (someone may ask)?
people are making lots and lots of money and those people would have to get real jobs.
Before you analyze the value of any law or punishment for breaking these lawas, I suggest that you look up freedomainradio.com and listen to the podcases or view the videos dealing with the public protection of private property. Then make your own judgements. This is a much more effective way to analyze the disasterous consequences of something like a death penalty instead of relying on complete bogus statistics.
As far as the morality of whether the ends justify the means---what if it could somehow be empirically proven that the death penalty deterred 99% of crime?
There's this myth common to segments in the right and in the left that states that most violent crimes are committed by people suffering from temporary or persistent insanity, so that such crimes could not be deterred by prospective legal punishment.
Maybe that myth comes close to the truth in places like Denmark. The economic incentive to become a violent criminal in Denmark is very small, and most violent crimes are indeed the result of mental instability.
But this is arguably not the truth for certain places in the U.S., and it's certainly not true for most places in the developing world (think Brazil or Colombia). In these places, being a member of a drug dealing armed cartel is a career option for many people, and they carry on executions and raids as a part of their daily business.
These places require a more ruthless justice system in order to reduce the prospective gains some people expect from entering in the crime world.
To think that a lenient justice system is the root cause for widespread criminal violence is not only very naive, it's also a self-inflicted wound. Italy understood the lesson when they decided to give their mafia bosses a taste of rough justice (although not through death penalty).
Stats can be a very effective tool if the people crunching the number hold some understanding of the underlying relations of cause and effect governing the phenomenon they are trying to capture and quantify.
For instance, you have to compare comparables. It makes no sense comparing the incidence of violence in Somalia and Norway and attribute it to the death penalty.
It is a trade-off. You grant the justice system a significant power in order to make it more effective against criminals, but this power has also negative consequences towards non-criminals. And as any trade-off, it is perceived differently in different circumstances.
These things are well understood by the common people. Almost every pool taken in Brazil on the subject shows that the population is massively supportive of a death penalty initiative, since the country is croweded with vicious criminals and has one of the most lenient, emasculated and slow justice systems in the western hemisphere.
A similar pool would not show that germans or swedes are favorable to capital punishment, since for them, such a tradeoff would not be interesting. Gang and random violence are not as much of problem in Stokholm or Berlin as in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, so germans and swedes can afford not to execute their incidental murderers and rapists.
Ever wonder why Denmark doesn't have violent drug cartels like the U.S. Brazil Columbia and Mexico?
Consider the fact that prohibition introduces violence in the marketplace. The government then escalates the violence with harsh prison sentences property seizures and the death penalty. Non violent market participants are then forced to adopt a kill or be killed mentality. VICES ARE NOT CRIMES. Kidnapping (harsh prison sentences) Theft (property seizure) and Murder (death penalty) are. You can't change human nature under penalty of law. There will always be violent sociopaths in society. Take away their bully pulpits guns and badges and maybe they will be forced to become productive members of society ie: manufactures merchants and prostitutes.
These complex patterns of criminal violence, black markets and political corruption are seldom explainable or solvable by sloganical quick fixies.
This kind of thinking that the realities of Kopenhagen and Medelin are somehow reducible to the attitudes their authorities have regarding drugs and vices is entirely useless.
It ignores many factors much more significant to the economies of drug cartels and focus the debate on the superficial ideological issues that are entertaining for middle class potheads far removed from the real situations they believe they can solve.
The death penalty is acceptable in accordance with tit-for-tat or "eye for an eye" positions from antiquity, plus Kinsella's estoppel theory of punishment. It seems that all of the sophisticated, semi-empirical, utilitarian arguments to the contrary have the typical weaknesses, e.g. (1) is it OK for a man to rape a woman if his pleasure outweighs her suffering, (2) how does one compute or measure utility and (3) how does one compute an overall utility - as a minimum, a maximum, an arithmetic average, a geometric average, a harmonic average, or something else?
>The victims should own the murderer, not an irrational agent (i.e., our enemy, the State).
No2statism got it right here. Of course "victims" means the victim's estate or victims' estates.
But if someone executes the murderer, and it is later determined that the "murderer" was in fact innocent, then the person who exacted the punishment could end up liable to the same kind of treatment. So it might be tricky to find a willing executioner.