I was curious about the NY example. I found the same expressed in several articles that googled up, and the same kind of analyses on lots of anti-DP websites too. But there were other things that caught my eye too.
The last year I could find criminal justices expenditures by state was 2003.
In 2003, NY had a per capita criminal justice expenditure of 266 with 14.2% of its budget going to criminal justice
TX per capita criminal justice expenditure 192 in 2003, with 12.4 % of its budget going to criminal justice.
Criminal justice expenditures includes the total of policing, corrections and court expenditures.
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/jeeus03.pdf Okay, but what if we look at the breakdown of employees within those expenditure categories:
NY spent 49% of that budget on police protection. TX ~ 38%.
NY spent 17.3% of it's budget on judicial and legal, TX ~ 15.7%.
NY spent 33.7% of it's budget on corrections, TX ~ 45.5%.
9.4% is almost as much as 10%. It’s .6 per 100,000 or 6 per 1,000,000 or a difference of 60 murders per 10,000,000.
In 1990 the murder rate in NY was 14.5 and TX was 14.1. Going by this year (and 2007), NY decreased 10.3%, while TX decreased 8.2%, just over a 2% difference.
A 2% difference means 2 murders per 100,000, 20 per 1,000,000, 200 per 10,000,000, 400 per 20,000,000. That’s still just the difference in the decrease.
If we only look at present murder rates ~ NY with 4.2 and TX with 5.9 murder rates, we’re ‘only’ talking about a difference of 1.7 per 100,000 or 170 more murders per 10,000,000 in TX than in NY in 2007 alone.
Quite possibly. Still, better policing likely means more creepazoids caught. That's a reasonable guess. Catch more, prosecute more, incarcerate more.
The question I keep asking myself is, 'why, if the death penalty is the deterrent it's purported to be, are more than double the police officers in TX (where they're more likely to get a death sentence) being killed than in NY'?
Well, sure. No one thing alone, but rather, a few factors, makes perfect sense. The same would hold true for TX, though, wouldn't it ~ *if* they chose to incarcerate their incarcerated for 85% of the sentences passed? Last I checked, TX inmates (on average) serve less than 50% of their sentence. Is that changed? *IF* so, then TX has that same boast as NY, doesn’t it? ~~ which would make the 85% time served a wash ~ just as if I were comparing NY to CA which has the ‘boast’ of incarcerating perps for 85% of their sentences and offers a death sentence to boot
. *If* not, if I were a Texan, I’d be asking ‘why the hell not?’
I wasn't actually suggesting they saved money (or that they don't have appeals courts) ~ that'd be absurd. What I did suggest is that they've put their money where it counts ~ or certainly seems to. Surely we don’t save lives and money. Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that when the two compete ~ lives vs money ~ the latter too often takes precedence.
Of course.
If the death penalty (and executions) is the thang it's cracked up to be, then surely none of the measures that other states throw at crime ~ including money, including more police, including lengthier sentences, would hold a candle to the great state of TX and it's execution chamber. Yet, there it is.
You can use 91 because it better suits your argument and I can use 90 because it better suits mine........... but, I think we can agree that there’s no 'win' until there aren’t murder rates to compare.
*sigh*