As someone who moved to London from New York 30 years ago, I have to be proud of what my adopted, and beloved, city has achieved.
Though London has led New York in just about every crime category for as long as I’ve been here, New York has stubbornly clung to leadership in the murder rate.
That’s no longer the case. Under the sage leadership of our present Mayor Sadiq Khan, ably supported by the aptronymically named Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, London has shot (and stabbed) its way into the lead.
The issue is very much in the news, with every pundit identifying the causes and offering solutions. Most of them make some sense, but gaps remain.
For example, the welfare state is seldom mentioned as one of the causes, although it’s an obvious one. Yet most commentators err against logic by lamenting our growing, crime-ridden underclass, while refusing to see the welfare state as a reason for it.
Also, a commentator has to be rather far on the right to identify mass immigration of cultural aliens as a contributing factor, though that’s another obvious and logical reason.
After all, billions of people in the world don’t see the sanctity of human life as an absolute tenet, rather than one contingent on the religion or ethnicity of each particular life. Without overstepping the boundaries of logic, one has to believe that a great presence of such people in a community is likely to skew the murder rate upwards, an a priori assumption amply supported by empirical evidence.
Failures of our education get a frequent mention too, on both sides of the political divide. Indeed, reading newspaper reports one gets the impression that knives have outstripped textbooks as essential accessories of school paraphernalia.
True enough, scholastic tables show that British schoolchildren are close to the European bottom in numeracy and literacy, only ever doing better than the rest of Europe in pregnancy tests. This doubtless has an effect on crime.
The importance of the two-parent family also comes up often, and rightly so – although that again gets more of an airing in the conservative press. It’s not immediately clear why this issue has to be politicised, but it is: nowadays everything is.
However, it’s counterintuitive to believe that an unemployed woman with five children by eight different men is as likely to keep her progeny from crime as a male accountant happily married to a female teacher. But hey, ideology is like God in one respect: it works in mysterious ways.
The proposed remedies vary, depending on what the commentator sees as the key problem and where his political sympathies lie. Yet one possible ingredient in the mix of solutions never gets a mention anywhere, left, right or centre: the death penalty.
One is led to believe that the British had a Damascene experience in 1965, when they realised in a flash that the death penalty for murder was no longer morally acceptable.
While accepting, on pain of ostracism, that in the 1960s Britain achieved the kind of moral epiphany that the previous 5,000 years of recorded history had been denied, one still ought to be allowed to make a few observations.
First, the death penalty wasn’t regarded as off limits in the formative moral code of the West, the Scripture. When society and community were more than just figures of speech, the moral validity of the death penalty wasn’t in doubt.
It was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community, and the amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment fitting the crime.
The death penalty for murder was then seen as affirming, rather than denying, the sanctity of human life. People didn’t believe that an arbitrary taking of a life could be redeemed by any length of imprisonment, even if accompanied by counselling.
That’s one salient point in favour of the death penalty; deterrence is another. The deterrent value of the death penalty is often disputed, a long argument I’d rather not enter here. However, there’s no argument that the death penalty deters the executed criminal from killing again.
This is no mean achievement, considering that in the 53 years since the death penalty was abolished, more people have been killed by recidivists released from prison than the number of murderers executed in the 53 years before the abolition.
Admittedly, even a sound conservative may argue against the death penalty, citing, for example, the corrupting effect it has on the executioner – or else doubting the right of mortal and therefore fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.
Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that today’s lot are uncomfortable with, but punishment as such. More and more, the moderns betray their Enlightenment genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice.
One detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law is only an aspect of the social services. And so it now is, for it appears to be subject to the same inner logic as welfare, whereby a government activity invariably promotes the very mode of behaviour it’s supposed to curb.
If the single-mother benefit encourages single motherhood and the unemployment benefit promotes unemployment, then by the same token it’s the crime-fighting activity of the modern state that makes crime worse.
This is the case because the state proceeds from a false metaphysical premise. It refuses to admit that human good has to coexist dialectically with human evil – and some evil is irredeemable, in this life at any rate. To the moderns, there’s no worse fate than death, a belief that had been held in contempt when perdition was still accepted as real.
What upsets me about this whole situation isn’t so much the absence of the death penalty from the statute books as the absence of any further debate from the papers. In the very least, it ought to be acknowledged that both sides have a point, and the points merits discussion.
It’s not as if every existing law is accepted as chiselled in stone. For example, when in 2013 legal homomarriage got to be seen as a welcome addition to the laws, which in this area had remained unchanged since they were first codified, Dave Cameron (a Tory!) campaigned for it fanatically and successfully.
So can we at least talk about the advisability of the death penalty? No, of course not. These aren’t Victorian times, as the moderns will helpfully remind us. That much is true: in the 1880s and ‘90s murder was practically nonexistent in London.
Go see the You Tube video “The Execution of Gary Glitter”.
“The deterrent value of the death penalty is often disputed, a long argument I’d rather not enter here.”
Quick punishment and sure punishment. Even as late as WW2 a bad guy shooting and killing a policeman would be arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced and hung all within a period of three months.
“This is no mean achievement, considering that in the 53 years since the death penalty was abolished, more people have been killed by recidivists released from prison than the number of murderers executed in the 53 years before the abolition.”
That is the only argument one needs for the reintroduction of the death penalty for premeditated murder.
Incidentally, the debate on ‘humanitarian execution’, which has so occupied our US cousins, always misses the crucial point that the condemned, in 1950s/ 1960s Britain was dead on the end of the rope within 15 seconds of Mr Pierrepoint entering his cell. Mr Pierrepoint had worked out the length of drop, depending on the criminals weight, height and physical condition – which would give a, bespoke, instant death. No prolonged, transfer to the ‘death house’ (torture, in my view), no last words to witnesses…just the sound of keys in the lock, a rather dapper small man saying “follow me” and a ten yard walk to the scaffold (which you didn’t even know was there – hidden as it was behind a cupboard – the criminal thought he had long minutes to live when, in fact it was seconds -and was thus disorientated).
We used to be civilised.
“This is no mean achievement, considering that in the 53 years since the death penalty was abolished, more people have been killed by recidivists released from prison than the number of murderers executed in the 53 years before the abolition.”
That is the only argument one needs for the reintroduction of the death penalty for premeditated murder.
Or don’t let them out…
“more people have been killed by recidivists released from prison than the number of murderers executed in the 53 years before the abolition.”
Convicts serving life without parole and then killing another inmate or a member of staff. How exactly do you further punish them. Anyone know how?
I cannot decide for or against the death penalty. There are good arguments on either side, including the ones you’ve mentioned, Mr. Boot. However one thing does strike me in its disfavor, from the hanged-to-be and his victim’s perspective. To know that you are going to die at such and such appointed day and hour, the former’s position, leaving perhaps many months to reflect on such a fate in a jail cell in dread isolated silence throughout, strikes me as a crueler punishment than the crime of murdering someone who ‘never saw it coming’. Same day execution as the murder committed, though of course quite impossible in a sophisticated judicial system, would appear closer to eye for an eye justice.
I agree that there are good arguments on either side. My point though is that arguments for the death penalty (which I think are stronger on balance) are never made, or at least heard.
With certain categories of crimes or criminals the death penalty couldn’t be implemented soon enough of course.
Michael Portillo, who is in favour of it, made a rather macabre TV programme investigating the most humane methods of carrying it out, even testing death by hypoxia himself….well very nearly.
I’m against it. The inevitable media circus, one mob baying for blood, another mob calling for a repeal of the law, would all be horribly uncivilised. Grief would be unnecessarily inflicted – even murderers have mothers – time for ‘amendment of life’, to quote the BCP, denied the wrongdoer. The possibility, however small, of miscarriage of justice, clinches the argument for me. Mainly, though, I don’t want to live somewhere where the subject is constantly up for discussion, always raking over the arguments for and against.
Plenty of first world countries have a lower murder rate without the death penalty. Let’s compare ourselves to those as a first line of enquiry into the problem.
“Michael Portillo, who is in favour of it, made a rather macabre TV programme investigating the most humane methods of carrying it out, even testing death by hypoxia himself….well very nearly. ”
The Chinese execute about 3,000 persons per year and use shooting to the back of the neck as the method of choice.
After visiting China and reading up on their culture the less we imitate them the better
The Chinese government has no free press to scrutinise its actions. Let’s not emulate them.
What about emulating Britain before 1965?
Is that possible? So many aspects of society – factors that might affect the murder rate – are different now. Many of them are no doubt indeed worthy of emulation, but reintroduction of capital punishment isn’t where I’d start.
5 children to 8 different men?!
Recidivism rates in the U.K. (& USA ) appear to be the highest world-wide. It is about 75% for those serving 4-9 years, which is more than double that of the Nordic countries, (Norway is only 20%). Norway’s incarceration rate is just 75 per 100,000 people, it’s double that in the UK with 150, compared to 707 people for every 100,000 people in the US. However, in the USA 31 states still have the death penalty, and there were 2,902 people in line for it! (2016 figures). So it doesn’t appear to be a deterrent.
In some cases in the USA it takes thirty years to execute a person on death row. Even if evidence is irrefutable. Death when it does occur for the perpetrator more or less about the same as a middle-aged man having a heart attack. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Yes Bert, however, 23 were executed last year and 20 the year before. So it does not appear to be a deterrent. The huge rate of second offenders is frightening! Prison needs to be an awful place that that none intend to return to, yet at the same time it needs to reform the person to think better and to wish to contribute to society in a meaningful way. Maybe second offenders need the noose.
Yes, but we don’t know what the incarceration rate in those states would be without the death penalty, do we? All sorts of factors contribute to crime rates, and judging the deterrent value of anything is impossible by definition: we can’t know how many crimes were deterred precisely because they were deterred.
The Death Penalty Info. Centre (USA) has a lot of graphs and statistics. The figures consistently record lower murder rates in states without the ultimate penalty. Over the last two decades the figures reflect 18%-46% lower murder rates.