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Disadvantages Of Capital Punishment

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In this section, Levitt and Dubner fail to present statistics that back their argument for the advantages of increasing prison sentences, and they show a lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation.
Levitt and Dubner also address the issue of capital punishment, asserting that it does not lead to an decrease in crime because it does not act as a real deterrent.
This is because the annual execution rate is only 2% compared to the 7% chance of dying faced by a member of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation crack gang. They claim that if life on death row is safer than life on the streets, fear of execution is not a driving force in a criminal’s calculus. This argument does not account for the fact that in the absence of capital punishment, criminals still face extended prison sentences. The next chapter deals with innovative police strategies and increasing the number of police as possible explanations for the great drop in crime. Innovative police strategy was discredited entirely due to the simple reason that the drop in crime rates began in 1990, boasting a decrease of almost 20% by the end of 1993; whereas the New York police department did not start employing new strategies until
1994, when a new mayor was elected and appointed a new police commissioner.
Crime also continued to plummet even after Bratton, the new commissioner, resigned from office. The authors of Freakonomics partially attribute the drop in crime to the increase in the number

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