Hi Jacob Snyder; Re the death penalty in China. The US peak in executions was about 200 per year back in 1940. There's a great graph of this here:
deathpenaltyinfo.org
The data has some interesting peaks and valleys. Look for the post war drops after the Civil War, WW1, and WW2.
Our population back in 1940 was around 130 million, so those 200 amount to about 1.5 per million per year. Since the population of China now amounts to around 1300 million, if they were at our 1940 peak usage, they would be executing about 2000 people per year.
This is about where the country has been, at least recently:
China sentenced at least 3,152 people to death and executed more than 1,876 during 1997, Amnesty International said today as it released its annual death penalty log. ( People's Republic of China: the death penalty in 1997 AI Index: ASA 17/28/98; Death Penalty log: January to December 1997 AI Index ASA 17/32/98 ).
web.amnesty.org
The alternative punishment to the death penalty, life in prison, is quite expensive. Poorer societies have a tendency to use death instead of long prison terms, and to use corporal punishment instead of short jail terms. This should not be seen as evidence of their brutality, but instead a trade off due to their lack of wealth.
Of course the US could afford to put death penalty recipients into jail for life. And the expense of litigating (and administering) the death penalty is well known to be high. It is interesting to note that the legal costs (mostly due to appeals) of execution in the US has been high for a very long time, at least back to the 19th century, when those costs are compared to the legal costs of arranging for life in prison.
-- Carl
P.S. I tend to discount the lurid stories of prisoners being harvested for organs. This is incompatible with (a) the fact that China is converting over to administering the death penalty by lethal injection, and (2) the fact that death penalties tend to be administered immediately after the appeals process is completed. |
