You did not answer my question. Is punishment deterring people from committing crimes? Yes or no? If you say no then we need no punishment and we can make every

You did not answer my question. Is punishment deterring people from committing crimes? Yes or no? If you say no then we need no punishment and we can make every crime legal. There are several possibilities as to why capital punishment may not be or may not seem to be as effective today as it could be. The first obvious one is that universities and most of media has been under control by the left for decades now, so everyone that might tell you death penalty is ineffective is more likely to follow an ideology that views these punishments as inhumane or have an incentive to do so. (Let's not kid ourselves, most people here that are against capital punishment do this because they view it as inhumane. If presented with two studies where one showed that is was ineffective and one that is was effective most of these people would choose to believe the first one - no matter what) The other possibility is that we made changes to how we apply the death penalty that causes it to be less of a deterrence. For example it gets less and less likely for any criminal to be actually executed, and if that happens then often after decades of trials and retrials. Or how about the fact that we seem to be so much more concerned today about the cruelty and the supposed inhumane treatment of the criminal than about what the victims of said criminal had to go through? There used to be a time when we hanged people publicly for everyone (including the criminals family) to see. Today we make criminals that are executed into martyrs against state cruelty (many even reach celebrity status) instead of displaying them as criminals that are likely to piss their pants in public before being hanged for their heinous crimes. This definitely has an effect on deterrence.