World Day Against the Death Penalty 2024: “The Death Penalty protects no one!” – Part 1

The idea that the death penalty protects people is inherently false, and flawed at its very core. Executing people who have already been removed from society is nothing more than redundant and cruel. With the death penalty, the crime has already happened. The person who needed protection didn’t have it, and we as a society failed the victims of these heinous acts. And for allowing their dysfunction to progress to such an extreme, we failed those who committed them as well.

In order to protect people, we need to be proactive, and stop these crimes from happening in the first place. For most people in the heat of a moment, whether it results in a crime or not, stories about what happened to strangers in the past are the very last thing on a persons mind. And in that critical moment, a person will usually only think about the easiest and most apparent solution to their immediate problem.

So that means, harsher punishments for those that have already committed a crime does nothing to change the minds of those that might commit one in the future. Time and time again, its been shown that the best way to ACTUALLY prevent crime of any sort is through social services such as mental health support, tools for rehabilitation to prevent recidivism, and encouraging a cultural shift about how we perceive crime and violence in our society.

In short, the best way to prevent crime is to reduce the number of people who have the idea to commit one in the first place.

John Allen
Arizona Death Row