A therapist against the death penalty? I'm sure no one is shocked by this. We are famous for being flaming liberals. However, my primary objection to the death penalty may not be what you suppose, i.e. that criminals can be rehabilitated. I do not believe that people like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy could have been rehabilitated. However, I still do not think we should have been given a death penalty. Why?
First, let me say that there are numerous other arguments against the death penalty which are extremely valid and worthy of consideration. 1. It is arbitrarily applied. A serial killer in one state will get a life sentence while someone who commits a single murder in another state will get the death penalty. 2. Its costs far outweigh those of keeping someone in jail for life. 3. It has not provided the deterrent to crime it promised. 4. Since the advent of DNA testing we now know that people have been wrongly put on death row and some even executed.
For these reasons alone it would seem that a life sentence would be just than a death sentence.* However, there are three objections to the death penalty I never hear mentioned.
Someone Has to Pull the Switch
Even if you think it is right to put someone to death, death row inmates do not spontaneously combust. Someone must pull the switch. Prison guards must sit with this person, feed them, house them, interact with them and then, after coming to know them as a person and a human being, kill them. Can you imagine having to pull that switch and watch as it kills another human being? The toll this takes on prison personnel is enormous. Guards on death row must be rotated constantly to try to protect their mental state. I'm not sure whether anyone has ever studied the effects on the warden of holding someone's life (and ultimately, death) in his or her hands, but I cannot imagine they are minor. The psychological price all of these people pay is huge.
Some would say that people choose to be guards. Perhaps that is so. Perhaps it is not. If you work in a small community where the primary "business" is the local prison, finding other jobs may not be so easy. Even so, someone has to do it. And I highly doubt that anyone going into the prison to be a guard can imagine the problems in their own psyche having to kill another person can cause. But the psyche of the prison guards is not the only consideration.
The Family Has to Watch
Whatever crimes death row inmates have committed, their parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses and possibly children did not. Yet all of these people have to go through this process with the inmate. I cannot imagine being the parent of a child who is due to be put to death. It must be torturous. And what crime has the parent committed?
Psychological Research
If we put a violent offender to death we lose the ability to learn from them. The ability to perform psychological research on criminals can help us understand two things: 1) their methodology and 2) their origins. The psychological research done with Ted Bundy was some of the earliest performed with serial killers. For the first time we began to ask if there were patterns in the behaviors of serial killers which could help us identify other serial killers sooner. Researchers spent countless hours interviewing him, right up to the eve of his execution. The information gathered from Bundy and others was used to create a database for the FBI which is still used today to track and identify serial killers.
About the same time, we also began to ask how criminals were created. Are they born or made? If they are born, what kind of defect is it? Can it be treated? Are there signs which can be seen early in childhood which would indicate future criminality? If so, could interventions be created to address the problem and prevent yet another criminal from coming to be?
If criminal behavior is a product of environment, what in their environment created a person capable of such acts? Can we do something to indentify children currently living in such environments? Could we develop an intervention to remove such children from these environments and deter the criminal-making process?
Is there a difference between truly violent criminals and those who commit non-violent crimes? Is the difference biological or environmental?
Since psychological research is rather hard to perform on the dead, eliminating the death penalty in lieu of a life sentence would allow researchers to work toward finding answers to these questions. This might work to deter criminal behavior in a way the death penalty never has.
*I am in complete sympathy with those who respond that we are unable to keep someone in jail for life. They are right. A life sentence no longer means life. It may mean as little as ten years. And to this I would respond that we then need to change the laws which allow early release. If a jury of your peers sentences you to life it should mean exactly that. Lawyers and probation and parole boards should not have the ability to overrule the intentions of a jury. But to try to address an ineffective life sentence by imposing the death penalty not only fails to fix the problem, but brings numerous problems of its own, as discussed above.