This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.
I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill
I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/
Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/
The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.
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Capital Punishment is a Deterrent
There is a false narrative about the deterrent effect of capital punishment—that it doesn’t deter—which has long been a staple of the anti-death penalty crowd.
As I and anyone else who has spent any substantial amount of time around criminals—having gained enough trust not to be lied to—knows, it most certainly is a deterrent, and this superb article from Catholic World Report, How and why the death penalty deters murder in contemporary America by Joseph M. Bessette explains:
“Fifteen years ago I was asked to give an empirical overview on the use of capital punishment in the United States at a conference on Catholicism and the death penalty held at a Catholic college. Though I had been devoting three weeks to capital punishment in a course I regularly taught on “Crime and Public Policy” at my own secular liberal arts college and though I was Catholic myself, I had not paid close attention to developments within the Church in the 1990s on the death penalty. I had heard of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995) and knew that there was a new universal catechism for the Church, but I could have told you nothing about the two versions of the catechism (1992 and 1997) and how Evangelium Vitae had led to some subtle changes in the language on capital punishment between the first and second.
“It was around the time I was preparing for the conference that one of my students said in class, “Well, I am Catholic, so I am against the death penalty.” This came as a bit of a shock. I had been raised on the venerable Baltimore Catechism and had attended a Jesuit high school and college in the 1960s; so I knew that that the Church taught that the state had the right to impose the death penalty for heinous crimes. I respectfully corrected the student, informing him that the Church had always taught the principled legitimacy of the death penalty. He responded that that was not what he had learned in his own Catholic education. This set me to the task of learning more about whether anything had changed (or could change) in the Church’s teaching.
“At the conference my empirical overview was the first formal presentation. After I finished, I sat quietly and learned from the experts in attendance. At the general discussion that ended the conference, I decided to ask a question that had been nagging me the whole time on an issue that none of the speakers had addressed: “If we knew that the death penalty deterred murder, wouldn’t the Church have to support it? Hasn’t the Church always taught that public officials have an obligation to protect the innocent and to promote the common good, as long as they use legitimate means? And hasn’t the Church always taught that the death penalty is a legitimate form of punishment for murder and other heinous crimes?” As Edward Feser and I maintain in our recent book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment (Ignatius, 2017), that question about deterrence and Church teaching on capital punishment is as pertinent today as it was when I asked it fifteen years ago.
“Recent pontificates and deterrence
“It is well known that the last three popes have urged the worldwide abolition of the death penalty. None of the three, to the best of my knowledge, has expressly denied that capital punishment deters murder, though they seem to have presumed as much. Consider Pope John Paul II’s treatment of the subject in Evangelium Vitae, the encyclical he issued in 1995. Relatively early in the document, before he turned to his formal treatment of the death penalty, John Paul praised the “growing public opposition to the death penalty,” holding that “[m]odern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform” (Section 27). Certainly the pope was right that we can render convicted murderers harmless in our super-maximum security prisons by isolating them from all direct human contact, an extreme and costly measure that some consider cruel and inhumane in itself. Yet, incapacitating dangerous criminals is not the only purpose that punishment (including capital punishment) serves; for it also promotes justice by giving the offender what he deserves and it deters others from committing similar crimes. Ed Feser and I devote the bulk of our book to the “just deserts” defense of the death penalty; yet here I want to keep the focus on deterrence (which we also cover but at less length).
“Though justice and deterrence have always been central considerations in Catholic treatments of the death penalty, John Paul II simply ignored them when he first briefly addressed the topic early in Evangelium Vitae. Yet if the death penalty deters murder, then this would seem to contradict the pope’s assurance that society can be effective in “suppressing crime” without it. When he returned to the death penalty later in EV (Section 56), John Paul broadened the discussion but again failed to mention deterrence. Catholic abolitionists tend to interpret the discussion of the death penalty in Section 56 as simply restating the narrow incapacitation defense in Section 27; but in our book Ed and I show that John Paul reaffirmed the Church’s traditional teaching that, quoting the pope, “[t]he primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is ‘to redress the disorder caused by the offence,’” thereby “defending public order and ensuring people’s safety.” It would follow, then, that if the death penalty is in fact necessary to defend public order and ensure the people’s safety it should be used. Note that John Paul’s formulation of the doctrinal principle, which itself drew on the language of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, was virtually identical to that in the old Baltimore Catechism, which held that “human life may be lawfully taken . . . [b]y the lawful execution of a criminal, fairly tried and found guilty of a crime punishable by death when the preservation of law and order and the good of the community require such execution.”
“Now, there is no denying that John Paul II did not believe the death penalty was necessary, except in the rarest of cases, to defend public order and ensure the people’s safety, else he could not have lent his powerful voice to the abolition movement. But this conclusion was a prudential judgment, not a doctrinal one, and implicit in this judgment was the presumption that the death penalty does not deter murder. To be clear, the doctrinal principle at issue allows for the serious consideration of deterrence, but the pope’s conclusion that lesser punishments will equally well secure public order and the people’s safety simply presumes away the potential deterrent effect of punishing murderers with death.
“Although John Paul II’s immediate successor, Pope Benedict XVI, said relatively little about the death penalty, he did use his office to promote abolition. In November of 2011, he addressed those who had come to Rome to attend a conference on the death penalty and expressed his hope that the group’s efforts would “encourage the political and legislative initiatives being promoted in a growing number of countries to eliminate the death penalty.” Pope Francis has been more forceful (and more frequent) in denouncing capital punishment. Perhaps his fullest treatment of the subject was the letter he wrote in March of 2015 to the International Commission against the Death Penalty. The letter details a long list of critiques: the death penalty “contradicts God’s plan for man and for society”; it punishes for past offenses rather than present dangers; it “fails to conform to any just purpose of punishment”; it denies the opportunity for repentance; and it is subject to the possibility of “judicial error.” As with John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis simply presume away the deterrent effect of the death penalty (as is the case with Francis’s most recent statements). It is clear, then, that our last three popes sincerely believed that abolishing the death penalty will not lead to more murders, but why should Catholics and others agree with them? The possible deterrent effect of the death penalty is a purely empirical issue, and neither popes, nor bishops, nor other clerics have any particular expertise that would qualify them to speak authoritatively on such a highly contested matter.
“This view that the death penalty does not reduce murders would have surprised many leading figures in the life of the Church. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul wrote that rulers are a “terror” to bad conduct and do “not bear the sword in vain.” In his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, St. Augustine praised the “great and holy men” in ancient Israel who “punished some sins with death” because “the living were struck with a salutary fear.” Augustine specifically defended Moses’ order at the foot of Mt. Sinai to execute the worshippers of the golden calf: “he impressed their minds at the time with a wholesome fear, and gave them a warning for the future, by using the sword in the punishment of a few.” In his Lectures on the Letter to the Romans, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that many men “have no love for virtue and . . . must be compelled to avoid evil by punishments.” Rulers legitimately use the “fear of punishment” to “keep us from evil conduct.” Such punishment may well include the death penalty. “[W]hen a thief is hanged,” Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologiae, “this is not for his own amendment, but for the sake of others, that at least they may be deterred from crime through fear of the punishment.” (Note that the Latin translated here as “thief” is better rendered as “robber” or “bandit.”) And the Roman Catechism of the sixteenth century, the first universal catechism of the Catholic Church, taught that “the just use of [capital punishment] . . . is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder” (presumably because it saves lives through deterrence). Though these examples are all from the Catholic tradition, it is not too strong to say that the deterrent effect of capital punishment was nearly universally accepted in the West until recent decades.”
Retrieved January 12, 2018 from http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/01/04/how-and-why-the-death-penalty-deters-murder-in-contemporary-america/
This article—and his co-authored book—touched on many of the points I made in my book about the subject, Capital Punishment & Catholic Social Teaching: A Tradition of Support