My response from Mail Online to Peter Hitchen's assertion that there is a strong case for restoring the death penalty

1. Last week I criticised Peter Hitchens on Twitter over his support for
the death penalty and his assertion that its re-introduction here
would save lives. I should say that I did so rather rudely and I have
apologised to him for that. But I still disagree with him and here,
briefly, is my rationale and why I believe that there is another
potentially much more effective, but almost as controversial, way of
reducing violent crime.
First of all I observe that the debate on the death penalty is often not
a debate at all. Individuals on either side take a firm stance and insist
that either executions deter or they don’t. In fact the research is
inconclusive. This was emphasised just this week by the National
Academy of Sciences in the USA, which advised policymakers to be
cautious of absolute claims – one way or another - about the
deterrent effect of execution. The Academy concluded that:
Studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions.
Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives;
others conclude that executions actually increase homicides; and still
others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide rate.
So, if the evidence is inconclusive, why am I in the anti-death-penalty
camp? First of all some background: For twenty-three years I worked
in and around prisons and I ran the Prison Service for seven years.
So, Yes, I am the same Martin Narey who, as Mr Hitchens put it last
week, “used to be a prominent bureaucrat in Britain’s pointless
warehousing organisation, known as the prison system?” (there’s
actually some validity in that description of the prison system, but
that’s another debate).
My experience of offenders is that punishment offers very little by
the way of deterrence. I made no apology for treating those we
incarcerate with decency and dignity. It’s about imposing our values,
not succumbing to the values of those who harm and steal from
others. But there would have been an interesting moral challenge to
my determination to make prisons more decent places if the various
experiments in the last thirty years with austere and physically
demanding regimes had deterred offending. But they didn’t. And the
reason they didn’t, in my view, is the same reason that the deterrent
of capital punishment wouldn’t work here. And that is that offenders,
overwhelmingly, don’t believe they will get caught. That is what we
need to change.

2. It can be done. The simplest example of that is the way that the habit
of drinking and driving, something which countless law abiding
individuals indulged in, was changed by the spectre of the
breathalyser. It was never the case that there was a significant
chance of being stopped on the way home from the pub. But
individuals believed there was and this particular type of criminality
diminished remarkably.
But in general, offenders, whether those who indulge in theft or those
who are violent don’t believe they will be caught. And because of that
they don’t contemplate the likely consequences of being caught. And
that applies, in my experience, even when the criminality has been so
inept that, to you and me, apprehension would always have appeared
inevitable.
Most crime is committed by young men. Not always, but very
frequently, by young men who have a marked inability to foresee the
consequences of their actions. Some more serious offending,
including sex offending, is less spontaneous, more carefully planned
and with greater effort dedicated to evading justice. But almost all
offenders don’t believe they are likely to be caught.
We can begin to change that. We can convince current offenders and
future offenders that they are more likely to be caught and we can, in
particular, deter violent crime, including murder by requiring all
adults, or at least all males, to allow their DNA to be recorded. I know
that position holds very little support and that it is seen by many as a
wholly unjustified attack on civil liberties. I believe it would be a
price worth paying if the person who this week abductedfive-year-
old April Jones had understood that it was inevitable that his
abduction would be revealed by the presence of his DNA.
One final point on the death penalty issue: Quite properly we have a
very high standard of proof in the criminal courts. As judges
sometimes explain to juries, believing someone probably committed
a crime is not sufficient for a finding of guilt. If a finding of guilt for
murder were to lead to a death penalty – and assuming of course that
the sentence was not subsequently commuted – I believe that juries
too nervous of the consequence of their decision would acquit more
murderers.