How we Organized and Collected our Data
We decided to organize our research/data collection around our overall thesis, dividing our research focuses among three categories: Racial Disparities, Efficacy, and Financial Cost.
Racial Disparities:
The bulk of our work for this topic involved working with the DPIC's execution database. Because it was in .csv format, we were able to quickly format it for RStudio and SAS usage. Statistical analyses were then pursued through those applications.
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Within our exploration of the data, we were able to procedurally look at execution data on a progressive and magnifying scale - we started by analyzing national trends, went deeper by looking at state trends, and subsequently dissected that further with county level exploration.
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With the added variable of time, it seemed natural that we'd be able to use that as well to assist with the analysis of change over time.
Efficacy:
When assessing the justice system and the usefulness of capital punishment, we need some kind of definition to establish standards by which we can properly judge the death penalty.
The answer is with Efficacy - for the death penalty to be considered useful or worth keeping, there must be some kind of goal that its use works towards. In this case, we want to be measuring how effective Efficacy is at deterring capital crimes like murder.
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Luckily, the DPIC doubles as a repository for documentation of studies for the death penalty - including those regarding efficacy. One in particular that we found useful for this project was a study conducted in 1996 and followed up in 2008; it was a survey distributed to ~70 or so criminology and legal experts each iteration posing various statements regarding the death penalty and its impacts. The survey format was for these experts to provide a rating for whether they agreed or disagreed with a given statement, which we figured would provide for a good narrative regarding why efficacy is a driving force deterring the continuation of the death penalty's usage.
Financial Cost:
Exploring financial costs for the death penalty was an interesting process. Much of the information was scattered, and as such required some coordination amongst our group to see what information would be conducive of the narrative we were looking to understand better.
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Our first research goal was determining what the expenditure total would be for inmates and associated investments (ie. legal representation, costs for execution methods, etc.) From there we would compare sentencing costs along with other per capita costs, seeing which best demonstrates the inefficiency and costliness of capital punishment as a whole.
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From there we could supplement that association of costliness with exploration into how other countries handle their capital crime inmates. Scandinavian countries in particular are known to invest differently into their justice system, embracing more of a restorative network rather than a punitive one. In a sense this is also representative of the narrative we are trying to better understand, all the more reason to validate our exploration of this topic.
