In the past several weeks, Connecticut has become the latest in a long line of states to abolish the death penalty.

The U.S. is one of the last civilized countries, in the world to utilize such barbaric punishment. Realistically, the death penalty is not a just form of punishment, and as a country we should abolish it.

Do we get some advantage from the overt barbarism of the death penalty? Many of the advocates for the death penalty argue that it is a deterrent for future crimes.

This argument is ridiculous. The plain and simple answer is “no.” We have 4.8 homicides per 100,000 people. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development rate of murders per 100,000 people is 2.87, two-thirds of our figures.

The OECD represents several countries who, on the whole, outlaw the death penalty as legal punishment. Therefore, these numbers imply that we don’t exactly deter people.

We have to instead look at the society we create. We have a violent culture, where the media glorifies deaths and horrific violence.

More importantly, we have a society with a huge income disparity.

Many of the crimes committed today are due to an overwhelming economic need, not because the criminal actually enjoys the crime.

Furthermore, many murderers are psychologically impaired, and would have committed the crime with or without the death penalty.  I’m not saying that murders are justified, but rather our society has to take a good look at our involvement in them.

This brings us to one of the predominant philosophers on justice, John Stuart Mill. He argued that if society created the person who committed a crime, that it is unjust for us to punish them for it.

Instead it is our duty to fix our own wrongs and to rehabilitate those who committed crimes. A crime committed out of passion will probably never happen again if the person’s anger and emotional problems are treated for.

A crime committed during a robbery is because the person felt an economic need to rob that store. This is how many of the European countries I cited above operate.

There are instances of people who will never reform, such as serial killers, but these countries largely focus on rehabilitating people for their crimes rather than simply killing someone because of them.

My point is that murders are preventable by the system before they even occur.

For us to condemn others to death row is to ignore our society’s role in creating these problems. Connecticut took the right step in abolishing the death penalty, and other states should follow.