Death Penalty Issues

Introduction
The social Policy I am presenting in this research paper is the death penalty (capital punishment). The perspective I chose to use in order to analyze this social policy is the structural functionalism point of view. The structural functionalism theory views society as a system of parts that are interrelated, that work together for the “efficiency and effectiveness of society”. One of the main assumptions of this point of view is that societies try to maintain equilibrium, with all parts of the system working toward a common goal. Another point of this theory states that societies are bound by organization and cooperation.
The Death Penalty
Historically, it was proposed in the 19th century by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in order to explain how societies maintain their stability and persists over time. It evolved; due to influences from Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown to say that societies were much like organisms, functioning fluidly due to all of its parts working toward a common goal of maintenance (2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc).
“The death penalty is the ultimate weapon in the war on crime-it personifies the violent response of the criminal justice system to crime (Vito,Maahs,Holmes,2007:445) The death penalty has had a long and brutal history. The death penalty has existed and maintained itself for many years. Long before the capital punishment actually became a law, execution-style deaths have occurred fo...

Death Penalty Issues

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