and the 1990s, leading many people to conclude-in the context of a debate that has been going on for decades-that capital punishment helped drive down crime. Lost in the debate, however, are two important facts. First, given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal should be deterred by the threat of execution. Even though capital punishment quadrupled within a decade, there were still only 478 ex- ecutions in the entire United States during the 1990s. Any parent who has ever said to a recalcitrant child, "Okay, Im going to count to ten and this time Im really going to punish you," knows the differ- ence between deterrent and empty threat. New York State, for in- stance, has not as of this writing executed a single criminal since reinstituting its death penalty in 1995. Even among prisoners on death row, the annual execution rate is only 2 percent-compared with the 7 percent annual chance of dying faced by a member of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation crack gang. If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, its hard to believe that the fear of execu- tion is a driving force in a criminals calculus. Like the $3 fine for late-     arriving parents at the Israeli day-care centers, the negative incentive of capital punishment simply isnt serious enough for a criminal to change his behavior. The second flaw in the capital punishment argument is even more obvious. Assume for a moment that the death penalty is a deterrent. How much crime does it actually deter? The economist Isaac Ehrlich, in an oft-cited 1975 paper, put forth an estimate that is generally con- sidered optimistic: executing 1 criminal translates into 7 fewer homi- cides that the criminal might have committed. Now do the math. In 1991, there were 14 executions in the United States; in 2001, there were 66. According to Ehrlichs calculation, those 52 additional exe- cutions would have accounted for 364 fewer homicides in 2001-not