Circumstance is the mother of all situations, crime can't be abstract to this.I'd agree Highfly's notion that government is partly responsible in the process of its citizens turning into criminals. Due diligence to each class of citizens on behalf of the government welfare system reduces the number of people living in despair, resulting fewer crimes. As far as capital punishment is concerned, people might fear to kill someone if they know they are going to face death penalty. But then, apart from ethnic cleansing and political killings, most of the killings occur out of spasmodic human outrage. I doubt criminals bear a killing instinct from their birth, and any individual with exceptionally well behaviour in the past can become a criminal/killer on a given day. Hence, capital punishment doesn't make a sense to me. Death penalty means justice through killing and if you accord to this idea, the criminal might be doing justice to his/her circumstaces by taking a life. I mean if you believe killing can do justice, you might not hesitate to seek personal justice by killing someone. The whole point is captial punishment gives a wrong message. It creates a fear society where more killings occur. If there were statistics to compare, you might see the number of individual killings higher in societies where law embraces capital punishment.