“They don’t deserve to live!” Strong words, coming from… God? Guess again. Your prime minister. He doesn’t just govern your country, this fine gentleman. He also informs us about who he think should join the afterlife (and to go to Hell, we presume?). After that famous statement after a gruesome crime a few years back, Jugnauth once again reminded us last week that he wants to add Mauritius to the virtually inexistent list of countries that have re-introduced the death penalty. But let’s not re-launch the old debate about whether the state should have the right to murder citizens. Ask this instead: Would capital punishment have the effect that Anerood Jugnauth seems to hunger for?

Justice. Revenge. The argument that harsh punishment benefits grieving families and crime survivors is so strong that one country allowed a battered woman throw acid in her aggressor’s face. She watched him scream in excruciating pain as his eyes melted away. An audience can watch as convicts say goodbye to their crying families and get a lethal injection, in other countries. Afterwards, these people who watched or threw acid in someone’s face feel amazing. Wonderful. A true sense of happiness. Or do they?

That’s the crux – they don’t. Years of psychological research has taught us that revenge, watching a person who made us or a loved one suffer, suffer in return, does not ben­efit us psychologically. Revenge doesn’t lead to closure, a series of so­cial experiments have showed. In­stead, it merely intensifies and pro­longs the emotions that survivors and families experience in relation to the crime. It keeps their wounds open, in other words. Open and infected – often for the rest of their lives.

Killing in the name of the state, or any other name, makes us miser­able. But look at the bright side of the prime minister’s suggestion. The death penalty would serve as a warning to potential criminals, right? It would push down crime statistics, would it not? Another popular argu­ment, but one that doesn’t hold from a scientific point of view. There is no reliable evidence that capital punishment curbs crime. On the contrary, the murder rate in, for instance, North Carolina, decreased when the death penalty was abolished.

Perhaps we aren’t even speaking to the right people. The prime min­ister hasn’t signed enough death warrants to be an expert on the topic (although he did sign the country’s last one, in 1987). Perhaps we should talk to the priest in the US who worked on death row for decades, and was asked recently by a journalist if he is for or against capital punishment. He just looked at her. Then, he explained that his job had taught him one single thing: That people waste their lives. He wasn’t just referring to the convicts, but also to those who hungered for revenge and to the entire system. We waste our own lives by hungering for a revenge that only in­creases our bitterness, and waste the lives of others through supporting an archaic capital punishment system that obviously isn’t effective. Do you really want to kill people in our name, prime minister?

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