The death penalty is a never ending debate in the political chamber of our country. Is it ethically or morally right to kill another human being? Who decides who lives or dies? What crime calls for the death penalty, if there even is one? All these questions are asked in the Supreme Court. Is it righteous to kill a man who has committed multiple murders? What if he is innocent and it is just a cover-up? All of these questions are valid to ask when taking a persons life, but what if we could prove that this man raped and killed an innocent girl? What if we could prove down to the DNA print that this man committed this crime? Should we be safe and put him in prison for life, all the while paying for him to stay in jail through our taxes? Now the answer to all these questions becomes a little clearer when we are in this scenario. What if the case was roughly the same for 50 to 100 men? Should we do the same and continue to pay for them to continue living when they have committed these atrocities? The death penalty is ethically correct because it will give a punishment that is proportionate to the crime and will lead to reduced financial expenditures of lifelong sentenced inmates.
People argue that taking life is immoral and unjustified. That certain people who have committed horrible crimes can be saved and readmitted into society. This is undoubtedly a choice, for some. As if to slam the door on the death penalty, people say that the justice system is flawed and that innocent people die, therefore the death penalty should be abolished. This is also true; there are a couple thousand people who are wrongly accused in prison today. However, the death penalty isn’t just handed out to every criminal that comes around. The death penalty is a huge punishment that rarely gets used because lobbyists have forced fear into many judges that they could kill an innocent man. This, in turn, leads to many guilty serial killers, murderers, rapist and others of the like to get only life in prison, where it is has been proven they continue their savagery. Some simple keyboard clicks will bring you to a website called “PRISON MURDER”, which will tell you all about the atrocities that continue to take place in today’s prison systems.
The benefits of the death penalty, however selfish they sound, start financially. Fact: there are currently roughly 2.2 million people in prison today in the U.S. (Bureau of Justice). That’s only the United States, which is the leading country when it comes to inmates in prison. Each state inmate costs the American public $22,650 thousand dollars in a fiscal year, lets include that each inmate as a lifespan of at least 20 years once in prison (Bureau of Justice). That’s roughly $62.50 a day, which is more than a lot of Americans make in a day! Just to make the point a little more obvious; state prison costs per year, per resident, are estimated at $104 dollars a year. Not a lot right. Well, that’s one person in the United States paying the government $7,800 in a 75 year lifespan. Now if that same prisoner sat on death row for 9 years, which is the estimated time for inmates on death row, they would have only cost the American public $203,850 instead of roughly $450,000 for the full 20 years.
Spending this money on criminals seems repugnant and wasteful. The shock fact is, however, that these numbers continue to rise while our educational statistics are rather lacking (Bureau of Justice). Something is terribly wrong with this picture. It seems that we as Americans would rather spend our tax dollars on protecting criminals instead of education our youth.
Since we know that this is far from the truth, why then, are these statistics so daunting? In a sense, the death penalty would remedy that problem by cutting down inmate population, thus freeing up some expenditures to be spent to hire more teachers, strengthen our school system and raising our graduating class percentage. With the death penalty we could reduce the amount of guards and prisons needed to house and watch these criminals, thus lowering the death rate of guards and construction workers. This is just one example of what the death penalty can do.
People lobby at capital hill that the death penalty is ethically wrong because it constitutes the taking of a life, which by most religious standards is wrong. But what about the crime that was already committed. The Old Testament states “…….an eye for an eye…..”, so how is it that the religious community can fight against the death penalty when it was the religious institution that said it was ok so many years ago. We don’t hear about how the Romans debated over with or not it was ethically right to kill a man, no, the followed the Old Testament. And don’t think that just because someone writes a New Testament that all those years of history with the Old Testament can be erased.
Lobbyists also petition for the abolishment of the death penalty using logic, stating that many of the inmates can be rehabilitated into society. Now how many times in history has logic been wrong, or gone astray. Take the serial killers that have murdered countless amounts of innocent people and feel no remorse or sorrow for what they have done. The ones that continue to kill in prison, killing other inmates, guards, or even civilians that visit their families in prison just because they can. People don’t realize that by lobbying for one prisoner, they lobby for all prisoners, including those serial killers. For example, people lobbied to protect Stanley “Tookie” Williams, saying that he had been rehabilitated after 20 years on death row because he wrote great children’s books against gangs and violence. He founded the Crips and people are protecting him?! Granted that the founding of the Crips was to protect neighbor hoods from gang violence but in the process look what it turned into. He is convicted of killing many people and as an accomplice to many others. This doesn’t make since, to take life is immoral, but to protect one who has taken life and continues to do so isn’t? This man has admitted to his crimes and does not regret what he did. He may have come to terms with what he did but that does not excuse him from the crimes he committed against humanity. Like the Old Testament says “An eye for an eye”.
A lasting counter argument that people honestly hold true is that prison is hell for most criminals anyway. Those people are looking at the wrong group of inmates when we talk about the death penalty. We aren’t talking about petty theft and criminals who are serving time for a crime we aren’t sure they committed. We are talking about those serial rapists and murders that have no remorse or sorrow for the destruction they cause. The ones who end up killing inmates and guards while in prison. People continue to push their argument by stating that the risk of killing an innocent man is too great when measured up to the bigger picture. The usual comment that follows this is simple; give that reason to the son or daughter of a guard of a maximum security prison that won’t be coming home today.
Work Cited
1. Innocent on Death Row. By: Erwin, Mike. Progressive, Nov 97, Vol. 61, Issue 11, pg.16, 1p, 3bw
2. Life in Prison Costlier than Death Penalty. By: NA. USA Today, 11/01/2002
3. Questioning Capital Punishment by: Hammond, Sarah. Brown State Legislatures, Sep. 2005, Vol. 31, Issue 8, Pg. 32-33, 2p. 3bw
4. www.geocities.com/prisonmurder/
5. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm
6. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report: State Prison Expenditures,2001 by: James J. Stephen, June 2004
7. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. By: Zimring, Franklin E. New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.
8. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/
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