The U. S. Government Should Uphold the Death Penalty in All the States That Carry It.

The U. S. Government should uphold the death penalty in all the states that carry it.

My assigned position in this paper is to inform people about the benefits of capital punishment. The views are solely those of the authors and not of myself. I am only gathering information and giving brief examples of why this ruling should not be stricken from our justice system.

The death penalty has been part of justice system since the beginning of civilization (Gulbin - 2). It is to serve justice for those who commit the worst crimes imaginable. Unlike in the early days of our culture a person could be sent to death simply for stealing or some type of witchcraft. Today you can only be sentenced to death for the killing of other another person or rape. Taking away the life of a murderer has three main advantages. The first is to serve justice for a crime. The second is to take a criminal off the streets so they cannot kill again, and the third is to prevent others from doing the same thing. If we put people in jail for life instead of killing them then we would be saying that it was ok from them to kill people. For the rest of their lives a place for them to live will be provided by the American government. Then the American government will have no other choice to increase local and state taxes to cover the cost. In the end we pay for these criminals for the rest of our lives. That’s not fair to every citizen.

Another important part of capital punishment is the cost to the American citizens. Surprisingly the death penalty is beneficial for the economy. First of all, the American economy has enough problems as it is. The government is trying to cut spending left and right, gas prices are becoming more and more outrageous, and the war with terrorism has cost billions. State and Federal prisons are becoming more and more overcrowded and more prisoners are coming everyday. The only way for the system to survive is to keep expanding the jails. It sounds easy but the cost of one bed in jail is sixty thousand dollars. That is just for the area to house them. To feed them and provide services such as lighting and water cost almost twice as much.

What do these prisons have to do with the American economy? American tax money is used to support hard core criminals like murderers, rapists, etc. that are serving their sentence. The average time a death row prisoner has to spend in jail until the death sentence is carried out is about nine years and six months. It's more economical to keep them in prison for those nine years and execute them, rather than give let them spend their life in jail, taking up space and tax money. Those who argue that it's more expensive to execute a prisoner don't look at the overall picture. Suppose the Amount A equals the amount of money to support one prisoner per year ($22,000) and Amount B equals the cost of the execution (negligible). We are talking about paying Amount A times the nine years spent in jail plus Amount B for the execution plus the cost for new construction during the nine years (total is approx. $690,000), as opposed to paying Amount A times an average of 60 years the prisoner would spend in jail plus the cost of new construction during an average of 60 years (total is approx. $4,560,000). Even if the prisoner spent 20 years in prison the cost would be approx. $1,520,000(Martinez- 1).

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