Death penalty: history, arguments, and policy implications

Death Penalty

In Favor of the Death Penalty

Capital punishment has long been one of the most highly-debated topics throughout history. Whether for or against the death penalty, capital punishment is one of the few topics of discussion on Earth that has the universal ability to send individuals hurrying to different sides of the playing field. While critics of the death penalty argue that such a practice is inhumane and detrimental to the country, the fact remains that the death penalty has long been used in the United States, and no amount of debate over the years has been persuasive enough to take this punishment off the table. In viewing the debate, the death penalty seems not only a logical but effective measure of the criminal justice system, and its use should continue to be upheld within the United States.

The purpose of criminal incarceration is not to reap revenge against that person, but is instead to reform or correct that individual, hence the "correctional system." As such, prison time is a means to show offenders the error of their ways in hopes of aiding these individuals on their path to again becoming a contributing member of society. While this process is both effective and encouraged in the case of lesser-level criminals, there seems no reasonable way for an individual found guilty of a crime heinous enough to land them on death row to rehabilitate themselves in a manner that would allow them to return to their lives as free men and women. This is one of the contributing reasons for the upholding of the death penalty. In certain situations, crimes are committed that are so heinous that an individual is sentenced to death, and in viewing the alternative: keeping that individual in jail to feed off taxpayer money for the rest of their lives seems not only unnecessary but offensive to the victim of the offender's crime.

In viewing the basic research available on this issue, the average cost of keeping a prisoner in jail falls somewhere between $100 and $130 a day depending on what area of the country that offender is imprisoned. This equates to a rough estimate of nearly $40,000 per prisoner per year, which not only equals an exceedingly large sum of money, but also surpasses that national average salary of hard working men and women who have done nothing to offend their country or its laws. In viewing the state of the national economy alone in terms of this number, it becomes clear that death-row prisoners kept in prison as well as those prisoners serving a life sentence continue to offend society by becoming a consistent drain on the country's resources.