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To Execute or Not

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To Execute or Not
To Execute or Not The death penalty is a very strong debate in today’s society. It seems like every time we turn on the news, somebody is sentenced to death. But, what if we decided to just keep them in prison for life? If the government decided to take away the death penalty, do you think that we would have more money to spend on different kinds of things? It is said that we spend more money on killing people than we do when we just keep them in prison. Maybe if we didn’t sentence people to death, then we would have more money in our economy. The death penalty costs taxpayers quite a bit of money. It is ten times more expensive to put them to death than to keep them alive. In just the state of California, taxpayers have paid around 308 million on just one person being put to death. With this money we could put it towards better things like drug and alcohol treatment centers, schools, mental health services, and maybe even put it towards gang prevention in our bigger cities. We could upgrade our economy with the money that we’re putting towards killing people. For only one death penalty trial, it costs one million dollars. But, it is said that only one in every three capital trials may result in death. So, in all, it costs three million dollars. Only one in ten of the death sentences may result in execution. The cost of the state to reach that one execution is about thirty million. Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin quotes “I worked in corrections for 30 years. . . I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole. I didn’t reach that conclusion because I’m soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I wish the public knew how much the death penalty affects their wallets.” If you don’t think that it’s bad enough already, then just wait until you hear this. The costs of capital punishment are only getting higher, with more people on death row, fewer executions a year, and a higher overall cost makes a higher cost for execution. Just in the state of Florida, they’re spending over 51 million a year on executions. With that 51 million, they could be punishing all first-degree murderers with life without pay roll in prison. In 26 years, from 1976 to 2000, there have been 44 executions, and when you add all the costs up it ends up being at least 24 million per execution.

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