From the Ministry of “It has to sink in eventually, right?”
![insp_captkirk[5]](http://apublicdefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/insp_captkirk5.jpg "insp_captkirk[5]")
The Death Penalty Information Center, in keeping with its tireless mission of boldly going where no man has gone before abolishing the death penalty has yet another “why didn’t I think of that!” report out today, pointing out (yet again) the stupidity of persisting with the death penalty in these financial times (and the general lack of cost-effectiveness of that method of punishment).
The study (available here) essentially says that the DP is far too costly to be viable these days. The report is a fascinating read for several reasons, but I’ll highlight just two. First, let’s get right to it. How much does the damn thing cost? From the report:
The high costs to the state per execution reflect the following reality: For a single death penalty trial, the state may pay $1 million more than for a non-death penalty trial. But only one in every three capital trials may result in a death sentence, so the true cost of that death sentence is $3 million. Further down the road, only one in ten of the death sentences handed down may result in an execution. Hence, the cost to the state to reach that one execution is $30 million. Sums like these are causing officials to rethink the wisdom of such expenditures.
Although arriving at the actual cost of the death penalty in a state is complicated, in some states $30 million per execution is a very conservative estimate:
In 2008, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice released an exhaustive report on the state’s capital punishment system, concluding that it was “dysfunctional” and “broken.” The report found that the state was spending $137 million per year on the death penalty. The Commission estimated a comparable system that sentenced the same inmates to a maximum punishment of life without parole would cost only $11.5 million per year. Since the number of executions in California has averaged less than one every two years since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, the cost for each execution is over $250 million. The state has also indicated it needs another $400 million to construct a new death row.
In Maryland, where a legislative commission recently recommended abolishing the death penalty, a comprehensive cost study by the Urban Institute estimated the extra costs to taxpayers for death penalty cases prosecuted between 1978 and 1999 to be $186 million. Based on the 5 executions carried out in the state, this translates to a cost of $37 million per execution.
In 1988, the Sacramento Bee found that the death penalty cost California $90 million annually beyond the ordinary expenses of the justice system, of which $78 million was incurred at the trial level.45 But the costs have increased sharply since then. According to the Los Angeles Times in 2005, maintaining the death penalty system now costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. This figure does not count the millions more spent on court costs to prosecute capital cases. The Times concluded that Californians and federal taxpayers are paying more than $250 million for each execution.
The study then goes through an examination of the opportunity costs and why the death penalty costs so much to begin with. But more interesting is the first part of the report, which is a poll of 500 randomly chosen police chiefs. Read pages 9-12 of the PDF report, but here are the highlights:
- The death penalty was considered the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money. Police chiefs ranked expanded training for police officers, community policing, programs to control drug and alcohol abuse, and neighborhood watch programs as more cost-effective ways to use taxpayers’ money
- 69% of those surveyed believed that politicians support the death penalty as a symbolic way of showing they’re “tough on crime”.
- Only 24% agreed that offenders think about the range of punishments before committing a murder.
- Of various statements about the death penalty, the one with which the police chiefs most identified was: “Philosophically, I support the death penalty, but I don’t think it is an effective law enforcement tool in practice.”
- 57% agreed (and 39% disagreed) that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.
This is just reinforcement for the argument that the death penalty should be abolished. CT came close last year, but was vetoed by the Gov. Good thing she likes polls so much; someone should show her this new report.
And because it’s been so damn long since we’ve had a video on this blog, I give you a related Ministry:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpcqbbrfuzM[/youtube]
So really, there’s two directions you can go. You can drop the death penalty, or you can go at it guns-a-blazin’.
In the old-old-old movies, everybody is terrified to commit murder. “We’re gonna be hanged” is said in just about every movie (with a murder) from the black-and-white era. While this is a terribly unscientific use of “evidence” on my part, I think it does reflect something about the society at the time . . . you didn’t murder because, if you got caught, you were gonna be hanged, period.
Imagine if we only vaccinated 2 people a year. It would still cost the same amount (hundreds of millions, I believe) to develop the vaccines. It wouldn’t cost as much to produce them, because you’d only have to buy enough raw material for two vaccine doses. But the net effect on public health of only vaccinating two people would be . . . well, nothing. Statistically, the population would be no healthier than if you inoculated nobody at all. So there’d be no cost-effectiveness to vaccinations. Public health officials would rate them the least-effective use of taxpayer money. People would argue on blogs that we should just drop vaccines altogether. And if the alternative was 2 vaccinated people a year, they’d be right.
But if we vaccinate more and more people, the per-vaccination cost goes down, while the net public benefit goes up. Once you’ve inoculated a certain number of people, even non-vaccinated people experience a health benefit, because of their reduced chance of contracting the disease.
I believe the same is true with execution. We don’t execute enough people now to be of any statistical benefit to the rest of us. It’s not a deterrent the way it’s done now, and it’s not saving enough lives (deterrent-wise or future-offenses-wise) to be matter. But that doesn’t mean the only option is to drop it. The other option is to doggedly pursue it. If every first-degree murder conviction carried an automatic penalty of death, the state wouldn’t be spending that much more on capital trials, and you’d get a much better deterrent effect (like the moderate one in Texas, the state with by far the most executions, and the only state with a demonstrable per-execution deterrent effect). It’s not a pretty choice, but it would be disingenuous to say the evidence only points in one possible direction.