Death penalty and its affects on the economy - Research Paper Example

The question arises if the death penalty is worth-applying if its efficiency is so doubtful and, moreover, it is considered to be unethical. It is essential to think over the issue as the government of several states still spends much budget facilities on the not well-grounded and unreasonable killing. We should not forget that in some cases capital punishment is applied to innocent people. This fact again reminds that capital punishment is unethical and ungrounded. The given paper will try to answer this question and define how much death penalty costs our government and if it would be more rational to direct this finances on the programs, which are proved to be efficient in crime prevention (Gaie, 2004).

The analysis of the current state of the United States’ police brings upsetting results. The facts testify that in the current conditions of crisis the state is forced to fire many policemen, to release prisoners before the appointed time. And if to add the overfull courts, we will have the full picture of the current situation: the crime is rising rapidly. The state of criminal justice system was shaken due to the economic crisis the country is currently going through. The recession influenced every state differently: in Georgia the state had to fire around 1000 of police employees and in New Jersey 500 policemen remained without job.

In Texas rearrests are frequent as prisoners can’t be kept for long. In Florida more than 3000 prisoners were released before the appointed time. Some of these states, and they are Texas, Florida and Georgia, spend too much money on death penalty without any positive result. “Over two-thirds of the states and the federal government have installed an exorbitantly expensive system of capital punishment which has been a failure by any measure of effectiveness. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent on a response to crime which is calculated to be carried out on a few people each year and which has done nothing to stem the rise in violent crime” (Dieter).

It is obvious that the high and ungrounded cost of death penalty makes the United States of America less safe as the financial facilities spent on death penalty are taken from the programs, the effectiveness of which are proved. For instance, in California the government does not have enough facilities to organize appropriate and needed policing, while it still spends much money on death penalty. Texas that is famous for the quantity of capital punishment cases, spend more than $2 million per case!

It is no need to say that Texas is famous not only for the high number of death penalty cases, but also for its high murder rate. “The death penalty is escaping the decisive cost-benefit analysis to which every other program is being put in times of austerity. Rather than being posed as a single, but costly, alternative in a spectrum of approaches to crime, the death penalty operates at the extremes of political rhetoric. Candidates use the death penalty as a facile solution to crime which allows them to distinguish themselves by the toughness of their position rather than its effectiveness” (Dieter).

The capital punishment appears to be much more expensive that life imprisonment. First of all, the expenses on capital trials are very high as well as all the pre-trial procedures like professional witness research and the selection of jury cost much.