Cost of Lethal Injection vs Cost of Life in Prison - Research Paper Example

Cost of Lethal Injection vs. Cost of Life in Prison Introduction A practical concern usually emerges in the execution of capital punishment: is it less or more costly than a life imprisonment? It seems obvious that death penalties are less costly than accommodating an inmate for life. Traditional systems definitely prove the assumption that death penalties can be carried out cost effectively. At present, the drugs for lethal injection are cheap. Nevertheless, the contemporary period has launched improved safeguards through far-reaching legal processes; these require large amount of resources or money, prolonged pending cases on death row, and at times lead to reversed cases (Bedau & Cassell, 2004). Money spent on this overdue process in capital punishment cases has been discovered to surpass the estimated cost of imprisoning a criminal for life. A Cost Analysis At one point, the reason for the lack of the cost premise before the contemporary period is quite clear. Before the Supreme Court of the United States implemented its plan of constitutional rule of death penalty in the 1970s, the amount of resources or money required by capital punishment were comparatively negligible (Douglas & Stockstill, 2008). Before the involvement of the Court, death penalty cases were not firmly distinct from cases concerning non-capital major offenses, and the costs and duration related to such cases were minor in comparison to present-day procedure. Post-conviction costs in death penalty cases were similarly fairly minimal, in terms of imprisonment expenses and litigation expenses (Douglas & Stockstill, 2008). For the greatest part of American history, the usual interval between sentence pronouncement and execution was assessed not in years and decades, but in weeks and months, hence there was almost no basis to think that pronouncement of a death sentence entailed a substantial continuing fiscal problem for the state (Steiker & Steiker, 2010). Thus, to the point monetary concerns relate to the capital punishment debate before the contemporary period, they were inclined to strengthen rather than weaken the case for death penalty. However, states like New York and Pennsylvania launched a new period of criminal justice with the construction of prisons, based on the assumption that offenders could be rehabilitated if secluded from adverse societal forces and subjected to a course of rigorous control and discipline in a good-natured environment (Steiker & Steiker, 2010). The building of jails entailed massive sums of public resources and provided a previously absent alternative to capital punishment: long imprisonment. Despite the evident financial effect of the construction of prisons, and the likelihood that the capital punishment could offer a more affordable option for criminals, there is slight indication that the disagreement over capital punishment swung toward cost concerns following enormous public spending on the newly built, intimidating penitentiaries (Mandery, 2004). The lack of such premise is probably encouraged by the certainty of reformers that the new penitentiaries would generate more social gains than losses. On the one hand, the prisons were supposed to create the circumstances for real attrition, an advantage that the religiously driven actors were not likely to consider for traditional cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, reformers assumed that prisons would substantially lessen recidivism through restructuring, a guarantee that, if accomplished, could offset the costs of the penitentiaries themselves (Bienen, 1999). Certainly, the only consideration of cost was presented by Justice Marshall to disprove the belief that capital punishment is a more affordable option than incarceration: “As for the argument that it is cheaper to execute a capital offender than to imprison him for life, even assuming that such an argument, if true, would support a capital sanction, it is simply incorrect” (Mandery, 2005, 177). It would take several decades before the traditional belief concerning relatively greater cost of incarceration would create a new, general assumption that capital punishment is significantly more costly than incarceration, even life sentence. Today, the largest portion of the new expenditures in capital lawsuit is sustained at trial. However the expenditure of handling huge death rows has become relatively sizeable as well. For instance, in California, a recent statement revealed that lethal injection imprisonment sustains an extra $90,000 per prisoner, annually (Steiker & Steiker, 2010, 644). Furthermore, in several states, the possibilities of translating death verdicts into executions are still fairly distant. Because of the complex principles surrounding the completion of capital punishment, executions need a strong cooperation among large numbers of actors, such as federal judges, statewide judges and prosecutors, local judges and prosecutors, and state executive authorities (Bedau & Cassell, 2004). Consequently, according to Steiker and Steiker (2010), merely a few of the total number of states that presently sanction lethal injection have performed substantial numbers of executions over the recent decades. The combination of greater imprisonment costs in death penalty cases, greater post-conviction litigation expenditures, greater trial costs, alongside the lack of substantial numbers of executions in several states, has altered the manner in which the lethal injection costs are interpreted and deliberated (Bienen, 1999). The comparative expenditure of lethal injection is no longer measured by a simple assessment, on the one hand, of a capital trial costs alongside the cost of performing an execution against a non-capital trial expenditure and long imprisonment cost, on the other hand. Instead, the comparative cost of carrying out the lethal injection at present frequently entails an evaluation of the expenditure of multiple capital cases and the cost of long incarceration on death row against the expenditure of a solitary, non-capital case and the cost of long incarceration (Steiker & Steiker, 2010). Certainly, the contemporary period has introduced a new assessment of the cost of lethal injection, or death penalty in general: the expenditure for each execution in a particular state. This accounting process ‘divides the total expenditures on capital cases within a jurisdiction by the number of death sentences the jurisdiction actually consummates with an execution’ (Steiker & Steiker, 2010, 644). In states with a small number of executions, the statistics are surprising. Applying this model, a current article in the New York Times proposed that the thirteen executions of California over the recent three decades incurred roughly a ‘quarter of a billion dollars each’ (Steiker & Steiker, 2010, 644). Another case in point is Maryland, which almost removed capital punishment recently. A study in 2008 showed that Maryland used up more or less an extra $37.2 million for every one of the five executions (Steiker & Steiker, 2010, 644) of the state in the contemporary period. The brand new popularity of the cost premise is certainly attributable to two major incidents: the increasing costs of lethal injection and the economic recession recently. However, the apparently profound importance of the cost premise in current debate has other origins too (Douglas & Stockstill, 2008). The cost premise successfully reorients the emphasis of anti-capital punishment efforts from humanitarian and individual rights assumptions that never gained vast public support in the United States (Bedau & Cassell, 2004). While European resistance to capital punishment mostly refers to arguments about human dignity and considerations of the possible excessive exercise of state authority (Mandery, 2004), there has never been prevalent uncertainty or concern in the United States about granting the states the authority to execute or subject individuals to this absolute power. Conclusions The influence of the cost premise emanates not merely from its capacity to pin the attention of political agents and the people on opposing public interests. The issue of costs also, in some way, spells out the various problems in existing death penalty process, such as the powerlessness of states to meet minimum constitutional conditions in death penalty cases, the lack of political determination to perform executions, the uncertainty shaped by the handful executions that actually take place and the moral and practical problems originating from lengthy death row imprisonment. The issue of cost is not merely a means of sidestepping anti-capital punishment disputes that have less grip, like issues of human dignity and randomness; putting emphasis on cost inform the people about these difficulties even though it focuses on the end result. Cost is hence a lens into the present-day problems of the American death penalty practice, and it presents exact and practical alternative for articulating consideration of diverse issues. Bibliography Bedau, H.A. & Cassell, P. (2004). Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishments? The Experts on Both Sides Make their Best Case. New York: Oxford. Bienen, L. (1999). “Just Revenge: Cost and Consequences of the Death Penalty” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 89(2), 751. Douglas, J. & Stockstill, H. (2008). “Starving the Death Penalty: Do Financial Constraints Limit Its Use?” Justice System Journal, 29(3), 326+ Mandery, E. (2004). Capital Punishment: A Balanced Examination. Canada: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Steiker, C. & Steiker, J. (2010). “Capital Punishment: A Century of Discontinuous Debate” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 100(3), 643+   Read More