What is the costs for the death penalty and life in prison?
what is the costs for the death penalty and putting people in prison for life
Well.... if one factors out the cost of endless appeals, life would be the most expensive. However with the cost to the state of lawyers, the extra time (up to 10 or 15 years or more) on death row waiting the results of judicial decisions on the minutia, of legal wrangling.... the life sentence wins out.
well i know life in prison cost more then giving them the death penalty. but hey its your tax dollars and sometimes your safty. if you want us to release people from prison early to get the people with more serious crimes in for life then go ahead
Answer:
You're going to get a LOT of different answers for that, just because people include (or don't) lots of different things.
Some people will compare typical costs of death penalty trials versus life trials and add those in... not always a good comparison because these can be very different kinds of cases, not just different sentances.
Some will add in all the legal costs for all the appeals. Some include money paid by both sides, some just by those government. Some include costs paid by jurors, witnesses, police, and so on for attending trials and helping them along, even though these people aren't specifically paid much to do these things per se.
And, of course, different people live for different lengths of time. Some people stay in prison for decades. Some people cause trouble while they're there and cause extra expense for the state. Inmates, of course, may be confined at many different kinds of facilities with many different costs - a Supermax security prisoner is certainly not costing the state the same amount as a minimum security one!
Even different methods of execution have different expenses. All these things will have different prices depending on what state it's happening in and what the economy is like.
Bottom line: every case is really very different. You could draw a gross generalization of these costs, but I would be greatly surprised if it could predict future costs with any kind of accuracy.
Making decisions based on such gross generalizations should probably be criminal itself (I wonder if we can factor in those costs, too?).
Here are some facts, with sources listed below.
The death penalty costs much more than life in prison and the disparity depends on which state you are talking about.
First, why does the death penalty cost so much more-
Pre trial costs are much greater because, once a suspect is caught, the prosecutor must do a separate investigation into the crime, into the suspect himself, that is, does the suspect have mental retardation (if so, he cannot face the death penalty) or mental illness (he can face the death penalty). If the prosecutor decides to seek the death penalty, the trial will have two separate phases, one to decide guilt, one to decide the penalty. The process of choosing jurors is much more complicated in death penalty cases. Jurors must be 'death qualified.' Many more pre-trial motions are filed by both sides and have to be answered. Prosecution teams use more lawyers, and where the money is available, by the defense as well. The two phases of a death penalty trial require different sets of witnesses. Death penalty cases take much longer to try. If the sentence is death, the prisoner will be locked up in a separate prison facility, which is generally much expensive to run and to maintain. It is only at this point that appeals begin and costs continue to mount up. The overwhelming number of cases where the death penalty is not on the table end in plea bargains.
As an example, in New York State, the average annual cost to incarcerate someone not on death row is about $35,000 per year. On the other hand, in the years since 1995, when New York State brought back a death penalty law, 7 people were sentenced to death, none had more than one appeal and 3 had not even had their first appeal. New York shelled out well over $200,000,000 for its capital punishment system since 1995. Assuming each of the 7 men lives for 40 years the cost to incarcerate all of them for life would be under 10 million dollars.
(For information about other states, you can visit
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article....
If the death penalty process were speeded up, the costs would still be much higher than with life sentences and many innocent men who were on death row for years would have been killed.
By the way, 48 states now have life without parole on the books. It means exactly what it says and costs much less than the death penalty.
