The death penalty wastes taxpayer money

The argument

Although death penalty supporters often argue that executing a criminal costs less than giving a sentence of life without parole, evidence suggests that maintaining the death penalty is actually more expensive than getting rid of it. The intuition behind the supporters' claim is straightforward — a prisoner who is executed is not housed for decades — but it measures only the years of incarceration avoided, and not what the state spends to reach an execution at all. The comparisons that have been made run the other way. For example, the death penalty costs the state of Florida 51 million dollars more than the cost of sentencing all first-degree murderers with life in prison. That is a comparison of two complete systems rather than of two prisoners, which is the relevant test for a taxpayer: it asks what the state pays in total under each policy, including for the cases that never end in an execution. According to a study conducted by Susquehanna University, "on average, across all 50 states, a death row inmate costs $1.12 million more than a general population inmate." The figure applies per prisoner and across the whole country, so it is not an artefact of one state's procedures. After learning that approximately 2,500 prisoners currently face execution in the United States, it is plain that the death penalty's cost is exorbitant, since a per-inmate premium of that size applies across a population of that size. Death penalty supporters argue that execution is a more economical option, but studies prove that it is actually more expensive. The economic case, in other words, points to abolition rather than away from it. For this reason, the death penalty is a waste of taxpayer money, and we should abolish the death penalty.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although the death penalty's exorbitant cost is unsettling, the criminal justice system's chief concern should not be financial convenience. If we carried this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we would give all criminals the lightest possible sentence in hopes of saving taxpayer money. The criminal justice system should execute people who deserve it. We cannot let financial concerns stand in the way of doing justice.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The comparison is between capital cases and life sentences as currently administered, and the additional cost arises largely from trial procedure and appellate review. A supporter can accept the figures and argue for reforming the procedure rather than abolishing the penalty, and the premise does not close that route. [Rejecting P2] The Florida figure is given with no year, no source and no statement of what it covers, and $51 million is a total rather than a per-case cost — it cannot be compared with anything without knowing the caseload behind it. [Rejecting P3] The Susquehanna figure is a lifetime differential per inmate, and setting it beside the number of prisoners currently under sentence of death mixes a flow with a stock. The deeper difficulty is the counter-argument's: cost is the wrong kind of reason for this conclusion, since applied consistently it would favour the cheapest available sentence in every case. Abolitionist arguments have stronger grounds available — wrongful conviction and disparity in who is sentenced to death — which this argument does not use.