
Providing justice, and punishing those who have wronged a society or just a singular person dates to the earliest forms of civilizations. The way that these criminals have been punished has never been a perfect system, but has certainly improved in the recent decades. We now try to make the crime match the punishment instead of killing them without a second thought. As our justice system is growing for the better we are still putting people to death even though we should have outgrown this form of punishment just like the other barbaric ones that do not work the way they are intended, and are unnecessary. By looking at the lack of deterrence, conflicting viewpoints, and that it benefits no one involved we can clearly see that the death penalty is a pointless form of punishment because it does not accomplish any of it’s intentions. This is important because it gives us the ground to switch over to more humane way to punish criminals such as life in prison.

Capital punishment is an outdated form of punishment in the United States that has been around for centuries, and recently has been argued very effectively that it has no upside. The death penalty used to be held in the middle of town so that everyone around could attend, and see what happens when you break the law. According to Kaithy Weiser in America “hanging soon became the method of choice for most countries, as it produced a highly visible deterrent by a simple method” (1). Whenever this was going on it used to be a good form of deterrence because these people were shamed in front of everyone, and the citizens could up close and personal see the effects of it, and the pain on the criminals face. Some societies even forced all the people the people to attend. Now we declared this to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment, and we do conduct the executions behind closed doors and outside of the publics eyes. Since the public can no longer see this they are now no longer as scared of capital punishment, and it no longer has the same deterrence effect that it used to have. So the only way for capital punishment to be effective is to shove it right in front of the publics face and make them watch it first hand, and witness the horror. Then if we do this though are we any better than the guy that is being killed? Then flaunting and showing off his death and forcing our society to watch is just making us regress as a society. The death penalty is only around because of its believed effect of deterrence, and that death was the ultimate punishment, and if they punished these criminals in the worst possible way that it would cause these people to not commit the same crime. We need to outgrow this because we know should all know that this is not the case. Recently though we have switched to different forms of execution like the electric chair, lethal injection, gas chamber, and firing squad. Through recent studies we have gathered sufficient evidence to prove that the death penalty as a whole does not have any effect on the rates of crime in the United States.

Studies have been taken over the years to focus on the trends, and try to figure out if capital punishment is correlated to a drop in in crimes. Robert Tanner points out one study in particular that shows that “each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University” (1). This study was measured by taking the states in America that use the death penalty, and how frequently it has been used, and then looks at the comparison to crime rates and execution rates. Another study that Robert Tanner points out in his writing is that “for every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor” (2). Then by this rule we can so many more lives if we keep the system we have now. According to these numbers if we bump up how many of these guilty criminals we execute we can continue to save more lives. In these studies it clearly states that by pure numbers that deterrence is a big factor in why we should keep around capital punishment.

The other reason that people want to keep around capital punishment is purely for justice reasons. The best way to evenly punish someone for their crimes is to do to them what they did to you/someone that you love. Then you are just hurting the criminals family after they just hurt yours in the same way, then where do you stop after that? This just causes it to go around and around in and endless circle where no real justice comes out of it. All crimes that are deemed worthy of capital punishment are crimes that have to deal with murdering one or more people. Then the victims families believe that because they killed their loved ones they should also die, and suffer the same way that they made their loved ones suffer. Another bonus for capital punishment is that it gets these people off of earth, never being a threat to anyone ever again. If you put them to death then they have no chance of hurting anyone else again, and makes everyone else feel a little bit safer. Basically, it is making earth safer one person at a time.

According to John J. Donohue and Justin Wolfers the charts that most people use to show the correlation to capital punishment, and the drop of crime rates in a certain place are skewed (2). Specifically one chart showed that where executions were held “finding that each execution yielded 8 fewer homicides” (2) arguing that this drop in the homicide rate can be directly contributed to the amount of executions that they were holding. The problem with this idea is that in these states the stats did show that there was a decline in homicide rates, but there was also this same exact decline shown in the states that did not use the death penalty. So basically this was just an overall trend in America that had nothing to do with the use of capital punishment or not Then when you look at that along with it you cannot come to a direct conclusion that capital punishment is the reason for this decline, and it just happened to be a trend maybe contributed to something else. These trends are the same with all of the data that is used to argue for deterrence. Another thing is most graphs also zoom in to show you trends or might not show the whole picture in what is truly going on to try and persuade you to see something else. With graphs you have to really look into them, because you can not always take numbers at face value.

Studies have shown that most people when asked about if they feel deterred by watching or hearing about the death penalty being the punishment for crimes say that it does not deter them any more than any other punishment. When asked according to deathpenaltyinfo.org “87% of the expert criminologists believe that abolition of the death penalty would not have any significant effect on murder rates” (2). This means that the majority of people who work with and study this issue do not believe in what the major argument for capital punishment it. Then when doing a random survey around town conflict it was found that people said that they felt that the death penalty had no effect of deterrence on them (Study Says The Death Penalty Deter Crime). So when interviewed most people stated that they believed that it did not deter them which is the base of the argument to keep around the death penalty in the first place.

Another reason that we should abolish the death penalty is purely because of the cost of it compared to the alternative. When states have a case over the use of execution as a punishment or not it costs “$620,932 per trial in federal death cases, which is eight times higher than that of a case where the death penalty is not sought” (Criminal Justice) according to criminal justice degree website. According to the same website the price to go through all of the steps of putting someone to death it comes up to around 3 million dollars, compared to the total cost of keeping the same person in jail for life which rounds up to about 1 million dollars (Criminal Justice). This means that to execute someone it costs about three times more in tax dollars that we as citizens must pay. So really we are just hurting ourselves by requiring that these people be put to death. With the amount of money that we save if we switch over to just simply life in prison we can save around two million dollars which we can put to something more beneficial instead of a pointless and more expensive form of punishment. Life in prison also has the same effect because it gets these criminals out of society, and provides a form of justice to their crimes at a fraction of the cost. With this money we could also try to make our streets safer in the first place which would reduce the murder rates, plus all other crimes by having more protection instead of wasting it by putting these people to death. According to Payscale the average pay for a cop is 49,624 (1), and according to death penalty information center to keep a prisoner on death row compared to just a regular inmate it costs about $90,000 dollars more. With all of the money we could save by eliminating death row, and just having life in prison we could employ almost 2 more cops to be out on the streets making sure that these crimes do not even occur in the first place.

The biggest problem with the death penalty though is the small chance of executing an innocent person. This problem is why they have to conduct so many different trials to prove that the person is guilty, and is part of the reason that the death penalty is so expensive. With life in prison there is still the problem of convicting an innocent person, especially because there are less trials conducted. The difference is that if new evidence comes out you can not go back and bring back someone that you have wrongly executed, but if someone is in jail you can release them and allow them to go back to their life. Even though you cannot repay a person for the years they could have lost by going to jail, you can at least allow them another chance to go back to their life.

The death penalty is also an easy way out compared to life in prison. According to Salon “Between death or living the rest of [their] natural life in jail, the latter is a far more painful punishment” (2). A lot of these criminals who come out and plead guilty do this because they want to die. They want to die because they know it is a way easier way out, and is instant compared to spending their whole lives in jail which stretches out their pain, and really makes them suffer. A specific example of this according to Salon is Dylann Roof who shot up a church, and “is proud of his cowardly act and wants to be rewarded with death” (1). A lot of these criminals view capital punishment this way, they go out kill people and then get to escape this world through death when we need to keep them in jail and truly make them face the consequences by suffering for the rest of their lives in jail. The fact that some people even prefer the death penalty at all should tell us that it is a luxury over life in prison more than it is a punishment. We want these criminals to feel as much pain as possible so we should not be giving them what they want, which is death, and force them to suffer in jail. This switch can benefit everyone because it provides more justice to their actions, and it is also morally correct because we are not trying to play god and choose who lives and dies, we are just making them pay for their actions.

Another problem with the death penalty is the conflicting viewpoints that Americans have on the matter. For a lot of people they just support it blindly because they just see these people as criminals, and believe that since they committed a big crime that that gives them a right to kill them. While like stated in Criminal Justice: Capital Punishment Focus a lot of people believe that nothing, even murder permits any, especially the government the right to take someone else’s life and fate into their own hands (3). People have different reasons for believing it like their religion, or their own conscious, and we as a melting pot should support everyone’s viewpoints. For any reason though we should not be trying to kill these people even if it is what they did to get themselves in this situation it is not for us to decide when they die. Most people even forget about these criminals when they get sentenced to jail, and their world is not even changed in the slightest whether someone is executed or living out the rest of their miserable days in jail. Since it does not change their lives we can just have these people be on a jail sentence while respecting everyone’s viewpoints.

In today’s society we should no longer be using capital punishment because it is an outdated form of punishment. We have been changing our forms of punishment throughout America’s history because of the fact that we realized that they are wrong. We have been decreasing the use of capital punishment because it is not the proper way to go about punishing someone for their actions. Now all we need to do is once and for all get rid of the death penalty for good, and end the debate and switch to a better society for everyone. Life in prison is a perfect just as effective form of punishing criminals, and even saves us money that we could be using to help keep our streets safer. The death penalty does not have any effect of deterrence, is conflicting in people’s viewpoints, and is a pointless form of punishment because it does not accomplish any of the intentions that it is meant to. We need to switch over to life in prison because it is better than the death penalty in all ways.
