California's death penalty ballot: Prop 34 makes economic and ethical sense

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/26/california-death-penalty-ballot-proposition-34


Not many people know that having an inmate on death row incurs high costs, from legal fees to extra security. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

This year, California's death row will cost taxpayers $184m. What will the state get for that price? The same number of executions as last year, and the year before that, and every year since 2006: zero.

A solution has been offered: the state's worst offenders would die in prison of natural causes, just as they are doing on death row today – only now, taxpayers would save $130m a year. That is Proposition 34, the ballot initiative to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole as the state's maximum sentence for murder.

The economic benefit may not be obvious. After all, many people don't know that the death penalty is far more expensive than life in prison with no chance of parole. Voters are surprised to learn that every death row inmate comes with a lifelong team of lawyers, is housed to one cell and automatically gets extra security, and even extra visiting hours. Most often, death row inmates die of old age. It all adds up to a very large tab for no useful purpose.

The one thing about the death penalty everyone agrees on: the system is broken beyond repair. There is simply no other way to describe spending nearly $1bn over six years in order not to execute a single one of the 726 prisoners currently on death row.