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Thursday, June 23, 2011

Toe Tag Price Tag of California's Detestable Execution Fetish

Calitics:
California’s death penalty… price tag… is even higher than we thought: $4 billion since 1978. Put another way, we spend $184 million more per year for death penalty inmates than we do on those sentenced to life without the chance of parole. All told, California is on track to spend $1 billion on the death penalty over the next five years. The new estimate is the result of a three-year comprehensive examination of state, federal, and local expenditures on California’s death penalty... $4 billion... g[o]t us... [a] grand total of 13 executions. That’s over $300 million per execution above the cost of life without parole. Meanwhile, nearly half of all murders in California go unsolved. How many dangerous individuals could we have locked up permanently and taken off our streets over the last 33 years if we hadn’t executed those 13 people? How many children and families could have accessed the education and health services they needed, or how many students could have had the opportunity to attend college? … Looking ahead, the study predicts another $9 billion will be spent by 2030… The Governor has the authority to convert all 714 of California’s death sentences to life without the possibility of parole, saving California $1 billion over five years without releasing a single prisoner… California voters agree. Polls as recent as April 2011 show that Californians support cutting the death penalty. A full 63% of likely voters favor the governor converting all existing death sentences to life without parole, with the requirement that prisoners work and pay restitution into the Victims’ Compensation Fund (death row inmates are not currently required to work). That support spans party and geographic lines -- majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all across the state agree… The case is closed on the death penalty.
(That sentencing is inherently and inevitably inequitable, that executions provide no demonstrable deterrent effect, that the unspeakable injustice of errors cannot be reversed, that killing people is wrong, that two wrongs don't make a right remain as true as ever as still further reasons to detest the barbaric practice of capital punishment, of course.)

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