I was talking to someone on Reddit about the death penalty, and they kept bringing up that it costs more than just imprisoning someone for life. As far as I know that’s true - in the US. But also AFAIK that’s mostly because death penalty cases get special treatment in terms of a more rigorous trial, extra appeals etc, and because it takes so long to execute anyone that there is not much of a saving on imprisoning them.
So I was wondering if this is also true in other countries with capital punishment. Singapore, Japan and Taiwan might be good examples since they are some of the few developed countries that still apply the death penalty, but I couldn’t find anything useful on Google.
Generally speaking lawyers are more expensive than prison guards. And whatever level of protections afforded those convicted of capital crimes, they haven’t been sufficient to prevent certain possibly innocent people from being put to death. Wiki on wrongful execution. Also bear in mind that Japan has something over 100 people on death row vs. a little over 2200 in the US.
So much for background. This paper notes that Japan’s death row inmates spend a long time in prison between conviction and execution, for the following reasons:
The long delays between death sentence and execution have two main causes: in- mate appeals to one of the country’s eight High Courts and then to the Supreme Court, each of which may take several years to conclude, and a norm in Japan’s Ministry of Justice not to seek execution warrants for the half or so of death row inmates who have petitioned for a retrial (as of October 2015, 128 persons were on death row).
Japan has a similar problem with executing possibly innocent people: 4 inmates on death row were exonerated during the 1990s, leading to a temporary moratorium on executions.
Since death sentences cost more than life sentences in the US by a wide margin (a factor of 3 to 6 according to this citation), and since the Japan also has an lengthy if not necessarily effective appeals process, there’s reason to believe that executions are more expensive than imprisonment in Japan as well.
The legal system both in Canada and the USA (and elsewhere?) seems to have an absolute horror of admitting they may have actually been wrong. During the initial wave of retrials based on DNA it was not uncommon for inmates to have to try for years for a simple rehearing or even to have a legal DNA test done on stored evidence.
The story I’ve heard in one discussion is that it costs something like $40,000 to $100,000 to keep an inmate in prison for a year. Considering that most executed prisoners would have 20-plus years more life left, even a 60-year-old, there’s a financial argument for execution.
However, the real issue is not finances. I have no problem with executing unremorseful deliberate felons, but I cannot imagine a simple rule that distinguishes between “we have absolutely no possible doubt he did it” and “beyond reasonable doubt”. At least, not any rule that might encourage killing eyewitnesses. Plus, all you have to do is read about wrongful convictions to see how often eyewitness testimony also is either wrong or perjury. It’s worst in the USA, where it’s not unheard of for the triggerman to turn and testify against an accomplice who did not pull the trigger or even know beforehand there was a gun, and the accomplice gets the death penalty and the actual murderer gets life. Conviction statistics trump actual justice every time.
Japanese data is difficult to come by, but in the US the death penalty is a net cost to the state by a large margin.
The death penalty is far more expensive than a system utilizing life-without-parole sentences as an alternative punishment. Some of the reasons for the high cost of the death penalty are the longer trials and appeals required when a person’s life is on the line, the need for more lawyers and experts on both sides of the case, and the relative rarity of executions. Most cases in which the death penalty is sought do not end up with the death penalty being imposed. And once a death sentence is imposed, the most likely outcome of the case is that the conviction or death sentence will be overturned in the courts. Most defendants who are sentenced to death essentially end up spending life in prison, but at a highly inflated cost because the death penalty was involved in the process.
How much the death penalty actually costs and how that compares to a system in which a life sentence is the maximum punishment can only be determined by sophisticated studies, usually at the state level. Many such studies have been conducted and their conclusions are consistent: the death penalty imposes a net cost on the taxpayers compared to life without parole.
Above I argued that the Japanese system is likely to face similar cost pressures as the US. I’m not so sure about Singapore. They apply the death penalty to drug traffickers and they are not a democracy. If you turn the gallows and prisons into an assembly line and care little about human rights, then the cost figures might reverse. Next up: S. Whiplash asks whether we should reconsider the prohibition on tying widows to train tracks.
Does the government pay for the lawyers, experts, etc. on the defnse side of a capital case? I gather most inmates are not that well off. Does the state provide a public defender for appeals? I was under the impression that most of these appeals are done by do-gooder charities and pro bono volunteers? And then there’s the argument that the judges, attorneys and assistants etc. for the state are paid a fixed salary (no overtime?), so how much it costs is fairly irrelevant, it just cuts into their golfing time.
The question being, what does it cost per year for an inmate in a maximum security prison?
An incompetent, bottom-of-the-barrel one typically*. One reason death penalty trials produce so many appeals is that they are consistently shoddily done, with the goal to railroad the defendant into a conviction against an incompetent defense. So future appeals have lots of material to work with since there was little concern about doing it right during the original trial.
One example being a defense lawyer who slept through part of the trial.
More prosaically, those with death penalty convictions spend a lot of time in prison. Many of them die there. Let me break up my wall of text into bullet points:
The death penalty is far more expensive than a system utilizing life-without-parole sentences as an alternative punishment. Some of the reasons for the high cost of the death penalty are
the longer trials and appeals required when a person’s life is on the line,
the need for more lawyers and experts on both sides of the case, and the
relative rarity of executions.
Most cases in which the death penalty is sought do not end up with the death penalty being imposed.
And once a death sentence is imposed, the most likely outcome of the case is that the conviction or death sentence will be overturned in the courts.
Most defendants who are sentenced to death essentially end up spending life in prison, but at a highly inflated cost because the death penalty was involved in the process.
Here’s an academic literature survey on the topic , published in the Susquehanna University Political Review. The Death Penalty vs. Life Incarceration: A Financial Analysis
The result is robust: the cost disadvantage of the death penalty is consistent across 40 states and the federal government (each with its own study). I’m going to go out on a limb and say many or to some extent all of them grasp the concept of marginal costs - and opportunity costs. But we could in theory drill down into one of the state studies.
Looking at my bullet points, I can’t rule out the possibility that the numbers could conceivably reverse if the death penalty was imposed rarely. Though I honestly doubt whether any reforms short of prohibition would in practice produce cost advantages beyond that of simply reducing the death row pool. For example, limiting the death penalty to multiple murders is the sort of reform that would probably get toughened up over time, more so than flat-out prohibition.
Back of envelope calculations - the extra appeals of a death row inmae run between $1M and $2M typically. Cost if incarceration, we’ll round to about $40,000/yr for death row and $30,000/yr for regular prisoners ('genpop"). So an inmate who lives 30 or 40 years longer in genpop than the executed prisoner (who waits maybe 16 years) sometimes costs more. That might apply to offenders in their late teens or 20’s who live to 80’s or 90’s. What’s missing from that of course, is the medical costs of someone who is pushing 80 or 90. The old saw is that your medical expenses are very high in the first or last year of your life. I imagine most states fix this by simply paroling critically ill geriatric inmates and dumping them on the Medicare system. How much medical care would an 80-year-old in need of bypass surgery or cancer treatments get in prison? How would you price that?
The study still doesn’t address my 2 main concerns - if the state’s personnel who are part of the appeals process are on salary, then there’s no great savings (or extra cost) for having multiple appeals from a death-row inmate. Especially if these are rare, it does not imply hiring extra personnel. And… who pays for all the fancy lawyers for the inmate for the appeals processes? The state or are they pro bono do-gooders?
Of course; just deny all appeals automatically and kill them immediately. Of course you’d kill more innocent people that way, among other negative effects.
In at least some such cases, the convicted person is represented, during the appeals, by an organization like The Innocence Project (a non-profit group which specifically works to overturn death-penalty convictions which are believed to have been wrongly applied).
AIUI, such groups are funded largely, if not entirely, by donations.
If you have 100 inmates on death row, then you are producing workload well above that of a single salaried lawyer. If the change in cost is large enough, marginal costs tend to equate to average costs. Put another way, In the long run, marginal cost equals average total cost, and unless the state only has a couple of prisoners on death row you will have to hire additional lawyers.
Again, there are dozens of studies on this, many of them conducted by conservative legislatures, and they all have the same qualitative result. While Jasmine is correct that changing the parameters could in theory flip the signs, I say this isn’t straightforward. If it was, some US state would have done so. Or an advanced democracy like Japan would have done so.
I am agnostic regarding Singapore. 70% of hangings there are for drug related offenses (many of them low level drug couriers). It provides an interesting alternative to treatment for addiction, from some perspectives.
It’s an efficient process: “Many lawyers are reluctant to take on late-stage death row cases because they might be accused of abusing the court process if they lose.” Earlier in the process, penalties are sometimes shortened to prison sentences, especially after changes in the law. I have the sense that stays on death row tend to be shorter, though wiki lists plenty of cases in the range of 5 years or more. So I’m not sure whether the death penalty in Singapore saves money relative to incarceration. It could go either way. So from a perspective that the nebulous interests of the whole should take priority over the rights of the individual (best understood as chattel depending upon their social position according to this view) counting beans makes a lot of sense. Singapore should seriously consider publishing a cost/benefit analysis of their death penalty policies, before and after the 2014 reforms, from the perspective of their rulers.
Thanks. This paper says that long delays are common, but it also says that in contrast to America, where death penalty cases have many extra safeguards, in Japan 'death is not different". Capital cases are treated like any other trial, and prosecutors can even appeal the sentence if they don’t get the death penalty. This suggests death sentences may not cost more in Japan, or not much more. It also sounds like the Japanese justice system is bad in general, and with few guidelines making sentencing a lottery.
I also looked up some cases from Singapore and they were in the region of 2 to 8 years from conviction to execution. According to Wikipedia, after trial with a judge (no jury trials in Singapore) they have the option of one appeal, and of applying to the President for clemency. Definitely not the long process used in America. I can’t imagine other developed countries want to start killing drug traffickers, but it would indeed be interesting to see a study of the costs.
It’s also notable that both Japan and Singapore use long-drop hanging as the method of execution, unlike the US which has experimented with electrocution, gas chambers, and lethal injection. I’m not really sure why these were supposed to be better than more long established methods.
The paper you linked on Japan contained a helpful explanation of why costs are so high in America:
Not required as far as I can see is a higher standard for determining guilt. But it does kind of imply other cases get a second-rate version of justice.
I said on Reddit that I wished we could execute some of the increasing number of terrorists and spree killers who are caught in the act. They are generally unrepentant, don’t deny they did it, and sometimes have manifestos - there is no doubt they are guilty. What’s the point of keeping them around? I do think the risk of killing innocent people is a convincing argument against the death penalty, but it doesn’t apply in these cases. However, having different penalties based on surety of guilt is its own can of worms. Personally I don’t think the cost is much of an issue, but I realised I’d only ever heard about costs in one country and became curious whether it was a general issue or not.
Yes - hw certain can we be that the person fleeing is the guilty party, how close to the crime do they have to be?
Recall a case in Israel where after a terrorist attck the police tackled a suspect, and while he was lying face down on the ground one policeman shot him - not a legal execution but certainly in the category of “we’re sure we got the right guy”. Turns out he was a bystander, an African migrant running away from the incident. Should the Unabomber get life because he wasn’t caught red-handed? Lee Harvey Oswald was picked up hours later. What about people who plant bombs? The mastermind who sends out the terrorists (ObL) And so on… (and I don’t want to debate specific cases here)
If the deciding factor in the death penalty is whether you made a successful getaway for a few minutes or more, that’s not really justice. If you’re not apprehended at the scene with a smoking gun, then how would you write a rule saying “We have absolutely zero no no doubt this guy did it… we are not making a mistake.”
I took the opposite view above, but further review leads me to endorse your take (including the wiggle language, due to the lack of cost data). There was another part of the paper that reinforced this position:
When it comes to execution, Japan is even more aggressive than the United States, where more than two-thirds of death sentences are overturned on appeal. In Japan, by contrast, most persons who receive a sentence of death are eventually executed.
This factor would tend to make execution less costly on net.
I’m dubious about applying the Singapore example, because of their lack of respect for human rights. It’s not comparable, nor are the examples of Communist China, Saudi Arabia, or the Hunger Games.
FTR, the US does a fine job of executing these folk, because they can be convicted of federal crimes that involve the death penalty. Timothy McVeigh is one example. But let’s be honest here: we’re not killing them to deter future crime: the death penalty doesn’t do that. Some claim we’re doing it for justice, but those who claim that don’t define their terms. They are sloganeering, not arguing. I say we’re doing it for revenge, and revenge is a constitutional and acceptable justification for punishment. It’s just one that I personally don’t support. Sort of: we’re getting into GD territory.
@Jasmine , if you’re going to be vague about what you really mean, then don’t be surprised when others misinterpret you. @Der_Trihs , next time, please don’t take the bait, as it risks taking this thread beyond the bounds of FQ.
Also not a very good (good meaning representative) example. McVeigh basically gave up and let the federal government execute him without exhausting all avenues for relief. If he’d held out a couple more years, he’d as likely as not made it a couple more decades. There was an almost 20-year span in which the federal government didn’t execute anyone. Then a race to execute as many as possible under the last President. And now, seemingly, another pause.
Whereas in Europe they are sitting around in a (relatively pleasant) jail cell, potentially radicalising other prisoners, and sometimes being released because they finished their sentence or on compassionate grounds. Life sentences rarely mean life, it turns out.
But I think my question is answered. The death penalty costs more in the US because the Supreme Court insisted on ‘super due process’, and other countries do not follow this. Whether any ought to, in the unlikely event they reintroduced capital punishment, would depend on how their existing justice system functioned.
