When you execute an innocent person, he’ll never commit a crime again, either. When you put an innocent man in prison, you can correct the mistake.
I spoke to my husband about this and it seems that the estimates contained herein are highly inaccurate. The cost would actually be much higher than this estimate. First of all, look at the assumption of 150 officers for 1500 inmates. That is a 10 to 1 officer to inmate ratio which is typically not safe enough (at least by Ohio Standards). Depending on the security level of the prison, the inmate to officer ratio is usually between 2 to 1 (Level 5- Super maximum) and 8 to 1 (Level 1/2 Minimum/Medium). My husband currently operates a facility (Level 2) with 2700 offenders and 340 correctional officers. He has experienced cutbacks (he should be at 351 officers) keeping his ratio around 7.5 to 1.
Next, 35k for a corrections officer is pretty low. Albeit Ohio is one of the highest paid states, what many people fail to factor in is benefits packages. Although a CO starts at around 30k and increases to around 40k over his/her career, the benefits package usually adds 15k-25k on. Health insurance alone for a family plan is usually around 15k a year. Thus, the average salary for a CO is valued, with benefits, at 50k+ a year.
Next, the biggest error is assuming only CO’s are there. Besides his 340 officers, my husband also has 120+ other employees that work there. Prisons are mini cities; they have to offer many of the services that exist on the streets. In addition, with recent correctional philosophical shifts, it has come to be widely accepted that inmates cannot perform many of the jobs as they did previously. As many of you may know, in the past, inmates handled a lot of the paperwork, medical areas, mailrooms etc… Against many of the prevailing myths, correctional facilities have moved away from that way of operating. Henceforth, staff must handle all the mail (you cannot risk tampering by inmates and introduction of contraband), staff must provide all medical treatment (obvious reason), and staff must oversee laundry, quartermaster and commissary operations. Although you have inmate workers, you need multiple staff there to closely supervise them. Staff must oversee power plant operations, maintenance and food service. Only staff can handle business operations, including keeping track of inmate funds, investing money for them and other administrative needs. Only staff can assist with records, mental health (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurse practitioners, psychiatric nurses etc…), personnel, labor relations, inspections, audits, investigations and visiting. Then, you have special services to the inmates, including religious services, education, recovery services (drug and alcohol), sex offender programming and related fields. In addition, you have social services, typically referred to as unit management that includes frontline supervisors, sergeants, case managers and secretaries. Then, you need Lieutenants, Captains and a Major to supervise security operations in a 24/7 operation requiring relief factors so that overtime is avoided. Finally, you need executive staff to oversee all of these operations and insure compliance with the over 1000 policies and 500+ ACA (American Correctional Association) standards. Finally, over all this, and not even in the prison, is a Central Office Bureaucratic oversight comprised of over 600 employees who handle… well my hubby doesn’t know exactly what they do besides justify their existence by screwing with his operation.
In the end, you have a boatload of people, some making 80k to 90k a year. Highest paid in Ohio is about 140k and that is the Director of the Department.
It would amaze people all the little things that must be provided, think about underwear, socks, food costs (average meal I think is $1.00 an inmate), soap, towels, cleaning chemicals etc… My husband works in a 72 acre compound all surrounded by two 18 foot tall fences with razor wire and ankle-breakers strewn on top of and between the fences in 14 foot gap between the fence lines. This fence is fitted with a microwave and electronic monitoring technology that allows for alerts to be signaled if anyone tries to tamper or bypass the fenceline. This compound is comprised of over 25 separate structures, some of them with 150k+ square feet of space that must be heated. If you think your gas bill is bad, when my husband turns on the heat it starts costing him $7.00 dollars a minute, or about 300k a month.
In all, the costs for incarceration vary by security level, primarily because of the staffing levels outlined previously. Level 1 and 2 ranges from 15k a year to 25k a year. Level 5 can reach as high as 70k+ a year per inmate.
However, the big kicker that few “lock em up and throw away the key” folk are forgetting is Health Care. This is the number one cause of rising costs. The Courts have consistently ruled that Healthcare in prisons must be equal to health care on the streets. There are many who believe it should exceed that standard since the prisoners have no choices in where to seek healthcare (believe me, it does not at this time, but if some people have their way, it will). I am not talking about colds, flu and broken bones. Think big: heart disease, cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer’s. Although the overall prison population has gone down slightly in Ohio, the number of individuals on Dialysis has tripled. 10 years ago it was 22, now, over 70 inmates need Dialysis. The question may arise as to why this is happening. The simple answer is that prisoners are getting old, very old. In my husbands prison there are almost 400 inmates over 50. In addition, a good way to look at aging in prison is to add 10 years to anyone who is in there and over 30. This is because incarcerated life is very difficult and the people in there have typically led pretty rough lives (drinking, drugs, promiscuous sex, violence etc…)
Many of you have probably had family members who have serious health conditions. Those same bills must be paid for the incarcerated. Heart bypasses, chemo-therapy, nursing home care, long-term hospitalization, expensive drug therapies are going up in cost AND are becoming more common in Correctional facilities.
In all, it costs a lot of money to house an individual offender. Tougher/longer sentences mean more money. In addition, we have still not witnessed the full impact of LWOP (Life without parole) laws, such as 3-strikes. There will come a time, when there will need to be prison nursing homes (we have something very close now), because I doubt that the people will support a “compassionate release” for a murderer who is dying of cancer. Thus, they will have to pay for the healthcare of that murderer, until he dies, giving him/her the same treatment they would receive on the street.
Now, does this mean that execution is cheaper (given all the legal safeguards), I believe it is debatable and new studies, factoring in soaring healthcare, will need to be conducted before that particular argument can be completely settled. But, one must remember that death row is typically housed at the Level 4 or 5 facility. For example, in Ohio, because of the recent breach of security on death row, Death Row is being moved to a Level 5 facility (Actually this is more because the population is seriously low at the Level 5 facility because of a recent ACLU lawsuit that challenged the states classification system and it is becoming harder and harder to justify the 90 million dollar facility, staffed with 400 staff for 200 inmates, but I digress). Nonetheless, this means that a death row person will be housed at an extremely expensive level of security. Costing around 70k a year. Thus, for every year we house someone on death row, we could have housed them for 3-5 years at another facility. So, in the wash, it may work out that death row is still more expensive.
Thus, a simple statistic to estimate the cost incarceration cannot be used to evaluate this question. Whereas that previous estimate concluded it would cost around 250k for a lifetime, I am saying that on death row, it will cost 250k to simply house the offender for 3 YEARS, not counting the money for legal assistance and appeals.I’m not going to get into an argument over whether or not half the country seceding is a threat to that country. Suffice to say that the leaders at the time considered it a threat, one for which there wasn’t a non-war alternative available. If there WAS an acceptable alternative to war, they damn well should have taken it, considering how many of us died.
Dangerous animals are not important enough to house indefinitely when there are so many animals euthanized already that have not been shown to be dangerous AT ALL. We euthanize animals by the thousands for no reason other than them not having homes to go to, trying to equate euthanizing a dangerous animal to the death penalty is a non starter by this fact alone.
I’ll grant you this. If we as a society killed thousands of homeless people a year because we had no place to house them, then I would say a ban on the death penalty would be pretty silly. OK?
It depends on the situation. If there was any risk of Hitler getting away, I would support shooting him dead on the spot. Hitler is also a special case, his trial would be nothing like a typical US murder trial, I imagine the quality and quantity of the evidence would be far superior to what we normally have, and his defense would be more than competant as well. Perhaps, after seeing the evidence, I would support the DP for him.
Remember, at least on my side, the objection is not over death as a penalty, it’s the risk of executing an innocent. Make the DP widely available as a punishment to murder, and you have potentially thousands of people every year subject to it. To say that there is one special case where we are definitely sure doesn’t suddenly make the DP valid for the thousands of other cases where it would apply. Guarantee that no innocents will be executed, and I will revisit my opinion.
I wanted to comment on this as well, but had forgotten. By sentancing sex offenders to death, you would virtually guarantee there would be less convictions and more sex offenders on the streets.
First of all, most sex crimes cases are pled. The main reason for this is that sex crimes are extremely difficult cases, especially if there’s no physical evidence and even MORE difficult if the victim is a child.
Children are terrible witnesses. They’re easily confused on the stand, and a good defense attorney can make it look like the child has been coached to lie. With adults, the case sometimes comes down to her word against his. If the woman has an active sexual past, it can often make the jury even more reluctant to convict.
Often, the prosecutor is faced with allowing the offender to plead to a lesser offense just to get some time out of the offender or the uncertain outcome of a trial.
If the penalty for a sex offender was death, no one would plead, and due to the nature of these cases, there would be less convictions-- especially if the jury knew that they would be taking a man’s life if they found him guilty. Basically, the more serious the penalty, the more reluctant a jury is to declare him guilty if the evidence is weak.
Secondly, innocent men do get convicted. In the prison my husband works. there was a man who had served eleven years for molesting a child. There was a hearing which would have determined his status as a sex offender. (After new laws were passed, there had to be hearings for these offenders which would determine if they fit the criteria for registries and the like.)
The victim, now an adult, stood up in the courtroom and asked to be allowed to speak. She said that she had lied all of those years ago at the urging of her family. It had been an uncle who had molested her, not the man who was convicted. The judge convened a hearing, and released the man ROR pending a new trial.
If, as you suggest, he should have been sentanced to death and would have only gotten five years to appeal, would justice have been served?
People can get this kind of health care on the streets? Which streets are we talking about?
(I’m not saying we shouldn’t provide health care to prisoners. However, I also know that I haven’t been to see a GP in three years or a dentist in one year, so to hear about other people getting health care for free just adds more pain to the physical and emotional pain which I cannot fix because I can’t afford health care. But enough hijacking.)
1, 2, 3, 4) There is a point, making sure that you get rid of “that guy”, but I don’t think it’s an acceptable point. If “that guy” is completely incorrigible, we ought to give him to the shrinks and have them try and figure out how to keep guys like that from happening. Is it “justifiable”? Sometimes - but justifiable is not the same as just.
Must be the streets of one of those European countries… certainly not the streets of the U S of A.
Well, realisticly, most inmates come from a similar situation to yours. A good portion of them have never been to a doctor for preventive care, and many had never seen a dentist before they were incarcerated.
The best way to compare it would be that it’s like the state “assumes” they would have had a job with healthcare insurance if they weren’t in prison.
Apologies for the hiatus (long work hours make it hard to want to carry on a proper debate.) 
Yep, I couldn’t imagine that housing that many people and providing care and security for/agaist them on a 24-hour basis could be cheap–which is why it seemed best to calculate at least a guesstimate minimum when presented with a statement like “a few dollars a day.”
OT: Nifty. Is this a backup system, or do they maintain their own power supply for security reasons?
Hm. Of course, all of the non-death row have also gone up when adding in your modifiers–and I would have to imagine that a life sentencer without possibility of parole must still be held at a higher security level than others.
If we want to continue the string on practical cost benefits of the two sides, I am perfectly fine to try and work out better guesstimates than my base minimum. Though we would need to add in legal fees (payed for by tax dollars), court houses and such.
Personally I would like to do the math, just as that could be a fairly solid way for the pro-lifers to win–or at least to lead to further debates on “a happy prisoner is a good prisoner” vs. “bare minimum to keep them kicking.”
No no, this is still a discussion on execution.
So again, what steps do you think that our forefathers took which are greater than those taken in a courthouse to insure that the utmost impartiality was applied and all decisions based on the best evidence that could be presented? GW Bush was able to almost single-handedly start a war without the support of half the nation and certainly didn’t look at what evidence he was given with anything except a preconception of what it must mean. Certainly I think Abraham Lincoln was a good person for his day, but at the same time they were just coming out of a atmosphere where congressmen were getting into fist-fights between the Northern and Southerners. So one has to assume that these same congressmen were probably not very impartial at the time.
So then we do not have any immigration limits towards refugees?
So then, if you personally were on a jury and saw the physical evidence presented towards a mass-murderer with your own eyes and agreed that there was in your own mind no room for doubt of the guilt, then it would be ok?
At the moment, the “one case where we are definitely sure” appears to be only the one where you personally have given the okay. This seems a terrrible onus.
Ironically, this sort of person is type we should not be executing - he obviously has a conscience, feels remorse and can probably be rehabilated.
Its thos that are incapable of feeling remorse, who have no conscience that are the most dangerous.
Pragmatics win in my book. Though admittedly, one could argue that by allowing offenders to live freely just continues a vicious circle–so I would have to examine the issue closer to be able to personally come down on one side. For the moment I will just have to hope that people who can make decisions know more than I and are considering both points. But I would be worried that people are too tied up on the “killing someone is the worst thing you can do to them” bit and not taking both sides into consideration.
Though, even in murder trials, there are several levels at which you can be prosecuted and the death penalty is only brought out if it is believed that there is sufficient evidence. Would adding the option to convict on this level change anything if we still had to prosecute 99% of all cases for low-level offenses? <-Honest question
Served incorrectly, but served.
Part of believing in the death penalty is about in having faith in the good intentions and honesty of the rest of humanity. Pragmatism where it is ludicrous not to follow is of course not something to ignore–but where possible to get away with it, I generally prefer to opt for the idea that if you aren’t going to try and trust the inhabitants of the world–that if you aren’t in fact going to expect them to behave maturely, then there is no reason for any of us to behave maturely in the first place and we’re all screwed.
And of course, it is the complete and total abuse of this mutual trust that these crimes present that makes them become completely non-allowable.
So a big part of the argument for me is whether the short-term pragmatism or the long term “greater image”; which of the two will have the better result over the course of the next 200 years.
That I have ever seen, guys (and old ladies even) like that occur because of people like that. Certainly this isn’t their fault, but fault is separate from the consequence of your actions.
Well, really I think this is more of a matter of giving a person the right to decide to end his life. Which, personally I would see as being that the right to life is precisely equal to the right to death. However, that’s really not on topic.
But indeed, I was specifically singleing out people who would not feel remorse.
They may not have been impartial, but that’s not completely relevant because there is no doubt that the South seceded. The question is whether or not an acceptable non-war alternative existed to reunite the country. I’m no history buff, so I can’t say yes or no to that. If there was a way to get largely the same outcome without killing all those people, then they probably should have given that a go instead.
We certainly do have limits on immigration. Illegal immigrants get deported, they don’t get shot.
I’m just trying to draw a distinction between the opinion that death is never an appropriate punishment and the opinion that our legal system is unfit for assigning that punishment. I think the fact that a reasonable alternative exists makes the burden of proof higher than it would otherwise be, a burden that is higher than our system can generally bear.
But the issue isn’t whether their lack of impartiality effected their ability to judge whether the South had seceded or not; obviously they had seceded. The question is why you have any faith in their ability to have decided rationally that the South posed a threat. And secondly, that if (as I originally asked) they were not a threat, whether they should have been allowed to go off and continue slavery until modern day rather than going in a killing them?
Why would such a question appear in a thread on execution? We’re talking about whether or not we can trust our government and fellow humans to choose whether to kill a person, not history.
But there are millions of people suffering under dictatorships who could be saved if we had no limit on immigration. And there are refugees who if they are not saved and in fact returned by the US will indeed be shot.
But why is it that our court system is not a good enough system to kill an individual, while as a gaggle of politicians is sufficient to decide the deaths of thousands?
It’s here because it cuts right to the heart of the matter. Why is it acceptable for a group of people in DC to decide to send us all to war, when it’s unacceptable for a group of people in a courtroom to decide to send one person to the gas chamber? It’s because of the alternatives.
In each case, we do not have a choice with respect to who makes the decision. People are fallible and we have to accept that, we have to trust that the groups will do their best to make a wise decision. There is nobody else to decide.
In the case of war, there is often no alternative to war that will accomplish the same outcome, or even a roughly similar outcome. If you have a desired outcome, a reunited nation or a defeated Hitler, and war is the only way to make it happen, then you choose war.
In the case of execution, there is an alternative that is openly and easily available that accomplishes both punishing the offender and protecting society, life in prison with no parole. You can acheive your desired outcome without taking that final, horrible step, you can’t do that with war.
If there were no alternative to execution, no long term incarceration, then execution becomes a viable punishment for dangerous criminals. If you’re on a desert island and one of your group rapes and murders 3 women, do you try and construct a bamboo prison and assign people to watch him 24/7 when you’re struggling to find enough food to eat? Of course not, but WE have an alternative and there’s no compelling reason to avoid using it.
I can do nothing with the body of your text.
I could of course chase you down on the various questions you’ve skipped–but I suspect that I need better traps (as the ones I started with in post 3 were the result of about 1 second worth of consideration.)
Anyhoo, “I shall return!”
I generally view certain crimes as worse than murder, mostly because I can think of any number of justifiable reasons for killing another person but when it comes to rape… not so much.
However, I still believe murder should be above other crimes when it comes to punitive measures, and I do so for pragmatic reasons; there should be at least some reason for a rapist to not murder their victim. If the punishments were the same he would have nothing to lose from killing the victim, typically the only witness, and if possible dispose of the body to destroy physical evidence. He’d be less likely to be caught, less likely to be convicted, and even if he was he’d be no worse off.
Having the death penalty for both crimes and you could very well end up with more dead victims and less offenders brought to justice.
I feel from a religious and in particular Christian point of view, a state imposed Death Penalty is unacceptable. Religious teachings generally allow for anyone to be saved if they take the necessary actions, and as such denying a person the ability to save themself by killing them is a very great sin. Not only is the judicial system faulty such that some percentage of those found guilty will be innocent, but also I believe some higher percentage of those who are guilty would with time be able to achieve their own salvation.
I do believe that permanent incarceration is reasonable, and that inmates should be allowed to choose to opt out of incarceration and choose execution for themselves should they so wish. But state mandated execution is immoral.