Capital Punishment is Not a Reliable Way to Deter Crime Capital punishment is a government sanctioned practice where a person is put to death by the state for crimes. Capital punishment is a very controversial topic. Some believe we should remove the death penalty from our government. People think that we should not use it for a punishment against crime. They argue that capital punishment has a lot of things wrong with it. Some countries have stopped using capital punishment altogether. Capital punishment is not worth the time or money. It is also unreliable and people are discriminated against when it is being decided if they should receive the death penalty. Capital punishment is not effective enough to be worth the time or money. …show more content…
It takes years for them to be executed from the time they are sentenced in court. Most people stay on death row for sixteen years or more. Sometimes they die of natural causes due to how long they are incarcerated for. The time they spend on death row makes it seem like they get both punishments, “the death penalty has become… punishment in the form of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, plus capital punishment ( Spending Decades on Death Row: Is it Constitutional?).”The cost of the death penalty has grown over the years. The death penalty costs more than life in prison without parole. The people on death row need more security than those who are in jail for life so the cost is higher. The death penalty can cost double the amount of life in prison. New Jersey was the first to ban the death penalty because it was not effective enough for the cost, “Legal costs were too great and produced no result, lawmakers said (To execute or not: A question of …show more content…
One of the government's priorities is to keep the people safe. They also want people to be convicted of the crimes they committed. People want someone to learn from what violence they have done but they use violence to keep them from doing it. Some believe that capital punishment is the only way to deter people from committing crimes like murder. People argue that when the crimes rate is down it is because of capital punishment. There is no evidence that capital punishment deters people from crime. No one can prove that capital punishment is a way to stop people from committing crimes. Capital punishment does the same as life in prison “the death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a sentence of life in prison (The death penalty is not a proven deterrent to future murders.).” The Times performed a study that looked at the crime rate and the results made them believe that the death penalty rarely deters