Capital Punishment in the US

Introduction

Capital punishment is being put to death by lethal injection for commiting a capital crime. They use to have methods such as hanging (Abolished in 1996), firing squad (Abolished in 2010), electrocution (Abolished in 2013), but they did away with those and went with lethal injection since the person receiving it does not have a chance of being tortured while being executed. There are six states that still use the gas chamber as a method if the injection cannot be given, those states are, Arizona, California, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri and Wyoming. A capital crime can be different things such as treason or espionage, but the most common capital crimes is premeditated first degree murder. Capital punishment is a controversial topic throughout the United States. Some people like the death penalty, some do not. I personally am for capital punishment being used for capital crimes.

Capital punishment is a controversial topic in the United States, it is legal in 31 different states across the United States, for example a few of them are, Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Texas. The death penalty is illegal in 19 different states across the United States, some of those states are, Alaska, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Michigan and New Jersey. It is easy to see that the majority of the country are for the death penalty. The death penalty is a good thing to have because anyone that can commit such horrible crimes, like capital punishment, and not have any remorse for what they have done, do not deserve to get off easy by just spending the remainder of their life in jail. Saying that a murderer getting off easy by spending the rest of his life in prison may sound odd to some people, but they took the life of an innocent person and they get to have a life, even if it is in jail, they are granted to still walk the Earth? Any decision that a person makes throughout the course of a day could have a possibility of leading them to death, and death is the most feared thing in the world.

Having even just the potential threat of the death penalty could possibly help bring a decrease in the number of capital crimes that occur. And in my opinion, our society today is so big on trying to prevent murder, then the death penalty is the more suitable punishment to give someone who commited the capital crime. How can you help bring down crime rates, if there is nothing to give a person who plans to murder a reason to maybe not go off and kill someone? This could even be represented as a more modern “An eye for an eye” (A life for a life) way of looking at the topic of capital punishment because the person who commited the crime would be paying a price that matches up to the harm he brought into the life of the victim and the lives for those around the victim. Families of victims would probably feel a lot better even after the tragedy because justice was served to a person that destroyed the order and peace in their lives.

Another reason to be for the death penalty is to free up space in the jails and lessen the costs that it takes to keep prisoners in the jail. Some prisoners spend an average of 15 years or more on death row waiting for execution, some over the age of 50. The cost to keep a prisoner on death row from the beginning of the case to execution is 1.26 million. That is a lot of money and time for a prisoner to be kept in a cell. In the United States, there are over 2.3 million prisoners in cells right now which is causing the facilities to become overcrowded.

Conclusion

If the amount of time on death row was lower for the inmates that commit capital crimes, it would bring the amount of prisoners down and not have the jails overcrowded. What most people do not see is that when prisons and jails are overcrowded, it is hard for the people who are working there to maintain order and control, especially if they are undermanned. Some states such as Louisiana and Delaware have a very hard time keeping officers on the job because of the large amount of time spent at the prison and how little they get paid drive them away. A man named Gefforey Klopp said that at Vaughn Correctional Facility, they would lose 57% of their hires within 3 years which does not help bring any effectiveness to the place due to the high turnover rate. It is already hard enough to control prisoners with a solid team of officers let alone not being able to make any effective progress when employees constantly come and go. Having the death penalty and freeing up space in our jails could help being back control into overcrowded facilities that have a hard time maintaining control of the inmates they have to spend pretty much everyday with.  

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