A few of my friends and I once saw a bumper sticker that questioned, “Why dowe kill people who kill people, to show that killing people is wrong?” Suddenly therewas a wild riot of arguments between us. Even though on that day I was out numberedtwo to three, I was and today still am against the death penalty as a deterrent to crime. The death penalty is not an effective way to punish a criminal.
Even states that use thedeath penalty seem to have a higher number of homicides than states that do not use it. Itdoes not seem to show its effectiveness since states that have the death penalty present nolong-term differences in the murder in comparison of the murder rate of their adjacentstates. So, if capital punishment isn’t lowering the murder rate, why waste the extraSince dollar signs seem to rule America’s minds, most tax payers feel that toomuch of their taxes are going towards maintaining prisons and feeding inmates. A recentstudy found that it costs more to put a prisoner to death, with any method than it does toAlso, in the U. S., the chief objection to capital punishment is that it was alwaysused unfairly.
First, women are rarely sentenced to death and executed, even though 20%of all homicides in recent years have been committed by women. Second, a studyconducted by U. S. News and a World Report showed that a disproportionate number ofnonwhites are sentenced to death and executed. Yet many people, especially family members of murder victims, want to see theoffender(s) dead. I have no objection to the emotions families have when a loved one iskilled and the family wants their satisfaction of knowing that the killer is dead as well,but death is too quick.
The mother of a murdered son has to suffer over him for alifetime. So why shouldn’t the murderer suffer, too? The death penalty needs to go andso should all the luxuries of prison. Our justice system shouldn’t just kill the criminal andget his or her life over with but rather make their life miserable. The prisons need to getrid of the library, gym, basketball courts, and TV’s and make these prisoners toillaboriously for food just like the working class has to.
I’m not implying that offendersshould be tortured, I’m only saying that prisons should only supply the bare necessitiesEven though our prisons need to toughen up, I give them credit for taking away acriminal’s freedom. And if capital punishment is not lowering the murder rate, is moreexpensive, and being alive is harder than being dead, then the death penalty should be.
