Sunday's Sacramento Bee carried the editorial, "What price is too high for death row?"
In a twisted sense of timing, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has placed the exorbitant cost of California's theoretical death penalty squarely before the public again.
The Schwarzenegger administration announced last week that it plans to borrow $64.7 million from the state's cash-strapped general fund to accelerate construction of a new death row at San Quentin State Prison.
The administration's call for bids to build new digs for condemned inmates comes as the governor's lawyers seek court approval to furlough state workers and cut their pay to minimum wage, and as he pushes to end safety net services for some of California's poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
Schwarzenegger needs to reconsider his priorities and focus on what is truly important as his time as governor ends – such as engaging in negotiations with legislative leaders to resolve the budget impasse.
The $64.7 million is merely a down payment. Construction would cost about $360 million. Interest payments on 20-year bonds the state ordinarily would sell to finance the construction could add another $150 million or more to the final price tag.
And:
The plan to build a shiny new 541,000-square-foot death row within San Quentin's boundaries underscores fundamental problems with capital punishment. So long as there is a death penalty, the state will need to house, clothe and feed the inmates at huge costs.
San Quentin sits on prime bayfront property in Marin County. It could be sold for a fortune and turned into housing, a transit hub, a ferry port and much more.
However, lawmakers cannot agree to close San Quentin. Nor are they prepared to abolish capital punishment, given that Californians support it by a wide margin. The U.S. Supreme Court and California Supreme Court seem willing to permit the process to continue, knowing that it is more likely that someone will be struck by lightning than die by lethal injection or gas.
Today's Merced Sun-Star carries the same editorial as, "Our View: Will cost of death row kill us all?" They are sister papers.
"California’s death penalty a failure," is the editorial in the Sunday Stockton Record.
The idea of taking $65 million out of the state’s general fund for a new, 1,152-bed death row at San Quentin is ludicrous.
When we’re firing teachers, police and firefighters and our streets are going without repair, the idea of building a bigger death row is loony.
We can’t afford it. Beyond that, we can’t afford to keep wasting tax money on a capital punishment system that is utterly broken. It costs millions and takes years for a capital sentence to be carried out. There is no clearer indication of that than the idea that we must build a death row housing unit roughly twice as big as the one we have.
We don’t have a particular moral problem with the death penalty. We do have a problem with the insanity of continuing to waste money on a system that is broken beyond repair.
James Clark posts, ""How Would You Spend $64 Million," at Calitics. He's with the ACLU of Southern California.
Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is so broke he breaks into his daughter's piggy bank, only to find it full of IOUs from himself?
On Wednesday, that scene was reenacted in Sacramento, with Gov. Schwarzenegger playing the role of Homer. The governor announced that he would be "borrowing" $64 million from the General Fund in order to move forward with one of his pet projects, the construction of a new death row facility at San Quentin. And $64 million is just the tip of the iceberg. Altogether, the new facility is expected to total upwards of $400 million. That's half a million dollars per prison cell — roughly the cost of a nice house in California.
Of course, the General Fund is virtually broke already, so our governor is borrowing against nonexistent budget. And didn't Gov. Schwarzenegger threaten that he wouldn't sign a budget at all? Every government agency in the state is in fiscal emergency, our social safety net is in tatters, and the state is weeks away from paying state employees with IOUs.
Which is why building a new death row is exactly what we don't need need right now.
Earlier coverage of the cost issue in California begins here; more in the cost index.
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