Today's Los Angeles Times carries the editorial, "California's costly death penalty: The state is spending $184 million a year more on its 714 death-row inmates than it would if they had been sentenced to life without parole."
Time and again, academic studies have demonstrated that California's death penalty is a staggering waste of taxpayer money, a legal fiction that gives voters the impression they're being tough on crime even though condemned inmates typically expire of natural causes before making it to the death chamber. A new such study, which is notable because it is based on previously unavailable records from the state Corrections and Rehabilitation Department, comes to the same conclusions we've seen before. But the political outcome is unlikely to change until voters figure out that the problem lies with capital punishment itself, not with the dysfunctional way it's practiced in California.
The latest analysis, from U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, shows that California is spending $184 million a year more on its 714 death-row inmates than it would if they had been sentenced to life without parole. That tops the estimate of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, whose 2008 report said capital punishment was costing the state $137 million a year. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, meanwhile, estimates we could save $1 billion over five years by eliminating the death penalty, in an analysis that includes the $400-million cost of making needed upgrades to San Quentin State Prison's death row.
In the Sacramento Bee, Bruce Maiman writes the OpEd, "Can California afford the millions it spends on the death penalty?"
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from capital punishment as an effective penal model. Ineffective in curbing crime; inefficient as a tax expenditure, they said.
And:
Even Texas has pulled back on its "electric bench" after realizing that prosecuting capital cases costs three times more than sentencing someone to life without parole. In California, 54 death row inmates have died of natural causes: Life without parole is killing them more than we do.
Wanna fix California's capital punishment model? Find $85 million more annually to fund courts and lawyers, says the study. Or reduce the number of death penalty-eligible crimes and save $55 million annually. Or abolish capital punishment and save taxpayers about $1 billion every five years.
If locking 713 inmates away forever rather than executing them saves that kind of money in a state that's broke, the choice should be obvious. Who's the fiscal conservative now?
Earlier coverage of the California study begins at the link.
The article, "Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature's Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle," should be available later this week at the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review website.It's written by Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law prof Paula Mitchell.
Related posts are in the cost index.
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