Eliminating Capital Punishment is a Luxury only Wealthy Societies can Afford

Capital punishment in the United States (the only developed country still executing people) is expensive and error-ridden. The cost is primarily due to the appeal process, something third world countries don’t bother with. We can (and should) debate the legitimacy of capital punishment – but not here. In this article, I simply wish to point out that only wealthy countries can afford to eliminate capital punishment.

There are crimes I would favour the death penalty for, especially when keeping ourselves safe from someone who did something truly heinous and who is clearly guilty. Not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond doubt. Certain serial killers, torturers, mass murderers, and so on. I would consider it acceptable, but that the state cannot be trusted with the power to kill people. It would be only a matter of time before people were being executed for political reasons. In the United States, blacks are executed at a rate nearly four times that of whites, especially by elected judges in election years.

However, we are entering a time (due to a permanent recession induced by peak oil) when a greater proportion of our resources will be required to support the incarcerated. Prisoners will become more of a burden on the rest of us, and there will be pressure to reduce that burden.

Non-fun Facts About Incarceration

In Canada, the cost to incarcerate a male prisoner is more than $87,000 per year, and a female prisoner costs $150,000-250,000 annually. Incarceration costs approximately $259 per day, while alternatives like probation and community supervision cost less than $25 per day.

The United States jails people at the highest rate in the world, and this combined with overcrowding enables economies of scale that result in a cost to incarcerate of $62 per day, or $22,650 per year.

These costs will become progressively more of a burden for a society struggling with ongoing recession.

Reducing the Prisoner Burden

One way to reduce the prisoner burden is to stop jailing people for victimless crimes, like using or selling small amounts of drugs. When society becomes poorer, then fewer people will be imprisoned because we stop jailing people for minor crimes. We may put them on probation, we may give them community service, but we won’t imprison them. And some current ‘crimes’ may cease to be soon.

Another way to reduce the burden is to execute certain prisoners and save ourselves the expense. Given the current cost of keeping someone on death row and then executing them, it would certainly seem more cost-effective to eliminate capital punishment. However, in poorer and more troubled times, there may not be so many avenues for prisoners to appeal, and the cost-to-execute versus the cost-to-warehouse may tip in favour of death.

The third way is to use the prisoners to do work for profit, as was done in the Soviet Gulags and Nazi concentration camps, and is done in American prisons. Not that I see anything wrong with prisoners working; quite the contrary. I think they should be growing and preparing their own food, making their own furniture and clothes, and otherwise minimising the burden to the rest of us. (And hopefully learning something useful and noncriminal while doing so.)

The corruption comes from working the prisoners for profit, because then an incentive is created to incarcerate more people for longer periods of time, and to criminalise things that will snare “them” but not “us.” It should come as no surprise that the American Republic has more people per capita in jail than any other country, and that most of these are poor people who cannot afford good legal representation. The system is working as designed, whether intentionally or accidentally.

In a poorer world, we simply won’t have the resources to imprison so many people – or to allow costly appeals processes. Protections for those sentenced to death are likely to slowly revert to third world levels, which saves money but certainly does not serve justice. Sentences for minor ‘crimes’ will either be eliminated, replaced with a lower-cost alternative like community service, or result in forced labour that is profitable for the prison owner.