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stella40 -> RE: Studes Say Death Penalty Deters Crime (6/13/2007 10:29:53 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: selfbnd411
quote:
ORIGINAL: stella40
Nice try though, and I guess it sure looked pretty.
I hasten to add that I used the numbers given to me by a prior anti-death penalty poster. Numbers that came from an anti-death penalty website, btw.
Nice try though.
Okay... So what exactly are the facts behind your figures?
You say, for example that the average amount of time spent on Death Row is 17.5 years.
Is this figure for prisoners incarcerated under sentence of death only, or does this figure also include those prisoners who are under sentence of death but who are also serving life sentences? As an example off the top of my head I give you the name of Christa Pike in Tennessee who is under sentence of death for the 1995 (I think) murder of Colleen Slemmer but who later murdered an inmate and received a life sentence.
Are you also counting Death Row prisoners in states where there is currently a moratorium in place? States such as Illinois, New York and Georgia?
As far as I'm aware, the longest serving inmate on Death Row is Mumia Al-Jamal in Philadelphia, 27 years if I'm correct.
I would agree if you were to say the average length of time prisoners as a whole is increasing. In the period 1977 to 1983 it was 4 years, and it increased steadily to 1996 to 12 years. In 1997 it fell to just over 10 years and has since wavered between 10 and 12 years (I'm using US Bureau of Justice statistics here).
In states which routinely carry out executions such as Texas (the leading executioner in the US) and Virginia (which executes more people 'per capita' of its population than any other state) the time spent on Death Row rarely exceeds 12 years. But then you have states which rarely perform executions such as California, South Dakota, and Mississippi, where you might find inmates who have served over 20 years still awaiting execution on Death Row. However some of these states have large Death Row populations, such as California, and some don't, such as Mississippi and Delaware.
Therefore, on what factual basis do you arrive at the figure of 17.5 years?
Also to arrive at your assumed or (guesswork) figure as to the costs per year of keeping a prisoner on Death Row I am interested as to how you arrive at such figures.
I know that it costs $50 a day to house a prisoner on Death Row in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, and a few other states. To arrive at your figures there would have to be states where it would cost anything up to $200 a day - I'm curious as to knowing which states exactly have these sort of costs.
Also your figures don't add up because it doesn't take into account the 'industry' aspect or even the 'business' aspect of the death penalty. And for a few the death penalty is big business.
Are you aware for example that each dose of Pavulon costs a state department of corrections an average of $86? We are talking about the exact same drug that vets use to put animals to sleep. But does it costs the vets $86?
Are you also aware that for many years one company held the monopoly for maintaining all execution equipment in the US and their instruction manuals formed the basis for execution protocols in many states? They maintained the gas chambers in Arizona, Mississippi and Maryland, all the electric chairs and even supplied the rope for the gallows in Delaware, Wyoming and Washington?
Then there is the example of the consultants who charged Florida Department of Corrections some $8,000 to examine the electric chair in Arkansas after the Pedro Medina execution (I'm citing here Moore vs. Provenzano from 2000 where Thomas Harrison Provenzano was challenging the constitutionality of electrocution under the Eighth Amendment claiming it was a 'cruel and unusual punishment'). In fighting this appeal Florida Department of Corrections commissioned a study of the execution protocol administered by the Georgia Department of Corrections.
I guess the anti-death penalty website you mentioned would be the Death Penalty Information Center, a site I know very well and which appears to be informative but can also be at times misleading and inaccurate. However I'm struggling to think of where on that site you could come up with the figures you mentioned without using a certain amount of imagination.
I base my arguments on solid facts, and not just on one site, there is also a very good pro-death penalty website with reliable information, Rick Halperin's websites, the NAACPD, Amnesty International, all the various state resources such as official department of correction websites, anti-DP sites, the US Bureau of Justice, and so on.
But maybe you have other sources - what are they?
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