Capital Punishment Revisited

Some time ago I wrote about capital punishment and concluded that it was probably a good thing to hold over some law breakers head. It was pointed out to me that it is cheaper to keep a prisoner in jail than it is to execute him/her. I have a problem with this.

Here in Canada, a murder would receive a 'life' sentence if any of our judges actually had any balls. But the term life is misleading. It means at the most, our murderer will serve 25 years. Yes, that is indeed a life sentence if you commit the crime when you're 70 years old, but hardly so dire if you do it when you are 25.

In the US, a 'life' sentence means just that, life. You are doomed to die in prison no matter how old you were when you went in. I'm not sure, but I don't think the States give you any credit for time served. Here you can get up to a 3 to 1 credit for the time you were held pending trial. If you were behind bars for a year (not unheard of) before your trial came up, the judge could sentence you to the 25 years less 3 years for time served.

In the US I don't think there is a mandatory minimum you must serve before you are eligible for parole. You might get paroled after one or two years or you might turn to dust in your cell. In Canada you have to serve at least 2/3s of your sentence before you are eligible for parole. Unless you luck out when invoking the Early Release Provision, in which case all bets are off. So from serving 25 years with parole eligibility at 15 years, we can go to 22 years with parole eligibility at 14 years. We always round down in favour of the prisoner, don't you know?

Also, in the US, sentences are handed down consecutively instead of our method of making them concurrent. The difference here is that if you're convicted of murdering say 3 people in the States, you will pay for each and every one of them. Here, you will serve time for killing one person and the other two don't count.

Every case has to be tried on its own, but in the case of cold blooded, hard nosed killers, the issue of capital punishment must be revisited.

Statistics tell us that here in Canada it costs $84,000/yr to keep a prisoner behind bars. So if we throw someone into the hoosegow at age 25, ignoring all the other nonsense and presuming he serves his full sentence, he will cost us $2.1 million dollars. Add to that the appeals this guy is allowed, the we, the taxpayer pay for, and the cost is horrendous. Multiply that number by the number of people serving life sentences and it amounts to a tidy sum.

What if we allow the guy one appeal? These things usually take about 10 years so we've already invested $840,000 in him. After that, if the appeal is unsuccessful, we hang him. I figure we just saved at least a million bucks.

I know what you're going to say next. What if DNA evidence finds him innocent after that little hanging thing? I say so what? He's gone, nothing is going to bring him back, sorry about your loss, we made do with the best we had at the time, here's some money for your trouble. Am I supposed to feed and shelter a convict indefinitely in case science comes up with something new that might exonerate him? That's sort of like saying freeze me when I die in case they find a cure in the future for the disease that killed me.

Your next argument is going to be that hanging is cruel and inhumane. I say so what? So was what the killer did to his victims. At least I am being charitable enough not to sentence him to the same death he visited upon his victims. The electric chair is too expensive. It uses up too much power and gets the tree huggers protesting that you're not protecting the environment. Lethal injection also is too expensive. You need a bed and a couple of doctors to verify death. Our health care system needs all the doctors it can get and they shouldn't be wasting their time on this kind of trivia. The gas chamber might be okay, but then you have to call in the HAZMAT team to deal with the left overs. Nope, seems hanging is the way to go.

Run down to your local Home Hardware and put down $20 for some nylon rope. Nylon lasts a long time, is extremely flexible and $20 worth gives you enough to hang a guy and have enough leftover to make a new painter for your boat. While you're there, pick up about $1000 worth of pressure treated lumber. Pressure treated because the gallows has to stand the test of time and any unused lumber will quickly find it way into someone's garage for future products. Last but not least, buy some material to fashion a hood to be fitted over the winner's head. This should be the cheapest material you can find, but should stand up to bugged out eyes and puke. It is disposable but again, this depends on the intestinal fortitude of the hangman.

Next you need a hangman. Since this is not a full time job, you can pay him a little less than minimum wage and as a bonus, you don't have to spend any money giving him benefits. And there you have it. Drop the trap door and when the body stops twitching, you know it's dead. Cart it off to the local landfill and get ready to welcome a new day.

Sure is cheaper than $2.1 million.