The death penalty.

[badgenome]

Khuutra said:

badgenome said:

Khuutra said:

This is almost definitely not true.

The average cost for someone to be imprisoned in California - as I recall - is about 50,000 USD a year; as in you could send them to UC Berkley with room, board, books, and everything, and spend a lot less money.

Extrapolate that shit to fifty years.

Yeah, but if you factor in court appeals and how long it takes to actually getting around to executing someone (10 years or more)? I can see it.

Court appeals happen without the death penalty, too. Even assuming that a person sentenced to life only lives ten years logner in prison than does someone on death row (this is not the case), you also have to factor in increased cost of care as a person ages - once you hit your mid forties, you become a lot harder to take care of. Execution would have to be enormously, egregiously expensive in order to outweigh how huge the cost of holding a prisoner for the course of his life is.

There's a great deal more deliberation (and often many more appeals) when it's a capital case, though. In North Carolina, it costs something like $2.5 million just to bring about such a case. A Duke University study from '93 put the total cost of execution at $163,000 more than a 20 year stretch in the slammer; if it's like everything else, that discrepancy has probably grown rather than shrunk over the last 17 years.