than the death penalty. It costs states roughly 25,000 dollars a year to house a defendant on death row and if he stays there for twenty-five years it would have cost one million dollars to keep in prison. For instance, if a prisoner worked forty hours a week, fifty weeks per year, over twenty five years at three dollars an hour, that would mean 150,000 dollars that could be put toward paying off his prison stay. However, on a national basis, over nine million dollars has been spent on the death penalty since 1976. California spends ninety million dollars on the total death penalty but, seventy-eight million dollars of that was incurred at the trial level. Each death penalty costs between two and four million dollars with all the appeals and the execution. In Alabama, a state which has banned the death penalty. The price of one death penalty case could cover prison costs for almost seven convicts for forty years. In contrast, many people think that life without parole leads to overcrowded prisons but nine percent of the people in prisons are in there on life without parole, not even close to being a major reason for over crowding. Furthermore, Eugene Wagner, a Michigan attorney says "That since they banned the death penalty, it has saved Michigan millions of dollars. At the same time, we've been able to devote more of our resources to finding effective ways to fight and prevent crime instead of lulling the public into false sense of security with the death penalty." They use money to fund programs proven to work fight crime like gun control, drug rehabilitation, employment opportunities, and early intervention for abused and mentally handicapped children. To sum it up, a 1993 national survey showed that sixty-four percent of the people prefer life without parole, and thirty percent said they wanted to keep the death penalty and six percent were undecided.In conclusion, I hope you agree with me on how horrible the death pen...
