There is an ongoing debate on the use of capital punishment. Discuss Essay - 1

There is an ongoing debate on the use of capital punishment. Discuss the social, moral and historical aspects of this controversial topic - Essay Example religious leaders, and foreign press make quite a spectacle of how the Throughout the world legal systems regularly sentences people to die for the crimes they have committed. As such, many nations around the globe view the death penalty as something of a novelty (Debrevnik, 2004). From a purely economic standpoint, capital punishment is an extraordinarily expensive form of punishment. As compared with life in prison, the average cost of execution is approximately the same cost to keep a prisoner housed and fed for over 100 years (Petersen & Lynch, 2012). Currently, the average cost of execution in California exceeds 4 million dollars per criminal executed. Comparatively, the average cost to keep a prisoner housed and fed as well as ensuring proper health care and medicine usually does not exceed $35,000 per year (Semeshenko et al, 2012). At such an exorbitantly high expense, it is clear that choosing capital punishment on the grounds that killing the criminal will somehow save the state money over time is entirely illogical. As such, the argument for execution does not hinge on economic savings; instead, it hinges upon the Judeo-Christian belief of â€Å"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth†. In this way, the major supporters of the death penalty believe that certain crimes are so heinous that rehabilitation is not possible. As such, one’s life is forfeit for certain crimes if convicted. This further raises the tangential issue of the purpose of prison; whether it is it to rehabilitate or to punish. According to death penalty activists, prison’s primary objective is to punish with rehabilitation being a very distant second. A secondary issue with the death penalty in its current form is that they death penalty has been proven not to be a significant deterrent against the crimes it punishes. It is obvious that murder rates throughout the world are comparably higher than almost any other nation that currently does not have the death penalty as