Death Penalty Analysis: Argument From Cost of Alternatives

Presently, executing a person costs the state more than life imprisonment, largely due to the different laws and regulations around both. This is where reality doesn't match up with my theoretical arguments. We'll start with the theoretical arguments, though, and then see what changes when we add reality. Remember, this is an argument from cost alone, with no moral dimensions in play.

I've found a few numbers for cost-per-inmate-year. Let's pick a low one: $20,000 per year. An executed inmate consumed fifteen prisoner-years of resources, on average. A life-sentence inmate consumes on average 45 prisoner-years of resources, or three times that. That doesn't account for the increased the medical costs of housing an older person, but we'll ignore that for now. This time we're being generous to the anti-death-penalty argument.

So an executed inmate consumes $300,000, and a life inmate consumes $900,000. That's $600,000 saved per execution, all other things being equal. Even using very low costs for inmate housing, and ignoring the medical costs of older prisoners, this argument looks valid on the face of it.

But go back to the false conviction rate; one out of twenty-five inmates is innocent. By executing 25 people rather than sentencing them to life, you've saved $15 million, but at the cost of one innocent life!

Are you willing to spend $15 million to save an innocent life? Remember, that number is the anti-death-penalty extreme. Go the other way: drop the wrongful execution rate to 0.1% and use higher numbers for prisoner incarceration costs. Would you sacrifice one innocent to save $2 billion?

This is a serious question. Don't believe me? Shocked that anyone could ever put a dollar value on something like not killing an innocent person? Take it even further: what if the cost to save an innocent life was fifty trillion dollars? Would you destroy the economy of the whole world for one person? Of course not; far more people than one will die if you do that. At some point the cost of life imprisonment vs. execution overwhelms the state. That's why execution was ever an option in the first place; an impoverished society can not afford the resources to keep an unproductive member of society alive forever.

So what is the dollar value of an innocent human life? US GDP per capita over 45 years is only $2.5 million. More sophisticated statistical estimates come to around $9 million. Those numbers are instructive, but not comprehensive for such a bizarre question.

Or let's put it another way: say we spend $2b saving an innocent life. How many other innocent lives could we have saved spending that money in some other way? How many medical procedures does that pay for? How much food for the hungry? How much clean water? How much is society as a whole giving up to save that one innocent?

And it's not even that simple. Suppose you saved that $2b by executing an innocent, rather than leaving 999 guilty horrid murderers alive and in prison. We're not talking about spending that $2b to give that innocent his life back. We're talking about spending two billion dollars and still leaving an innocent person in jail forever. Is that enough of an improvement to be worth the cost? If given the choice between dying in jail as an old man, or dying now and knowing that $2 billion would be given to the poor, which would you pick?

Not that our government would actually give that money to useful causes; we'd probably invade Iraq again, or something. (They say you should play to your strengths...) But that doesn't answer anything one way or another. And I'm not saying I have the answers. I'm saying there is no easy answer. This is the terrible calculus of government, wherein lives are weighed against money.

All I can say is that the naive argument that the death penalty saves money works. We'll have to see what happens when reality comes back into play.