Capital Punishment | Teen Ink

Capital Punishment

March 20, 2010
By tietjenmichaela BRONZE, Reno, Nevada
tietjenmichaela BRONZE, Reno, Nevada
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Some people have mixed opinions about the death penalty. Some people are dead-

set on their opinion about the death penalty. Others don’t even know what to think about

it. So what is the death penalty? Lethal injections that are given to death-row inmates who

were sentenced to be executed. These prisoners get free food, free housing and don’t have

to worry about anything. More money is being spent on prisoners rather than to the

education of children. Statistics show that an estimated $8,765 per high school student in

Nevada is taken and used for the finance of prisons. That’s a lot of money that the school

districts could be using to give better education to kids rather than being used for

prisoners. The death-row inmates get the same thing until they are executed,

although most die in prison before they are executed.


Why should murderers, prisoners with life sentences, and death-row inmates be

allowed to live if all they are going to do is sit in prison for the rest of their lives? Due to

the cost of lethal injections, the government doesn’t want to pay for them but instead

they’ll pay for the overpopulation of the prisons. This includes having to let some of their

prisoners go and even closing some prisons because of budget cuts and too many people.

Sure, lethal injections might be expensive but paying for them and killing the inmates on

death-row will save a lot more money than refusing to kill them and keep paying for

them. Another cause of the overpopulation of prisons is because of inmates with life

sentences who aren’t being sent to be executed. They don’t have the possibility of parole

so the only thing they’re going to do for the rest of their lives is sit in prison and make

their own world out of it. Some people think that prisoners will suffer in prison for what

they did, that they’ll hate every minute of it. Well that might be true, but they are humans

just like the rest of us so they will learn to adapt and become accustomed to life in prison.


Another issue that people have with the death penalty is religious reasons. People

say that it is still the murdering of another and they come up with the counterargument,

“Thou shall not kill” from the Bible. The counterargument to that would be saying that

these people deserve to die because they took the lives of other people just like us. It

would go back and forth, saying that the death sentence is just an easy way out they don’t

get to suffer for their wrong-doings. Well, if you believe in Heaven and Hell then don’t

you think that they would go to Hell and suffer for all of eternity? Giving lethal injections

would be a lot better than having the prisoners waste space and our money. Since the

government takes our tax money and uses it to fund the prisons, the government could

use it to pay for lethal injections for the prisoners. Lethal injections might be expensive,

but it saves money because you aren’t having to pay for overcrowded prisons anymore.


So overall, which is the better choice of action? Spending extra money on

overcrowded prisons, or paying for lethal injections and saving money and space in the

prisons? Only the public can decide on this and if they don’t soon, there will be a lot of

prisoners let go because of budget cuts.


The author's comments:
This is normally a debate topic, so I decided to make a persuasive essay out of it.

Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.