By Jan Pudlow
Senior Editor

The death penalty is “an enormously expensive and wasteful program with no clear benefits.”

That’s the bottom line of a report released October 20 by the Death Penalty Information Center called “Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis.”

“With many states spending millions to retain the death penalty, while seldom or never carrying out an execution, the death penalty is turning into a very expensive form of life without parole. At a time of budget shortfalls, the death penalty cannot be exempt from reevaluation alongside other wasteful government programs that no longer make sense,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit center in Washington, D.C., and the report’s author.

Florida spends approximately $51 million a year on the death penalty, according to the report, amounting to a cost of $24 million for each execution carried out.

The report’s main message is that especially now, during a budget crisis that is expected to continue, it is important for states to reexamine whether the death penalty is actually being smart on crime. The study noted that Florida’s courts have lost significant funding while facing the crisis of accelerated foreclosures.

To bolster the argument that the death penalty is a money pit without apparent benefits, a national poll of 500 randomly selected police chiefs was conducted October 29 to November 14, 2008, by RT Strategies, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.1 percent.

When police chiefs were asked to name one area as “most important for reducing violent crime,” the death penalty was ranked last — with only 1 percent listing it as the best way to reduce violence. The death penalty came in behind hiring more police officers, reducing drug abuse, better economy and more jobs, longer prison sentences, and technological innovations such as improved laboratories and crime databases.

The police chiefs ranked the death penalty as the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money, and said they would rather spend the money on hiring and training more police officers, more programs to control drug and alcohol abuse, and neighborhood watch programs.

Because violent criminals rarely consider the consequences of their actions, 57 percent of police chiefs polled agreed the death penalty does little to prevent violent crime. While police chiefs said they did not oppose the death penalty in principle, less than half — 47 percent — said they would support it if a sentence of life without parole with mandatory restitution to the victim’s family were available.

The report also noted that a recent survey published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology showed 88 percent of the nation’s top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and 87 percent believe abolition of the death penalty would have no significant effect on murder rates.

To read the report, go to www.deathpenaltyinfo.org.