Capital Punishment is the infliction of death as a penalty for violating criminal law. Throughout history people have been put to death for various forms of wrong doings. Methods of execution have included such practices as stoning, drowning, burning at the stake, and beheading. Today capital punishment is typically accomplished by lethal gas or injection, electrocution, hanging, or shooting. The death penalty is the most severe practice in the modern world. In the majority of countries, contemporary methods of punishment, such as imprisonment or fines, no longer involve the infliction of physical pain. Although imprisonment and fines are universally recognized as necessary to the control of crime, the nations of the world are split on the issue of capital punishment. About 80 nations have abolished the death penalty and an almost equal number of nations retain it. Crime definitely can not go unpunished, but killing a prisoner is just going to far. If we kill a criminal for killing someone it makes just so bad as the criminal. People who support the capital punishment will argue that it is cheaper, it gets the justice "everyone" wants, and that it deters potential murders, but this is not true.
Some Americans say they support capital punishment because they believe it is cheaper to execute a condemned prisoner than to imprison that person for the remainder of his or her natural life. According to Mark Costanzo, capital punishment is more expensive then life in jail. In the past, reckoning was swift and cheap. People who were found guilty were usually escorted to the gallows within days of the sentence, but things have changed. It now takes years of appeals, before someone is put to death. The longer the appeals take, the more expensive it is to put someone to death. .
According to Mark Costanzo, the price tag on life imprisonment without parole can range between $750,000 to $1.1 million per prisoner.
