Overcrowding in our prisons systems is becoming a burden on a Essay

Overcrowding in our prisons systems is becoming a burden on a taxpaying society. Should more people sentenced to the death penalty be put to death and should no - Essay Example 1)†. Additionally, the taxpayers may have to cough up more than $28,000 to keep each new individual who comes to jail for a year. This system certainly does not deserve more money from the people since to keep society safe from criminal elements; we the people are paying the cost for medical, educational as well as the living expenses of prisoners whereas a much simpler solution could be presented to the government. The simpler solution is execution. For criminals who have committed violent crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, armed assault and a host of other crimes, the easiest method to cure crime would be to hand them the death penalty and be done with it. Such crimes are already considered punishable by death by some countries which we do not consider as ‘developed’ as America but it must be noted that valued legal thinkers such as Bedau (1998) consider the death penalty for rapists to be quite valid. Bedau (1998) says that the death penalty to be a possible punishment for rape since it, â€Å"may measurably serve the legitimate ends of punishment (Bedau, 1998, Pg. 213)†. It seems that calling a prison a correctional facility is a misnomer because the aims of the prison system are not being met. As reported by Beard (2005), nearly 95 percent of all current prisoners will one day return to prison and more than fifty percent will utterly fail to readjust to the normal social order. The reasons given for this situation are the wrongful filling of prisons with individuals who may be mentally ill and could be given better services elsewhere. When we try to control their behavior with prisons, we fail and other solutions such as medical treatment and the death penalty itself become more realistic approaches to handling our prison population problem. Of course there are those who think that the death penalty