Recently, my office held its Christmas holiday party at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, it was pretty cool. We got to see Bonny and Clyde’s shot-up car, some famous criminals’ guns, and even an electric chair that was used for decades in Tennessee.
Now, it seems, capital punishment isn’t what it used to be. In fact, there were fewer executions in 2010 than their were a year earlier, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Has the U.S. undergone some sort of shift in its views on the death penalty? Is crime going down? Nope, it all comes down to money.
States avoided using the death penalty because it costs a lot to kill an inmate, unless you shank them. Also, there’s a shortage of the drugs they use for lethal injections. Also, in an economy this tight, does it really make any sense to kill another taxpayer?