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2/Louisiana has had the death penalty on its books since 1977. But until very recently we never knew what it cost the state. A few years ago @JPMorrell put together a commission to answer this question. I was on it. We bogged down in politics and never finished our work
3/So Loyola law professor Bill Quigley and retired judge Calvin Johnson did the job themselves. Their report - released earlier this month - confirms what we suspected: The death penalty is very expensive. It costs the state $15.6 million per year. law.loyno.edu/sites/law.loyn…
4/The $15.6 million is a very conservative estimate. The true cost is likely higher. The reason it costs so much is because government has to be very careful before using its power to kill a person. So there are a lot of procedural and constitutional safeguards built in.
5/Even so, Louisiana is spectacularly bad at administering the death penalty. So far 128 death sentences have been reversed; 10 people have been exonerated or released. Eighty three percent of death penalties that have completed appellate review have been overturned.
6/What we have here, quite simply, is a government program that is very expensive and that isn't working. So putting aside the morality of state-sanctioned executions, let's see what else we can buy for $15.6 million in the state budget.
7/How about the entire Board of Regents? This year the state general fund allotment to the group that oversees all of higher education is funded at $13.8 million, so we'd still have quite a bit left over. house.louisiana.gov/housefiscal/DO…
8/You don't want to spend the money on administrators? Maybe you'd like to see that money spent on campuses instead? We are currently funding Grambling University at $13.7 million per year, while $13.8 million goes to McNeese state - less than we spend each year on death.
9/Maybe you'd rather spend the money directly on students? The state currently spends an average of $3,818 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) college student (the rest comes from tuition and fees). So for $15.6 million, we could send another 4,085 kids to college each year.
10/The average annual cost of tuition and fees in the Louisiana Community and Technical College System comes to $4,617 per student. So for the cost of having a death penalty, 3,979 kids could have their education paid for, so they could graduate debt free to a career.
11/Or if you'd rather spend the money on young kids, consider that the average annual cost of high-quality child care in Louisiana comes to $8,000 per year. There are at least 114,000 kids, age 0-3, who don't have access. But for $15.6 million we could chip away at the backlog.
12/More than 1,900 kids per year could have access to high-quality early learning, letting them start school on time, for the price we pay to have an ineffective death penalty on the books.
