Capital Punishment is a legal infliction of death as a penalty for violating criminal law. Throughout history people have been put to death for various forms of wrongdoing. Methods of execution have included such practices as crucifixion, stoning, drowning, burning at the stake, impaling, and beheading. Today capital punishment is typically accomplished by lethal gas or injection, electrocution, hanging, or shooting.
The death penalty is the most controversial penal practice in the modern world (Ellsworthm, 1994). Other harsh, physical forms of criminal punishment—referred to as corporal punishment—have generally been eliminated in modern times as uncivilized and unnecessary. In the majority of countries, contemporary methods of punishment—such as imprisonment or fines—no longer involve the infliction of physical pain (see Corporal Punishment). 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 (most of which are developing countries) retain it.
Pros of Capital Punishment
Incapacitation of the Criminal
Capital punishment enduringly takes away the worst criminals from society and should prove much cheaper and safer for the rest of us than long term or permanent incarceration (Siegel, 1991). It is self evident that dead criminals cannot commit any further crimes, either within prison or after escaping or being released from it.
Cost
Money is not an unlimited product and the state might very well improve expenditure our (limited) resources on the old, the young and the sick rather than the long term imprisonment of murderers, rapists etc.
Anti capital punishment campaigners in America view the higher cost of executing someone over life in prison but this is (whilst true for America) has to do with the....
