http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17210285

This is interesting. It seems that the cost may erode the use of the death penalty in the USA instead of any moral objections.

Surely still cheaper than the cost of keeping them alive indefinitely?

The cost of killing them is massive once you take into account legal fees over an easy 10 year period. If it is therefore cheaper to keep them alive in prison for life than to execute them then it should be an easy decision to make. I don't even see why the cost of the actual execution has been considered here at all.

Just make them do hard labour for life.
There's no killing involved so less appeals and lower costs, they'd be doing something useful for society and it would be seen as a harsh punishment and might just put people off murder (though having said that the death penalty never did).

2 reasons.

Firstly, depending on what you mean by "hard labour" then I think it's probably against international law.

Secondly, the use of slave labour gives them unfair economic. If they're sowing mail sacks, they'll undercut the existing mail sack supplier who will go out of business.

Don't the yanks have prisoners digging drainage ditches next to roads etc. I'm not talking about being chained to a rock with a hammer.

TBH, it probably won't dent China's revenue from exports that much

a rope and gallows are cheap and can be used time and time again ...

The drugs and actual cost of killing the person is a drop in the ocean when compared to the legal costs that a prisoner goes through before the deed is done. They have to be sure that they are 100% certain that the person to be executed carried out the crime. In some cases, prisoners on death row have been there for over 20 years. There is a big cost for that, not just in various hearings, appeals, etc. but also in keeping them.

Might as well just give a life sentence and be done with it. It would be cheaper.

There's already a massive amount of that going on in America. I don't have an exhaustive list, but there are certain areas where the prison service has a complete monopoly due to their non-existent labour costs. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is the making of number plates for cars, but the program I saw on the subject did list a fair few other things.

Was that QI? They certainly alluded to the fact that the USA has a massive slave labour population due to the high prison population and the work prisoners do for practically nothing.

EDIT:

YouTubery of the clip I’m referring to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScBC2nZ1 ... re=related

A lot of US prisons are run by private companies. It actually pays them to ensure they have a regular flow of felons in order to maintain their profits and pay their directors and shareholders.

I wonder how long it'll be before it is mooted here. There's already talk of putting routine police work out to tender. I don't want to live in a country where every public service can be had for the right price, yet it seems to be the way we're headed whatever we think about it.

You know the Tories don’t like the public sector at all, and if they had their way it would not exist at all. If there’s no way to make a profit from it, they just aren’t interested.