In the United States there have been major concerns over using the death penalty because of the erratic use of it in the past. "The forty-three persons who were involuntarily executed from 1982 to 1985 were among a death row population of more than 16000 condemned to execution out of about 20,000 who committed non-negligent homicides per year" (Greenberg 5).

This may make life imprisonment look like the better alternative now. However, there is a drawback to this idea of life in prison without parole. Sometimes the laws change and criminals who were sent to prison for life were getting out on parole. Imagine if your child were raped and killed found floating in a river. When the killer was caught, you decided that life in prison without parole would be better than killing him. However, in about seven months the system changed and he was up for parole every two years according to the new law. He convinced them that he was "rehabilitated" and was released. Between that time and his next arrest he had claimed five more innocent lives. Looking back are you glad you did not seek the death penalty for this murderer or are you distraught because more people had to die because he was released? This is just an example of many of the things that have happened when the laws and policies change. This shows that maybe life in prison without parole is not always going to mean exactly that. Also, it now makes one wonder what is the better alternative. Putting someone to death is a moral and controversial issue, but it is hard to decide if that is worse than taking the chance of having that person take more lives due to that decision.

However, the other option is to get rid of the death penalty and enforce the idea of life without parole. It has been shown statistically that the chances of recidivism for murder is among the lowest of all crimes (Potas and Walker 4). This makes one feel a little better for those murderers that have been released, but they really should not be released at all.

There are many reasons that the death penalty should be reevaluated as a form of punishment in the criminal justice system. The lack of deterrent effectiveness, the lack of consistency in the executions, the cost, and the public opinion are all-important factors when reexamining the sentencing of capital punishment. By applying the sentence of death consistently it would help both deterrence as well as public appreciation for the scum that is being taken off the streets for good. Other alternatives to the death penalty are not plentiful when the public is looking for revenge against murderers, but the best offer is life without parole, hoping that the laws will not change and allow the worst murderers back out onto the streets.

killings done justly instead of how the system does it now, where it is hard to say why one person is executed while another is not. This would, undoubtedly, improve the effectiveness of the criminal justice system when dealing with murderers.

After much research it is still hard to find a correlation between the punishment of the death penalty and the rate of deaths during a certain period. "Many things affect homicide rates; the problem is to separate the impact, if any, of capital punishment from that of al the other variables (Lamperti 3). The way to see the effect of the death penalty then and use it to support the position that capital punishment is an effective deterrent is to see if there are lower homicide rates in states that continue to sentence people to the death penalty. Another way examine the effect of is to look at the rates in states that had capital punishment and then

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2203
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)