Central Pennsylvanians
to Abolish the Death Penalty states: "No comprehensive study has been done to examine
the cost of the death penalty in Pennsylvania. In states where such studies
have been conducted, capital punishment is always more expensive than
even life without parole. A report in New Jersey in 2005 found that the state
had spent $250 million for a death penalty institution that had produced no
executions and just 10 death row prisoners."
The Death Penalty Information Center lists studies from other states. See DPIC's Contact page for information on its directors and organization.
It is well worth digging into the National Criminal Justice Reference Service site. NCJRS can be searched, but it also has a useful A-Z index. For example, the category "Sentencing and Sanctions > Death Penalty" includes a report: "Justice Delayed? Time Consumption in Capital Appeals: A Multistate Study, NIJ-Sponsored, 2007, NCJ 217555. (56 pages). On page 14 (pdf navigator page 15), it says, "In California, for example, it cost $22,400 to house a prisoner for one year on death row at San Quentin, compared with $20,760 for non-death row prisoners.16 Since the average national stay on death row (for those executed) is 12.25 years, the correctional cost (using the California death row figure) is $274,400 per executed prisoner (12 x $22,400 = $274,400), $20,090 more per prisoner than the non-death row cost of imprisonment over a comparable period. Clearly, the lengthier the capital appeals process, the more expensive the imprisonment. It should be noted, however, that this does not address the imprisonment costs of the 3,254 death row inmates who have not yet been executed (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006:14, App. table 2)."
If you are near a public university or college library, you can search databases such as Academic Search, and Socindex (Ebsco), or even Proquest Dissertations. Even some private institutions allow on-site access to non-students. Academic Search Premier gets 4 hits for the full text (TX) search: cost per inmate and capital punishment. It may even be wiser to go with broader searches, such as: cost per inmate and incarceration (31 hits) or even: relative cost and capital punishment (257 hits) Depending upon how scholarly or "peer reviewed" research you need, even newspaper databases can help. If they mention criminologists and sociologists who have researched this issue, you can then go back into the scholarly databases and search for those researchers' articles. Public libraries will almost always have access to full-text newspaper databases, and also access to magazine databases such as Masterfile (Ebsco) or Infotrac. They may well get fewer full text articles than Academic Search, but could save you a trip to a larger library, especially if you have a public library card for remote access.
