Capital punishment is a hard thing to abolish completely. While life imprisonment without parole is a preferable solution from a humanitarian standpoint, is it really the lesser of the two evils when taken into consideration the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs each state to incarerate people every year? The sad fact is that increasing prison spending often requires the reallocation of dollars which negatively affects the budgets of public schools and education systems. That to me is a comparable humanitarian crime. So the question is not black and white – in my opinion capital punishment, while not ideal, may be a way to avoid draining a state’s resources, taking away from the bright futures of our students in order to spend on a life doomed to remain decades in prison as it is. While I don’t necessarily support capital punishment, and certainly not in every case, I think the effect of life incarceration without parole on public funding should not be ignored.