Assignment 13 - Dani Fauzi

America ranks number one in the world for the percentage of our population incarcerated. Kentucky fits in with this national trend; we rank near the top in the nation for growth in our prison population, and the budget of our state’s Department of Corrections has surpassed half-a-billion dollars annually in the past decade. 
We face a conundrum--how can we ensure we’re keeping violent-crime offenders, which make up an entire 53% of state prison incarcerees according to Bureau of Justice statistics, off Kentucky streets while reducing this incredible strain on our state’s budget and taxpayers? Tough on crime laws enacted in the past decades just aren’t tough enough. A true deterrent to crime--and our solution? Enacting a mandatory minimum of the death penalty for all misdemeanor and felony offenses.
The cost of the doses of the pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride cocktail used to execute each prisoner is far lower than the average yearly cost of incarcerating an inmate, which hovers around $18,000 for the 2017 fiscal year. To save even more money, the state of Kentucky could investigate more cost-effective execution options, like the building of a communal guillotine, stoning, or mass live burial in the conveniently already-dug-out Lexington CentrePit.
Additionally, this proposal would alleviate discrimination in sentencing across ethnic lines. How can a judge possibly be racially biased in sentencing when he or she is required to hand down the death sentence to all?
It is time to make our old Kentucky home great again. Let’s rid our streets of nonviolent public nuisances who may only be committing crime due to underlying problems in our state such as poverty or homelessness, and obliterate from our communities drug offenders who may only be committing crime to fuel their addictions and would probably do better in cost-effective rehabilitation, and reduce the strain the Kentucky Department of Corrections places on taxpayers.