Anti capital punishment campaigners in America view the higher cost of executing someone over life in prison but this is (whilst true for America) has to do with the endless appeals and delays in carrying out death sentences that are allowed under the American legal system where the average time spent on death row is over 11 years. In Britain in the 20th century the average time in the condemned cell was less that 8 weeks and there was only one appeal. According to the statistics it costs up to three times the amount to keep a prisoner on death row than it would be to keep them in prison for the rest of their lives. These expenses are as a result of the lengthy appeal processes that are given to criminals, and also towards any court appointed attorneys. For example, in the American state of Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. Therefore if calculated out, in United States alone from 1976 to now 700 million dollars have been spent on executions. It is argued that the social cost of keeping a criminal alive, sheltered, eating and sleeping out of tax payer's money is shocking, whereas homeless people all around the country would benefit much more from this money. The execution of these criminals would get rid of them forever and need not bear with the life long expenses of food, shelter, medical bills and so on. On the contrary though, in many of these cases, criminals to be convicted of the death penalty are mass murderers or have committed terrible crimes, and even with time they cannot be rehabilitated and if ever set free will repeat whatever they had been convicted of again. Unfortunately with time, this has proved to happen on many occasions. If capital punishment were to have been used, these risks would be non-existent and society will be liberated from the fear of another criminal on the streets terrorizing their lives.