It is time we issued the death penalty a death sentence of its own.

Illinois politicians have proposed and passed a bill that does exactly that, which only needs Gov. Pat Quinn’s signature to abolish the penalty under state law.

The bill has raised considerable debate about the death penalty and the issues that it entails; cost is included among them.

Proponents of the death penalty sometimes balk at the expenses associated with providing prisoners essential needs like food, shelter, clothing, not to mention the costs of maintaining the prison and its staff.

Executing the death penalty (pardon the pun) is cheaper, quicker and more effective in the mind of pro-capital punishment advocates.

But that is not so. Amnesty USA collected the findings of cost studies from four states, all of which found that the death penalty cost more. The most striking report comes from the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, which found that the current system costs $137 million a year, whereas a system without the death penalty would cost $11.5 million.

Money is ultimately a moot point, however, because any system that breaks down decisions about human lives-even murderers-to dollar signs is a scary and broken one indeed.

Financial cost should never be the deciding factor in whether a person lives or dies.

Before we get down to the heart of the matter, it is important to address one other argument raised by those who oppose abolition of the death penalty: the notion that prisoners have an easy life with food, shelter and clothes provided by taxpayers.

If we look beyond the fact that this objection implies that prisoners, including non-violent offenders, are somehow undeserving of basic human rights and necessities, it still fails to hold water.

We, as citizens, enjoy considerable luxuries that are taken for granted. Right to unsupervised visits with our significant other? Check. Freedom to travel? Check. Rights to privacy? Check.

These are only a few of the simple pleasures a person is denied simply by being a prisoner. I do not have to spend any time in prison to know it is not a grand old time.

The only thing the death penalty guarantees is that the individual on death row will never commit a crime again-an end achieved just as effectively by lifetime incarceration.

It cannot bring a victim back to life, it cannot set right any wrong committed, it certainly cannot teach the criminal a lesson, and for all of our efforts, it does not teach other would-be criminals that murder is bad.

In the world’s long and varied history of executions-whether by beheading, stoning, hanging, burning, the chair or firing squad-heinous crime and murder has not ceased to be a problem, and yet it has strangely declined even as we grow “softer” on criminals.

At the risk of mistaking correlation for causation, it appears that as quality of life and education improve-even as capital punishment decreases-rates of crime decrease as well.

This suggests to me that killing killers will not put an end to crime, but treating people like people might.