One of the more divisive issues facing Americans today is the death penalty. It's a touchy subject and one that causes most people to form strong opinions. Personally, I think that capital punishment is a monumental waste of money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Capital punishment is expensive to a mind-blowing extent. Each state has different figures for the cost of the death penalty, but they all have a common ground in that they are all obscenely high.

Let's look at California first. According to a 2008 report from the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, the death penalty system in California costs taxpayers "$137 million per year; it would cost $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty."

So to those who would argue that putting criminals in solitary confinement wouldn't save that much money, think again. That amount of money isn't chump change-that is a substantial sum of money that could be used differently.

If California abolished the use of the death penalty, it could save $125.5 million each year. While that may not seem like a huge sum of money to a state that is billions of dollars in debt, the simple fact is that any little bit would help to ease its crippling debt situation. Another shocking statistic comes from a 2005 Los Angeles Times article, and that is the fact that "taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of [California's] executions." According to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center, California has executed 13 people since 1976.

If my math is correct, that means Californian taxpayers have paid over $3 billion for executions. So in addition to the $125.5 million they could save each year, California could also have simply not spent $3 billion.

But that's just one state. Texas, the state with the highest number of executions since 1976, has executed 466 criminals since 1976, with 17 of those taking place in 2010 and two of them in 2011. According to facts from the Death Penalty Information Center, the average death penalty case in Texas costs $1.2 million, while the average non-death penalty case costs about $3,000.

The DPIC also states that housing a criminal for 40 years in Texas would cost $693,500, which means that Texas could save a little more than $500,000 per each death-row inmate if it abolished the penalty. Taking into account the 19 executions Texas has performed since 2010, this means that the state could have saved roughly $9.5 million in 15 months.

The point of all these numbers is to show that the death penalty costs so much more than imprisoning someone in a cell for the rest of his or her life. Our country is in the middle of a recession, and states are struggling to fund everything from education to hospitals. Why is it that some state governments think it is more important to make sure murderers and rapists get executed than to make sure the schools in their state have enough money to properly educate children?

But here's the kicker about the cost of the death penalty: The cost is largely due to the lengthy trials that take place before convicting someone to be executed, not because of the actual execution. These trials are significantly longer than non-death penalty cases because the courts want to make sure they are convicting the right person. Obviously, this is a good thing, because we don't want people to be wrongfully executed. But in spite of all the extra time and resources the courts use per death penalty case, there are still many people who are wrongfully convicted and put on death row. The Innocence Project was created in 1992, and its mission is to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted through the use of DNA testing. Since 1992, the Innocence Project has exonerated 267 death-row inmates.

Even with all of the extra money that states spend on capital punishment cases, all of the extra resources and appeals and all of the careful efforts to avoid putting the wrong person on death row, the states still get it wrong sometimes. In terms of California, this means that the state wasted nearly $125.5 million for every wrong conviction they made.

Maybe it's just me, but I think that states could save an exorbitant amount of money. We can put our funds to far better uses, like reforming education, and also be certain that they are not going to wrongfully execute someone, it strikes me as being a no-brainer that we would abolish the death penalty for good.