Whats the total number of death row inmates and the average cost to hold them?
Most death row inmates are involved in an appeals process. If California or any other state cut that process short and executed someone before they had been able to fully pursue their appeal, they would almost certainly end up being forced to pay the family of the executed party a sum that dwarfed whatever they saved by not keeping him alive.
If you exclude the costs of legal appeals, which is what makes executions more expensive than lifetime incarceration (and, I suspect, also makes death-row prisoners more expensive than regular ones), I think that an ‘average cost per year’ like ferdydurke cites is probably not a bad starting place. I’m not aware of any stats on ‘time spent on Death Row’ in California, but in Texas it’s apparently nine years and six months. So, assuming you were just going to take them all out tomorrow and pop them in the back of the head, Stalin-style, you’d save something like: $35,587 (1/ prisoner year) * 9.5 (years) * 657 (prisoners) = $222,116,260. That’s just a starting value, though, because that’s only the prisoners currently in the system; you’d also have the present value of the future cost-stream that you were spending on keeping prisoners on Death Row, because now you’d just summarily execute them and not incarcera
