Not true.
Hundreds of people have been murdered in prison by those who should have been executed, including prison guards.
First, let me say that I agree that the use of capital punishment in the US as it is currently used is immoral. The catechism says,
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2267
Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."
68"However - that does not mean that it will always be. For example, what if we catch some criminal like bin Laden. It would be a danger to society to have him alive and in jail. His fanatics would do all kinds of things to get him out, more than they would if we executed him. In that instance it would be moral and even mandatory for the protection of life to execute one man.
Next - In discussion like these it is important to use facts and not opinions. We need to affirm truths, not believe whatever we want to believe. If we are not after truth - then this is just gossip.
That said - the facts are:
Are you advocating for better health care, suicide prevention in prison. If you are for the sanctity of life - then you should be. Those are greater causes of death in prison than homicide. Also, I have never come across any study or statistics on how many death row inmates have committed murder behind bars.
Please share those stats you claim and where you got them.
Have you ever visited or ministered to those in prison? If so then you would know that those on death row, generally speaking, are locked up 23.5 hours a day and when they are released for exercise it is by themselves in another locked “pit”. Most deaths come from Medium and Minimum security - those not on death row. This is because in Medium and Minimum security there is, again generally speaking, 50-100 inmates per guard and they live in a dorm setting - not locked up in a cage. This information can be gained by looking at your states DOC website.
A better approach to decreasing the use of capital punishment is educating people with facts, not opinions, on how it doesn’t help and it actually costs more to execute someone than to lock them up for life. There is even some research the suggests that capital punishment actually increases violent crime - this is known as the brutalization effect. To trully understand capital punishment and all of it’s effect on people and society check out Dr. Wrightsman’s Psychology and the Law. In it, he directs you to other’s research and studies across the world showing that capital punishment does more harm than good in multiple ways.
