President Trump spoke about his plan to address the nation’s opioid crisis on March 19. Included in his proposed strategy were stronger penalties for drug dealers, among which he specifically mentioned the use of the death penalty.

Mr. Trump’s suggestion is not necessarily new. Existing federal laws do permit the death penalty for certain drug cases, and the Department of Justice has procedures for determining whether to seek the death penalty in a particular case, which must follow the existing law and the Constitution. These federal laws have been in place since 1994 but have not been applied by any previous administrations.

Yet to suggest the use of the death penalty as a way to address the opioid epidemic ignores what we know already to be true: The death penalty is a flawed and broken tool in the practical pursuit of justice. And raising the death penalty as a possible response to the opioid epidemic is simply a distraction from what we are being called to do as a society to address this tragic problem.

Applying the death penalty to specific criminal acts will not help end the opioid crisis. We know that the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent to crime. Thanks to a newly released study from the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, we also know that state drug imprisonment rates have no impact on three key indicators of state drug problems: self-reported drug use, drug overdose deaths and drug arrests.

The death penalty is a flawed and broken tool in the practical pursuit of justice.

Our past experiment in hard responses to the nation’s drug problem, the “War on Drugs,” was a failure by many measures. The war did little to reduce drug addiction, but it did initiate an era of mass incarceration that has done immeasurable damage to U.S. communities. Removing a drug dealer from the streets does not address the issues of poverty and addiction. It just creates a job opening that will easily be filled.

The United States remains the only Western country to continue to use the death penalty as a way to address acts of grave harm despite its disregard for the inherent dignity of the human person. Our modern system of capital punishment has proven itself to be an arbitrary and discriminatory system that puts innocent lives at risk. In 90 percent of the 23 executions in 2017 there were serious doubts about the condemned individuals’ guilt or those individuals showed significant evidence of mental illness, intellectual disability, brain damage or severe trauma.

The death penalty is an ill-considered public policy. Rather than keeping society safe, it targets some of society’s most marginalized people. The fact that 161 former death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973 demonstrates the brokenness of our capital punishment system. The U.S. error rate in applying the death penalty is significant; this is an uncorrectable error.

Responses to social and personal harm should be restorative and allow for the flourishing of all people. Our energies and resources should be directed toward prevention, rehabilitation and treatment—not retribution and vengeance.

The financial impact of the death penalty is another reason the president’s proposal should give us pause. More than a dozen states have found that death penalty cases are up to 10 times more expensive than comparable non-death-penalty cases. Use of the federal death penalty could cost upward of a million dollars more per case tried in court.

The funds that would be used to pursue the death penalty in drug-related cases should instead be directed toward treatment and care for those caught up in the opioid crisis. Those suffering from addiction, their families and their communities need healing and restoration. The death penalty does not provide either.

Responses to social and personal harm should be restorative and allow for the flourishing of all people. Our energies and resources should be directed toward prevention, rehabilitation and treatment—not retribution and vengeance.

As a handful of states use every effort possible to continue the inhumane and unjust practice of state-sanctioned execution, public support for the death penalty has fallen to its lowest level in 45 years. Death sentences and executions have similarly fallen to record lows nationally. A majority of the American public has come to understand what Pope Francis has consistently maintained: The death penalty “heavily wounds human dignity.”

Capital punishment is coming to an end. State legislatures in New Hampshire, Louisiana, Utah, and Washington have all seriously proposed abolishing the death penalty in 2018, and several more states are considering legislation to limit their use of the death penalty.

As we near the end of this Lenten season and prepare to observe Good Friday and our Lord’s state-sanctioned execution, we are encouraged to remember the God-given dignity of each human person, a dignity that we are called never to diminish.

“A just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation,” Pope Francis said in his address to the U.S. Congress in 2015. The solution to the opioid crisis is to choose life, not death.

Karen Clifton is executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network.