I was just doing a mental exercise yesterday, and I ended up coming up with a prison system reform idea, lemme run through the exercise though. I was qualifying why I believe in the death penalty, and the circumstances I believe it's applicable. That was pretty straightforward: 1) subject is non-reformable, and 2) the net detriment from killing the subject is lower than the net detriment of letting the subject live.
Alternatives to death penalty were A) let them loose, and allow them to continue inflicting social harm, or B) segregate them from society so they can't continue inflicting harm on society.
After working with option B in my head for awhile, I started to contemplate the prison system as being treated like a segregated community from the citizen community. What are the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry towards prisoners in a case like that? Granted it's kind of how it is today, but what I was thinking was a little different. What I was thinking was that there was a large plot of land that was cordoned off from society, where prisoners could go and build their own society, with it's own economy and so on. Almost like a foreign nation. That way, being a criminal means 'deportation' to the prisoner nation, instead of to a resource-intensive prison. It's less resource-intensive, because the core expense of the prison system at that point would be, effectively, border patrol, as having guards go through the prison nation would be completely useless.
Because the prison nation would have it's own economy and it's own citizenry, it would have it's own GDP, methods of production, and trade, including trade with the regular citizenry. Effectively international trade. Now, some things would be just stupid to trade for, like weaponry. This is a nation of criminals, and it's not exactly smart to give criminals weapons. However, if they're producing common goods and similar stuff, there's not much of a problem in trade there. The prison nation would have it's own laws and government and would (with trade support) be functionally a nation. Immigration would be irrelevant, as the point is to segregate from the main population.
Then I started to think about what the equivalent of reform programs would be in this system, and that's where I started to get more flexible on the idea of immigration. Organizations could exist in the prisoner nation that train, mold and rehabilitate prisoners back into mainstream society. Because there's savings in the reduced cost of enforcement (now just border control), the remaining funds can be put on these kinds of social programs, providing an opportunity to migrate prisoners back to society. With an appropriately rigorous curriculum, it could work very effectively.
An even more interesting thing is that the prisoner nation could have it's own prisoner nation, so the 'dregs of the dregs' could be similarly segregated. It's infinitely regressible too.
Just a crazy thought while I was driving home from Reno today (-:
- Jason
