Jail or school?

Hi,
which would you rather spend $70,000 a year on:
sending two students to an Ivy League university or incarcerating one criminal?

In our travels last week, Marshall & I met a couple from Utah who had been on the cruise ship with us. They both worked in a correctional facility in Salt Lake City, Donovan is captain and Jennifer is a case worker. They were lovely to chat with and very interesting. I'd never met a prison guard before, and not just "a guard" but one with a masters degree in administration. Nice guy too. We had an hour to kill before our train pulled out, we started chatting.

It was interesting to get their take on the penal system in the USA. Their state holds about 6,000 inmates and their facilities are always 'full', plus another couple of thousand who are scattered in minor security or half-way house situations. It is tiny in comparison to Los Angeles which holds over 10,000 prisoners just in the city of LA, California has about 140,000 incarcerated on any given day. Are these numbers outrageous? You bet they are, but then there is the cost. That is what really struck home with me.

Donovan said it costs the states an average of $70,000 per year, per person to keep these people in prisons in the USA. That works out to $9,800,000,000 in California alone and $420,000,000 in Utah.... and that is just two states, start adding in the other 48 and the dollar value gets out of sight. Plus, what do we get for this tax dollar expenditure? Not much. Jennifer's job lets her see the cases up close and personal, and after 18 years in the position, she has little to no faith in the rehabilitation of hardened criminals. For $70,000 a year we could be enriching two brilliant minds at a top notch school or keep one low-life clothed and fed in prison. Is this really the smart choice for the money in our society? Pouring billions of dollars away, every year, on the dregs of our environment, without any measured success rate of rehabilitation or criminal culture reduction is such a waste I can't even begin to expound on it.... but I do have another approach to consider. Baffin Island.

Canada has a huge (about 200,000sq.miles) frozen island up in Frobisher Bay... way up there near the North Pole and Santa's house. My plan is to take all of the violent offenders, the sex offenders and the repeat offenders and drop lift them to the bright, snowy, freezing cold northern exposure of Canada. They get one can of Campbell's Soup, a pack of matches to heat it up and "have a nice life". I consider this more human than execution, no one has to plunge in the needle or flip the switch, and the polar bears will be well fed. A 'win-win' situation. England had the right idea with shipping their criminals and mentally insane to Australia, but it turned out to be too warm and pretty. Baffin Island has much less promise of colonizing in the near future, even with global warming.... and think of the savings! A one-way ticket to Iqaluit on Baffin Island would cost about $5,000 (or less with enough air mile points), $1 for the can of soup and 25cents for the pack of matches. I might even throw in an extra pair of warm socks at $1.50 bringing the total to $5,002.75 per person, once, not $70,000 yearly. You do the math.

This plan works two-fold. We save almost a million dollars per inmate over a ten year period and with that financial gain we improve our educational system.... maybe even start raising a society that is not only educated, but has some better moral standards, reducing the criminal activity. Do you see my circle of logic here? Plus we get well fed polar bears, it's all Eco-friendly. I think if you can't play nice in the school yard then you need to get shipped off for to major time out to some place in space. Outer space is too expensive but Baffin Island fits perfectly in the budget. We would still need jails for the Martha Stewart's and Bernie Madoff's... or would we? White collar criminals aren't hurt by incarceration, I think their punishment should be where they would really feel the pain, in their wallet. The rest, the petty crime offenders and general low life, okay, jail time but they have to work for their keep. We have roads that need garbage picked up, potholes to fill, graffiti to remove from public spaces. I have a list of dirty jobs that would keep Mike Rowe busy for the rest of his life. Who better to assign these nasty tasks than the people who didn't appreciate what they had to begin with. Their freedom.

Is there a perfect answer to the question of dealing with our criminal population? Probably not, but I wish we would reconsider wasting all this money on people who are a blight on society and put it back to good use for the ones who will really make a difference some day. Jail or school? Is this truly a tough choice?

xox
m