1115.org

This not only caught my attention, but got me thinking:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

First of all, it’s always gratifying to see American productivity being internationally recognized.

But we must also grapple with two uncomfortable facts. One, keeping a disproportionately large percentage of the world’s prisoners to ourselves clearly violates our free trade obligations, and is only going to lead to WTO complaints from countries like India and China. Two, the economic strains of maintaining our world class collection of prisoners are, frankly, enormous. The international prestige that our dominance of the prisoner market has brought us does come at a huge cost.

However, we can solve both problems with one stroke. Where is it written that American prisoners have to be housed in the U.S.? (I refer, of course, to those whom we do not intend to torture, maim or kill. Or have others torture, maim or kill on our behalf.) We’ve outsourced so much else to India, why not the housing of prisoners? Civilized countries have a proud tradition of establishing penal colonies abroad, so there is sound historical precedent. And it will be so much cheaper to ship our check-bouncers and weed-smokers off to serve their sentences in India. Just a win-win situation all round.

Easy to get legislation passed too. Democrats will get on board because it make so much sense. Republicans will get on board if Halliburton and no-bid contracts can be made to enter into it somewhere. Maybe they can handle shipping the prisoners to India?