Jail Guitar Doors

The Governator tries his hand at "thinking out loud." The results are in keeping with the fine tradition of Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan: Governor Looks South of the Border For Prisons

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that the state could save $1 billion by building and operating prisons in Mexico to house undocumented felons who are currently imprisoned in California.

"We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons," Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

About 19,000 of the state's 171,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants, according to the most recent statistics available online. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system.

Aaron McLear, spokesman for the governor, said later that Schwarzenegger's comments did not represent a concrete proposal, but "a concept somebody mentioned to him" and he could not say where the governor came up with the $1 billion figure.

OK, so foreheads are being slapped across the state, right? Well, wait a minute. Doesn't this sound like the sort of thing that your more conservative friends and relatives would say after a couple of beers on Thanksgiving? I'm not saying this is a genius idea, but it's the sort of thing that does cross the mind of the Right.

Not only that, it does seem like an unnecessary drain on state resources to house illegal immigrant prisoners in state prisons where - for all of the talk of CA's "unconstitutional" prison system - I bet that a Mexican prison would be a much worse place to spend your time. Deporting these guys might be the easiest way out, but it doesn't seem fair to the victims, not to mention red-white-and-blue American prisoners, that a felon obtain an early release because of their immigration status.

CA does a lot on its own to attract its sizable population of illegal immigrants. Our state welfare benefits are generous to a fault. There is a long tradition of itinerant workers toiling in the state's fields. There's a pretty well-developed underground economy and support system for someone without documents. But, factors beyond CA's control - i.e. the federal government's failure to enforce its immigration laws - are also a big problem. Yet, it is also the federal government that insists - having allowed these people in - that illegal immigrants have rights as quasi-citizens, including presumably the right to serve their prison sentence in an American prison, rather than down in Mexico.

Still, you have to wonder how this would work. CA apparently would build the prisons, but I sincerely doubt that CA prison guards would work there. But, the prison guard union is one of those frustratingly overweening fixtures of state politics, so they wouldn't allow CA prisoners to be guarded by scabs, or whatever they would want to call the Mexifornian guards.

It's probably too much of a hassle to seriously consider any solution to this beyond letting these guys serve out their sentences in CA and then deporting them. Still, it is a little galling that CA has to bear the burden of these criminals roaming our streets, and then sitting in our prisons for years on end. Forgive the Governator for expressing frustration with this annoying set of circumstances.