California’s New Mexican Trade Agreement
by Tony Chavira
From the Los Angeles Times today:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger floated a different approach to trimming down California’s bloated prison budget on Monday: pay Mexico to build new prisons and ship off California’s incarcerated illegal immigrants south of the border.
The Republican governor has pushed to house California inmates out-of-state before -- but never in a different country.
“We can do so much better in the prison system alone if we can go and take inmates, for instance the 20,000 inmates that are illegal immigrants that are here, and get them to Mexico,” Schwarzenegger said during a question-and answer session at the Sacramento Press Club. “Think about it.”
It’s cheaper to build prisons in Mexico, Schwarzenegger reasoned, and it’s cheaper to staff them there to boot.
The last Western country that openly used another for a prison dumping ground was Britain when they sent their inmates to Australia, and history can judge how that affected the indigenous population. That said, I'm actually pretty proud of the commentors on the LA Times site though: they seem to really understand that we're essentially combining the idea of dumping our prisoners on another country with the not-so-subtle notion that Mexico is the USA's bitch we can impose any policy onto. The commentors on the Wall Street Journal article has a few trolls though, so keep your eyes open.
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