No. of Recommendations: 8
Actually, why should taxpayers pay for them? Just send them away. Cheaper, and it accomplishes the same thing as prison: removing them from US society.
But it fails to accomplish two other main goals of the criminal justice system - punishment and deterrence.
Punishment is pretty straightforward: one of the purposes of criminal justice is to punish a lawbreaker. If someone has done a terrible thing, we choose to exercise the power of government to punish them. If we cede that to another country, and they then decline to punish the person for their crime, then that goal is unfulfilled.
And if people here unlawfully are able to escape criminal punishment by being deported, it will reduce the deterrent effect of being convicted of a crime. It won't eliminate it, of course - being deported is also a negative outcome. But it's less negative than being incarcerated for a decade and then deported.
