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Question

I have a world where as an alternative to rotting prison for the rest of your life, you can loose your citizenship from your home country and be deported to a desolate island with a bunch of other misfits (like yourself.) My world is using modern day technology and this alternative punishment is being sought by a number of first world countries (such as the USA, France and the UK.)

The said convicts would be deported to Islands such as the Queen Elizabeth Islands without any tools - even a knife.

Is this a viable option? Is there the chance that these convicts might make it back to the mainland and cause chaos?

I do not understand what you mean by "economically viable". Note that USA prisoners are protected from such treatment by the 8th Amendment. Escape-from-hell-prison has been the plot of many movies and books already. — 4 hours ago
If we focus on "economic viability", it may be even more viable to drop those convicts halfway to the island. — 4 hours ago
@L.Dutch One major difference from Australia in my scenario is that the convicts have been deported to a land where there is little to no vegetation or animals — 3 hours ago
If removing citizenship makes a person stateless, that's a violation of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Of course, many countries, including the USA, have not signed that treaty. — 3 hours ago

score 3 · Answer 1 · 2018-10-01 19:32:01Z

Let's look at some case studies

Case Study #1: Alcatraz

During its 29 years of operation, the penitentiary claimed that no prisoner successfully escaped. A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts, two men trying twice; 23 were caught alive, six were shot and killed during their escape, two drowned, and five are listed as "missing and presumed drowned". The most violent occurred on May 2, 1946, when a failed escape attempt by six prisoners led to the Battle of Alcatraz.¹

Why did Alcatraz close? Because it was expensive. Your island will have the same problem. Imported food, staff, ships to blockade and ensure private crafts don't swoop in to rescue prisoners. It isn't a cheap solution by any stretch of the imagination.

On the other hand...

Case Study #2: Escape from New York

This movie is iconic, and not just because it's a cheap action flick. It's imaginative solution to crime has driven people to wonder why it can't work for a long time. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem: cost. The wall around the island would exceed the cost of normal prisons by whole orders of magnitude. And you're still having to ship in food.

Both case studies also suffer from inhumane treatment. You'd have activist groups seeking to redress government wrongs against the prisoners all the time. This is because you can't guarantee healthcare, safety, that the punishment (from a U.S. perspective) isn't "cruel and unusual."

Our last case study is really the only viable solution, and it didn't work out as expected.

Case Study #3: Australia

Rather than an island with limited resources and a horrible lack of tools: ship them to something large enough (e.g., a continent) that they can make a new home for themselves â€” and then control all the shipping.

For a brief period of time this might have worked great for Brittain. All the inconvenient people were shipped off to Australia. Out of sight, out of mind.

And in the end what they created was a perfectly viable nation with art, science, industry, philosophy, an accent the rest of the English-speaking world loves to listen to... in short... a competitor. IMO, the odds of Australia continuing as a member of the commonwealth after Queen Elizabeth passes away are a bit long.

Conclusion

An island is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. While a small percentage of your prisoners deserve to go away for life, the vast, vast, majority do not. That makes this a very expensive, difficult to maintain solution that has every chance of comming back to bite you (Snake Plisskin! Hugh Jackman! Adrienne Barbeau! Wait... she's just a really good reason to watch Escape from New York Oh well... you get my point.)

And one more point: imprisonment is about bringing something that is out of control, under your control. A case could be made for the (enormously oversimplified) suggestion that because Australia was intrinsically out of Brittain's control, that it was destined to become a competing nation. I suspect that a review of prison culture, procedures, and technology will reveal that the goal is to provide for the humane needs of prisoners while never letting them out of your control. If you think about it, the price for betrayal is a loss of ~~trust~~ self-determined control.

These solutions make good fiction, and they're realistic to a degree, but they come with consequences. If you don't want to deal with the consequences, then they're unrealistic. Let's call them impractical.

_{¹â€ƒOne guy is known to have made the swim to shore, lending a lot of credence to the possibility that Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin successfully escaped. However, this was not the reason Alcatraz closed.}

My impression is that the OP isn't interested in shipping food to the island, or any other form of supervision. — 1 hour ago
@DJClayworth, if that's the case, then the prisoners will quickly find their way back to the motherland. The cost is still high, since the consequence is tantamount to execution - and few things are cheaper than a bullet. Activists would freak over the absolutely inhumane treatment of the prisoners. — 1 hour ago

Sherwood Botsford 6,021431 · Answer 2 · 2018-10-01 19:23:08Z

The story is an old one: Penal colonies are common through history.

Australia is the best known. But bear in mind that Australia was a 5 month voyage from England.

Convicts were in essence sold into slavery of plantation owners.

There is a reason that we generally don't use desolate islands. Living there is difficult, and the return on investment non-existent. These have to be some of the most expensive places in the world to keep human beings alive. Go look at pictures. Tree line doesn't come into it. I finally found some pix that are either grass or lichen but the main crop here is gravel.

So you need an economic reason for people to be there. Mining comes to mind. Come up with some reason that there is a deposit of Xmium, otherwise very rare in the islands. Your convicts then are the labour to process this. However before you think about chain gangs with pick and shovel, read up on how mining is actually done. Mining is a high tech industry now.

A second possibility would be lichen farming. Give the lichen some pharmaceutical use, and have it take enough tons of lichen per gram of drug that growing it more southerly higher elevations isn't practical. If you want a plot twist, the drug company finds a synthetic drug that works better, and just abandons the settlement, after destroying the communications link. Now you have some managers. guards and convicts and no one is answering the phone. You have 1 year's supply of food and diesel.

By the way: This is polar bear country.

Renan 34.4k878176 · Answer 3 · 2018-10-01 19:09:08Z

Let me start by stealing Alexander's comment, for the case it gets deleted:

If we focus on "economic viability", it may be even more viable to drop those convicts halfway to the island.

That said, if you are not making a profit out of your prisonal system, you're doing it wrong. Take a page from the US, the world leading country when it comes to private prisons. Do you seriously think someone would go through all the trouble of building and maintaining a prison, investing their own time and money, just out of an altruistic wish to protect society against criminals?

Take a look at this:

A private prison, or for-profit prison, is a place in which individuals are physically confined or incarcerated by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner in the facility, or for each place available, whether occupied or not. Such contracts may be for the operation only of a facility, or for design, construction and operation.

If you don't want to go that way, you can do it like China, where inmates have to play some MMORPG and farm a minimum amount of gold per day for you to resell, otherwise they get less food and no cigarretes.

If you are not into making easy cash and just want the cheapest way to deal with the convicted, a bullet is always cheaper than a cruise ticket.

Last but not least, what crimes are those people comitting? If you exhile someone who has stolen precious data (from the government, the military, companies or the people at large), or if they are important to the drug and weapons trade, you may be sure that someone even worse is going to that island to rescue them - rendering the whole exercise useless in the very first place.

score 0 · Answer 4 · 2018-10-01 19:42:22Z

Assuming you want the state to bear the least possible cost while still making the criminals "go away", you may want to consider handling the mechanics of your exile in a slightly different way.

Your question implies that it's the government's problem to find you an island to live on and a way to get there. While the United Kingdom used "transportation" as a punishment, that's not the only way to do it. Republican Rome used the concept of being declared "hostis"; this put you outside the protection of the law as of a certain date within a certain distance from the city. Because that's an incredibly precarious state of being, people declared "hostis" would do their best to be outside of the radius of their sentence by that date. Often the distance chosen left you just shy of Athens - which as a result filled up with aristocratic Roman exiles and political refugees.

So your world could work the same way. The courts pass the sentence - then it's the defendant's problem to find a country that will let him travel there, and his problem to get there. People who fail to "get out of Dodge" end up killed, or robbed, or otherwise abused by the non-exile population.

Ooooh. +1 for an insightful and informative alternative. However, -1 because you don't actually answer the OP's question, making this a comment. I'm willing to walk away from that -1 if you present your answer in the context of "this is why your solution isn't viable... so let's consider an alternative!" — 3 hours ago
This answer conflates three different Roman (quasi-)legal punishments. (1) The word hostis means simply enemy. In certain times, a person could be declared hostis rei publicae, that is, an enemy of the state. They were said to be proscribed, and their life and property were forfeit; anybody could kill them, anywhere, and get part of their fortune. (2) There were two kinds of banishment, relegation and exile (more severe, the exile's wealth was forfeit); the legal formula was aquÃ¢ et igni interdicere, to forbid water and fire. The place of exile was specified in the sentence. — 3 hours ago

Thucydides 78.1k676230 · Answer 5 · 2018-10-01 23:02:29Z

The way this is worded you are effectively sentencing the prisoners to death, either by starvation, exposure, cannibalism (as they realize there is nothing to eat except each other) or suicide (many prisoners will look at their hopeless situation and simply go for a long, one way swim). If that is truly the case, then simply locking them in a large warehouse and filling the space with nitrogen gas and painlessly asphyxiating them is probably both cheaper and more humane.

I suspect the true intent is to house people in an "escape proof" prison. Some attempts have been made over the centuries, two fairly well known ones were Alcatraz, a former fortress in San Fransisco bay, and Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. Soviet era Gulags were essentially escape proof as well, being located in isolated locations where prisoners could be used as slave labour in mines, logging and other hard, physical work.

As noted in some other answers, the rational for these sorts of enterprises was very poor, it was expensive to maintain these facilities, since food, equipment and staff had to be brought in from long distances, and with the possible exception of the Gulags, there was no return on the rather large investment.

Frankly, this makes about as much sense as shipping prisoners to the Moon. They are unlikely to escape from there either, but the costs for transportation and incarceration will be (ahem) astronomical.

For non violent prisoners, it may simply be more efficient to "chip" them and put them out to community service. At least they will be earning money (their wages can be garnished to pay restitution costs), while violent offenders can be housed in existing "Supermax" prisons, which are usually located at great distances from population and are effectively escape proof. Exiling people without citizenship could actually backfire-who's to say a hostile nation would not grant the prisoners citizenship and use them to carry out dirty jobs that their natural born citizens might not be able or willing to do.

There are issues with the way criminals are handled in today's society. Let's not entertain ideas to make it worse.

score 3 · Answer 6 · 2018-10-01 19:32:01Z

Let's look at some case studies

Case Study #1: Alcatraz

During its 29 years of operation, the penitentiary claimed that no prisoner successfully escaped. A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts, two men trying twice; 23 were caught alive, six were shot and killed during their escape, two drowned, and five are listed as "missing and presumed drowned". The most violent occurred on May 2, 1946, when a failed escape attempt by six prisoners led to the Battle of Alcatraz.¹

Why did Alcatraz close? Because it was expensive. Your island will have the same problem. Imported food, staff, ships to blockade and ensure private crafts don't swoop in to rescue prisoners. It isn't a cheap solution by any stretch of the imagination.

On the other hand...

Case Study #2: Escape from New York

This movie is iconic, and not just because it's a cheap action flick. It's imaginative solution to crime has driven people to wonder why it can't work for a long time. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem: cost. The wall around the island would exceed the cost of normal prisons by whole orders of magnitude. And you're still having to ship in food.

Both case studies also suffer from inhumane treatment. You'd have activist groups seeking to redress government wrongs against the prisoners all the time. This is because you can't guarantee healthcare, safety, that the punishment (from a U.S. perspective) isn't "cruel and unusual."

Our last case study is really the only viable solution, and it didn't work out as expected.

Case Study #3: Australia

Rather than an island with limited resources and a horrible lack of tools: ship them to something large enough (e.g., a continent) that they can make a new home for themselves â€” and then control all the shipping.

For a brief period of time this might have worked great for Brittain. All the inconvenient people were shipped off to Australia. Out of sight, out of mind.

And in the end what they created was a perfectly viable nation with art, science, industry, philosophy, an accent the rest of the English-speaking world loves to listen to... in short... a competitor. IMO, the odds of Australia continuing as a member of the commonwealth after Queen Elizabeth passes away are a bit long.

Conclusion

An island is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. While a small percentage of your prisoners deserve to go away for life, the vast, vast, majority do not. That makes this a very expensive, difficult to maintain solution that has every chance of comming back to bite you (Snake Plisskin! Hugh Jackman! Adrienne Barbeau! Wait... she's just a really good reason to watch Escape from New York Oh well... you get my point.)

And one more point: imprisonment is about bringing something that is out of control, under your control. A case could be made for the (enormously oversimplified) suggestion that because Australia was intrinsically out of Brittain's control, that it was destined to become a competing nation. I suspect that a review of prison culture, procedures, and technology will reveal that the goal is to provide for the humane needs of prisoners while never letting them out of your control. If you think about it, the price for betrayal is a loss of ~~trust~~ self-determined control.

These solutions make good fiction, and they're realistic to a degree, but they come with consequences. If you don't want to deal with the consequences, then they're unrealistic. Let's call them impractical.

_{¹â€ƒOne guy is known to have made the swim to shore, lending a lot of credence to the possibility that Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin successfully escaped. However, this was not the reason Alcatraz closed.}

My impression is that the OP isn't interested in shipping food to the island, or any other form of supervision. — 1 hour ago
@DJClayworth, if that's the case, then the prisoners will quickly find their way back to the motherland. The cost is still high, since the consequence is tantamount to execution - and few things are cheaper than a bullet. Activists would freak over the absolutely inhumane treatment of the prisoners. — 1 hour ago

Sherwood Botsford 6,021431 · Answer 7 · 2018-10-01 19:23:08Z

The story is an old one: Penal colonies are common through history.

Australia is the best known. But bear in mind that Australia was a 5 month voyage from England.

Convicts were in essence sold into slavery of plantation owners.

There is a reason that we generally don't use desolate islands. Living there is difficult, and the return on investment non-existent. These have to be some of the most expensive places in the world to keep human beings alive. Go look at pictures. Tree line doesn't come into it. I finally found some pix that are either grass or lichen but the main crop here is gravel.

So you need an economic reason for people to be there. Mining comes to mind. Come up with some reason that there is a deposit of Xmium, otherwise very rare in the islands. Your convicts then are the labour to process this. However before you think about chain gangs with pick and shovel, read up on how mining is actually done. Mining is a high tech industry now.

A second possibility would be lichen farming. Give the lichen some pharmaceutical use, and have it take enough tons of lichen per gram of drug that growing it more southerly higher elevations isn't practical. If you want a plot twist, the drug company finds a synthetic drug that works better, and just abandons the settlement, after destroying the communications link. Now you have some managers. guards and convicts and no one is answering the phone. You have 1 year's supply of food and diesel.

By the way: This is polar bear country.

Renan 34.4k878176 · Answer 8 · 2018-10-01 19:09:08Z

Let me start by stealing Alexander's comment, for the case it gets deleted:

If we focus on "economic viability", it may be even more viable to drop those convicts halfway to the island.

That said, if you are not making a profit out of your prisonal system, you're doing it wrong. Take a page from the US, the world leading country when it comes to private prisons. Do you seriously think someone would go through all the trouble of building and maintaining a prison, investing their own time and money, just out of an altruistic wish to protect society against criminals?

Take a look at this:

A private prison, or for-profit prison, is a place in which individuals are physically confined or incarcerated by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner in the facility, or for each place available, whether occupied or not. Such contracts may be for the operation only of a facility, or for design, construction and operation.

If you don't want to go that way, you can do it like China, where inmates have to play some MMORPG and farm a minimum amount of gold per day for you to resell, otherwise they get less food and no cigarretes.

If you are not into making easy cash and just want the cheapest way to deal with the convicted, a bullet is always cheaper than a cruise ticket.

Last but not least, what crimes are those people comitting? If you exhile someone who has stolen precious data (from the government, the military, companies or the people at large), or if they are important to the drug and weapons trade, you may be sure that someone even worse is going to that island to rescue them - rendering the whole exercise useless in the very first place.

score 0 · Answer 9 · 2018-10-01 19:42:22Z

Assuming you want the state to bear the least possible cost while still making the criminals "go away", you may want to consider handling the mechanics of your exile in a slightly different way.

Your question implies that it's the government's problem to find you an island to live on and a way to get there. While the United Kingdom used "transportation" as a punishment, that's not the only way to do it. Republican Rome used the concept of being declared "hostis"; this put you outside the protection of the law as of a certain date within a certain distance from the city. Because that's an incredibly precarious state of being, people declared "hostis" would do their best to be outside of the radius of their sentence by that date. Often the distance chosen left you just shy of Athens - which as a result filled up with aristocratic Roman exiles and political refugees.

So your world could work the same way. The courts pass the sentence - then it's the defendant's problem to find a country that will let him travel there, and his problem to get there. People who fail to "get out of Dodge" end up killed, or robbed, or otherwise abused by the non-exile population.

Ooooh. +1 for an insightful and informative alternative. However, -1 because you don't actually answer the OP's question, making this a comment. I'm willing to walk away from that -1 if you present your answer in the context of "this is why your solution isn't viable... so let's consider an alternative!" — 3 hours ago
This answer conflates three different Roman (quasi-)legal punishments. (1) The word hostis means simply enemy. In certain times, a person could be declared hostis rei publicae, that is, an enemy of the state. They were said to be proscribed, and their life and property were forfeit; anybody could kill them, anywhere, and get part of their fortune. (2) There were two kinds of banishment, relegation and exile (more severe, the exile's wealth was forfeit); the legal formula was aquÃ¢ et igni interdicere, to forbid water and fire. The place of exile was specified in the sentence. — 3 hours ago

Thucydides 78.1k676230 · Answer 10 · 2018-10-01 23:02:29Z

The way this is worded you are effectively sentencing the prisoners to death, either by starvation, exposure, cannibalism (as they realize there is nothing to eat except each other) or suicide (many prisoners will look at their hopeless situation and simply go for a long, one way swim). If that is truly the case, then simply locking them in a large warehouse and filling the space with nitrogen gas and painlessly asphyxiating them is probably both cheaper and more humane.

I suspect the true intent is to house people in an "escape proof" prison. Some attempts have been made over the centuries, two fairly well known ones were Alcatraz, a former fortress in San Fransisco bay, and Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. Soviet era Gulags were essentially escape proof as well, being located in isolated locations where prisoners could be used as slave labour in mines, logging and other hard, physical work.

As noted in some other answers, the rational for these sorts of enterprises was very poor, it was expensive to maintain these facilities, since food, equipment and staff had to be brought in from long distances, and with the possible exception of the Gulags, there was no return on the rather large investment.

Frankly, this makes about as much sense as shipping prisoners to the Moon. They are unlikely to escape from there either, but the costs for transportation and incarceration will be (ahem) astronomical.

For non violent prisoners, it may simply be more efficient to "chip" them and put them out to community service. At least they will be earning money (their wages can be garnished to pay restitution costs), while violent offenders can be housed in existing "Supermax" prisons, which are usually located at great distances from population and are effectively escape proof. Exiling people without citizenship could actually backfire-who's to say a hostile nation would not grant the prisoners citizenship and use them to carry out dirty jobs that their natural born citizens might not be able or willing to do.

There are issues with the way criminals are handled in today's society. Let's not entertain ideas to make it worse.

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