I say bring back the whole devil's island routine. We spend all this time as American fretting over punishment and whether it is cruel and unusual and whether it's something we ought to be doing and so forth.
Fine, I say.
Let's go out and spend one year's worth of the American penal system's cost and buy some island (or we could just dig a really wide canal and use Florida if we had to). We leave a bunch bricks, some tools, a bunch of seeds a few livestock animals. We get the phone company to put in a single phone. Hell, to start out with, I'd even give the first group dumped on shore some tents for a little while.
We drop off all of the criminals from every state and federal prison on the dock and tell them to enjoy their stay.
From there, we simply maintain a secure floating perimeter (which would be far cheaper than running all sorts of prisons and everything that comes with it).
Occasionally, we'd send someone in to pick up the folks whose time was up (and survived) and we'd re-patriate them as citizens. If there was a dought, or a natural disaster, we might drop off food or something every now and then.
If they got industrious enough to raise a crop or something that the mainland wanted, then we might even think about trading with the criminals for corn, or rocks, or whatever. No requirement that they work, though.
Otherwise, we don't worry about punishment or reform. We just let them all sort it out amongst themselves. I imagine you'd see one or two things occur. Either the few reasonably decent types with some brains would band together and beat the degenerates into submission or kill them establishing their own little law and order system (which would likely result in the pedos and the mass murderers "going missing") or they would all live in utter chaos and more or less kill one another constantly. Either way, it wouldn't be our problem.
The amount of money we spend on punishing criminals exceeds what spend on roads and schools in many cases. I say save the money for something else and simply remove all the debate by simply saying that we are not going to punish anyone, we let mother nature sort everything out by forcing them to fend for themselves.
Of course, I am not proposing sending minor offenders to a place like this. This would be for your real maximum security type criminals.
I know, it's a stupid, narrow minded, and overly-simplistic idea, but it would end all the crime and punishment debates and would save the normal citizens a ton of money.
I'm done ranting now...
