The Governor spoke at the Sacramento Press Club yesterday and decided to use it as some sort of long-range brain storm session. Hey, why not build prisons in Mexico?

“We pay them to build a prison down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in the prison,” he added. “Half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons. That is money, again, a billion dollars right there that can go into higher education. That is an example of one of the things we do that is unnecessary spending.”

Schwarzenegger’s idea had not been vetted. The Governor’s Office was unable to answer, for instance, whether he would like to send all illegal immigrant prisoners to Mexico or just those who have Mexican citizenship. (SacBee)

You know, this sounds like a great idea. How about this, we find a huge island, ship ALL of our prisoners there, and forget about them. Hey, it worked for Australia, right? They’re doing fine there.  And if it doesn’t work we have some great reality TV or movie scripts.

But, even if we are able to build a prison in Mexico, this doesn’t come close to solving any of our current problems. We still would have to come up with the cash to build that prison, and then would have to set up a transfer process. And that doesn’t even begin to factor the possibly huge legal expenses that we’d incur in trying to ship prisoners (especially non-Mexican prisoners) to Mexico.

Look, I’m all about brain storming, and frankly, he’s had far worse ideas than this. But this is why we have offices (without tape recorders this time Arnold)). The underlying fact is that our prisons really can’t wait for several years for some action, they need some answers now.