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I think farm labor would be perfect. Take the unruley city kid and have them manually transplant Vidalia onions for 3 months. If they try to start something I doubt the visa-farm laborers would take a second to beat them to the ground. could even pay them $15/hr subsidized by the government to be paid upon completion of sentence. Any tantrum or loss of crops from the individual can be taken out of their pay.
The problem is that bored young antisocial men have no outlets for constructive behavior in the ghetto. Get them working and put them in a situation where they're isolated from what allows them to misbehave.
That could work - it's basically a short term at hard labor. This being said, there are perverse incentives galore: this shit's profitable. Now you've got not only budding thugs and gangsters but also some poor sap that got busted for shoplifting caught up in this dragnet. As long as they're not working them too hard, giving them enough food and water...as long as it's not some kind of troubled-teen hellhole like Holes with less water and more beatings, it sounds like a good idea. Ideally, the government (and the farmers) would barely break even on the scheme.
I wonder what happened to the petty criminals of our grandfathers' time, who were given the choice between jail and the Army...provided they didn't see combat, were they better off?
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