A Modest Proposal - To Convert Shopping Malls Into Prisons

by Dan Geddes

Converting aging shopping malls into low-security prisons is a cost-effective way to create more prison space to house America’s growing population of non-violent criminal offenders.

America has an undisputed need for more prison space. We already keep more than two million people behind bars, and the growing number of non-violent offenders sentenced to prison strains our capacity to confine them all. Further exacerbating the situation is the tendency of liberal courts to uphold prisoners’ rights to some of the same comforts as law-abiding citizens. Thus, the cost of housing America’s miscreants continues to mount.

By a happy coincidence, America’s stock of shopping malls is aging ungracefully. Malls built during the shopping mall’s gold rush days of the 1970s are now depressing environments, plagued by empty stores and roamed by unkempt hooligans. The efforts to convert these malls to community centers are usually ineffective, and an increasing number of these malls—some less than twenty years old—are being razed because they appear to serve no useful purpose.

Why not use these cavernous malls to help satisfy our government’s need for more prison space? It is not so far-fetched once you consider it. Shopping malls tend to huge, windowless, concrete structures, with large adjoining lots that provide ample room for recreation yards and for buffers between the incarceration facility and nearby suburban populations.

Simply refitting a mall into a traditional prison takes surprisingly little effort, but an even more creative and efficient use of the space suggests itself, as we shall see.

Working within a traditional prison model, the inmates could be housed in the stores themselves. A former Thom McAnn shoe store, for example, can house up to fifty inmates comfortably. All mall stores are already equipped with a metal gate for their front doors, which can be pulled down to keep the prisoners inside. And with some "poetic justice," shoplifters can be confined in the very stores in which they once practiced their craft. At meal times, prisoners can be escorted down to a centrally located Food Court, where extensive kitchen facilities are already in place.

Malls are already designed to hold people in place for the maximum period of time. Consider the design of the parking lots. Special zoning permissions mean nearby streets have nearly constant green lights to allow people to enter the mall, while persistently red lights obstruct the exits. The parking lots are also designed so that roads leading out of the mall are always congested, and so people sometimes prefer to park and return to the mall rather then to try to leave. Guard posts erected at these bottlenecks will make escape very difficult.

"It’s a Mall World After All"—A More Creative Solution

Although this unimaginative use of the mall space as a prison can save taxpayers millions of dollars in prison construction costs, more creative thought on this subject could lead to millions more in savings in the operational costs of running the prisons—and a boost to our economy.

Keep in mind that thousands of inmates are non-violent, and serve time only for such crimes as recreational drug use or insurance fraud. These non-violent offenders can participate in the pilot program.

The number of guards needed to man a prison is a decisive factor in its operational costs. However, many studies have shown that if prisoners are suitably occupied, then their idle brains do not hatch plans to escape. As expected, installing televisions in prison cells, especially cable television, has led to such atrophy of mind and spirit among the prisoners that guards were scarcely needed in those prisons. But we anticipate that such a widespread use of television in prisons will one day be overturned by the Supreme Court as an unconstitutionally "cruel" (if not unusual) punishment, and so a more foresightful strategy is needed.

Call it "It’s a Mall World After All". Instead of wasting prime commercial real estate on prisoners’ cells, offer retail merchants tax-breaks to participate in the "It’s a Mall World After All" program. The shops are reopened, and are staffed entirely by prisoners. The persistent use of video surveillance prevents theft. (Again, surveillance technology is already in such widespread use in shopping malls that equipment upgrade costs are minimal.)

At night prisoners can sleep in the stores in which they work, making sure to first lock themselves in with the metal gates already in place. The stores are open every day from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. ('til 11:00 p.m. during the week before Christmas), and prisoners are scheduled to work ten hours per day.

For their labors, each prisoner is allotted $10,000 in cash per annum to spend in the shops. After their ten-hour day, they have four hours per day with which to shop. The schedules are arranged so that there are always people shopping.

Remember that states currently spend an average of $40,000 to incarcerate a prisoner. Under the "It’s a Mall World After All" plan, we estimate a savings a $5,000 dollars per prisoner, even after granting each prisoner an allowance of $10,000.

Here’s how:

• a $5,000 per prisoner savings in new prison construction costs;
• a $5,000 per prisoner savings in prison guards. A few well-placed machine-gun wielding guards can be placed in skylights and at the mall exits, nearly all of which can be blocked off with giant dumpsters containing the waste generated by the mall prison;
• a $3,000 per prisoner subsidy paid by the merchants, taken from the significant profits generated by the stores.
• a $2,000 per prisoner savings in food costs, as prisoners are required to feed themselves out of their $10,000 allowance,

This saves the government $15,000 per prisoner, assuming the $40,000 currently being spent to keep an inmate in jail. The $10,000 allowance given to the prisoners pays for itself through lower costs, and by creating a more robust prison economy.

With 400,000 non-violent offenders behind bars, that’s a savings of $2 billion per year.

And consider the more meaningful lives the prisoners themselves can lead!

After a leisurely morning of shopping or browsing, the inmates could visit the food court for lunch. Although the lunch served at food courts is far more perilous to their health than the fare served at most prisons, the prisoners’ consumption of brand-name food such as McDonald’s cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frapuccinos may well decrease their life-spans in incarceration, even while validating their identity and self-esteem as consumers. The prisoners feel much more a part of the normal society, and so are less vengeful, and more easily assimilated if they are ever released into greater society. From their extensive experience in shopping malls, they will have gained the social skills so needed to find a place in society.

After lunch, the shopping continues. Or perhaps the prisoners choose to take in a movie. The inmates could prove a captive audience at the Cineplexes for Hollywood’s latest spectacle, providing important focus group feedback in exchange for free movie passes and popcorn.

Credit card companies will certainly take note of this large demographic with government-backed incomes and infinite time to shop, and so inundate them with credit card applications. They will set up booths to encourage passers-by to sign up—and the credit card companies will be quite certain of the applicant’s address. The existing dental and optical centers in malls could be utilized to service the prisoners.

Note that with $10,000 in hand to spend in a fully stocked shopping mall, prisoners would have little incentive to leave, and so security costs are streamlined. To prevent any black market from arising and breeding gangs, a few shops would be dedicated to serving the prisoners’ needs for such vices as alcohol, cigarettes and soft drugs. Certainly inmates who have downed a six pack of beer or have smoked some marijuana, and then ambled into a store such as Spencer’s Gifts will become fixated on the available merchandise, and will lack the motivation or will to attempt escape. Prisoners who develop an entrepreneurial knack could also open a few bordellos, knowing that a steady business is theirs for the asking.

Willing prisoners can even sign-up for the "Shop ’Til you Drop" plan, whereby they forego their rights to appeal, parole, probation, job training, health care, and counseling, in exchange for additional credit-line of $5,000 per year.

A chief criticism against this proposal is that life inside the prisons’ walls is so appealing that more people would want to go to prison. After all, it seems little different from the lives of the people on the outside, except that the irksome responsibility of working has been largely eliminated (some prisoners may work part-time in the shops).

But this is an unconvincing critique of the proposal, as there is little danger that large segments of the society would deliberately commit non-violent crimes in order to be allowed in the prison malls. The $10,000 yearly income, while certainly greater than that earned by a large segment of U.S. population, (though larger than nearly all the rest of the human race), is simply too small to satisfy most people’s needs for cheaply made consumer products that are forgotten or disposed almost immediately upon being purchased. Most people would rather work for slightly more than that, even if it means accruing back-breaking consumer debt.

And a more sovereign argument for this proposal is the profoundly beneficial impact it would have on our economy as a whole. The large and growing prison population, while it currently benefits a few companies with lucrative government contracts, is of little use to the economy at large. By transforming inmates with infinite time on their hands into dedicated shoppers or movie viewers, we can spur our economy into even more furious fits of consumption.

And from that, we all benefit.

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