From the practical side of the house, there is a weird phenomenon that needs to be taken into account.
That is, some of the big prisons in the US are turning into retirement and nursing homes for criminals. And that means the *expense* of incarceration, with medical care, goes up and up.
While many *need* to be confined (and forget about the death penalty for those already “in”, because even if we started to quickly execute *new* convicts today, we would still have approaching a million old convicts for another 30-40 years), keeping them under strict confinement might be reserved for the still extremely dangerous, with lower level (and less expensive) security for the rest.
So the best solution might be to create minimum security geriatric “prison-towns” in very rural and isolated parts of the US. Possibly even subcontracted to some of the larger Indian tribes, to provide guards, food, electricity and water.
The tribes might even provide medical care, while training tribal doctors geriatric medicine at the same time—a medical specialty in increasing demand.
Those convicts who are ambulatory could spend their time farming by hand, to produce some or most of the food they eat.
Such prison-towns could import aged convicts from other States for a price—a lot cheaper than those States keeping them, themselves.
The bottom line is to keep them confined and out of trouble, at much lower cost then they are right now or will be in the future.
Fascinating idea...