Donate an organ, get out of jail

"[South Caroline lawmakers] are considering legislation that would let prisoners donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for time off their sentences."

Fantastic idea! The primary purpose of jail is to impose a cost on criminals to deter future crime. But the problem with jail is that the cost paid by incarcerated criminals benefits no one. Forcing criminals to go to jail is the equivalent of forcing criminals to burn money. They suffer, but no one benefits from their suffering.

In contrast, if criminals pay for their crime by losing an organ than the cost paid by the criminals is more than recouped by others. The criminals' suffering does not now go to waste.

Some people will argue that it is inhumane to induce criminals to give up their organs. But putting someone in jail for several years is far, far more inhumane, by any sane measure, than taking a kidney from them is.

The one downside of the proposal arises from the fact that keeping criminals in jail prevents them from harming people not in jail. Obviously, if a criminal donates a kidney and is set free he could again harm people. Consequently, perhaps only white collar criminals should be able to reduce their jail time in return for donating an organ.

White collar criminals generally don't have the ability to engage in their crime again because they won't be put in a position of trust from which they can steal. For example, imagine that a bank manager embezzles some money and gets caught. It makes sense to punish him to deter others from embezzling. But this former manager probably poses no further threat to society since no one will ever trust him with money again. Therefore, there would be no risk in inflicting a non-incarceration punishment, such as loss of a kidney, on him.