I'm still looking for a good place to stick those violent criminals who keep walking out of prison...
NOT so long ago, while living in the USA, I won a prize in a Sweepstake. One of those standard junk mail envelopes from a company whose products I did not wish to buy fell out of my mailbox:
"Mr. Pillay, congratulations! You have won one of the following: $20 000 in cash or a new car or a magnificent piece of Caribbean beach property."
I re-read it carefully. Not "you may have won" but "you have won". With trembling fingers, I ripped open the envelope. It was clearly not the beach property, so it had to be one of the others, right?
Two glossy 7x5 prints tumbled out showing sun washed sand dunes. "Yes, you have won this magnificent piece of property on a beautiful undeveloped coastline in Mexico."
Mexico? Me? A landowner in Mexico? So I read the fine print.
"Mexican law does not allow foreign nationals to own property, so the title will be made available to you on a 99 year lease.
"Since this section of coast is vital to the surrounding ecosystem, construction is not allowed at this time although this may change in the near future.
"To ensure your continued right to this land, you will be required to pay a maintenance fee of $25 per year."
Sigh. Another scam.
I was thinking about this fairly recently while examining a globe. About 1000km south of Durban was a spot marked "Prince Edward Island (South Africa)".
So, fellow South Africans and others, are you aware that we own this magnificent piece of property halfway to Antarctica? I certainly wasn't.
So I began asking questions. No one had heard of the place. Every library search for Prince Edward Island turned up some place of the same name in Canada, until the CIA's World Factbook informed me that South Africa's Total land area was "1 219 912 square km and includes Prince Edward Island (Marion Island and Prince Edward Island)".
Marion Island. I have heard about that one. The small 290 square km island is famous for its penguins, elephant seals, albatrosses and indigenous plants. But Prince Edward island itself is big enough to be displayed on the globe, while Marion is not?
"What's out there?" I asked a former MK commando who is now a bigwig in the New Improved South African National Defence Force.
"I think there may be a naval base there," he muttered. He wasn't sure though.
Sounds like the perfect solution to our overcrowded prisons, I thought.
The problem with island prisons like Robben Island and Alcatraz was that they were meant to be visible symbols of repression -- places where governments actively concerned themselves with beating the bejesus out of the bodies and souls of inmates to show the rest of the world this is what we do to you if you step out of line.
But what if a large island was set up as a volkstaat for those who in the bad old days would have been strung up?
Convicted hijackers, murderers, rapists can be given a choice: spend life in prison here, or take a one way ticket to Prince Edward island, never to return.
The island appears to be far enough off the regular shipping lanes to dramatically reduce the possibility of an easy swim to freedom.
The Navy can drop off food supplies on a regular basis and ensure that no private craft reach the island to provide an escape route.
I was actually getting excited about this idea until I considered that both male and female prisoners would have to be accorded equal opportunity.
If this were to happen, there's a strong possibility that they would breed. And children of the guilty are still born innocent, not so?
So what if we regularly removed children from the island? But then separating children from their parents is wrong, too.
Allow only those who accede to sterilisation to go to the island? Hmmm... That's constitutionally dubious. Could set a dangerous precedent.
So, the more I think about this, the more convinced I become that a fact-finding mission is needed.
I'm hereby volunteering for a taxpayer-funded visit to Prince Edward Island to investigate its usefulness in combating our crime wave. Who knows? I may decide to settle there...